During his early days as a musician on the London music scene, Eric Clapton had the chance to meet and watch many incredible bands while they were still just getting started.
Over the years, both he and many of those groups went on to become globally influential artists, leaving a lasting mark on Rock and Roll history. Throughout his career, Clapton has spoken about many of those bands, sharing his opinions on them, including The Rolling Stones.
What is Eric Clapton’s opinion on The Rolling Stones
“When I first started playing guitar, many moons ago, there was only one band in the country where I come from that played the kind of music I love. They were called The Rolling Stones. They were a scruffy bunch of kids just like me, so we got on very well. I particularly go on with the guitar player, one of the guitar players. Although we kind of drifted apart, I still love him (Keith Richards) very much.”
“Like me, he never sold himself down the river, he always played the music he loved. He never did any big commercials (laughs). He just plays the same old stuff and I love him dearly. It’s my great pleasure to give this award to Keith Richards,” Eric Clapton said during his speech at the “Living Legend” award in 1989 when Keith was being honored (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). Clapton has known Mick and Keith since the early 1960s, before the Rolling Stones even existed. Curiously, he even filled in for Mick at some club gigs when the singer was having vocal problems.
He continued:
“I’d known Mick, Keith, and Brian throughout their long gestation period when they were playing nothing but R&B. Our first meeting had been at the Marquee. It was only the second time I went to see Alexis play, and they were all there. At some point in the evening they all got up to play with Alexis’s rhythm section that particular night. I got talking to Mick, and we became friends. He always used to carry a microphone in his pocket, a Reslo. I borrowed it off him to do a gig in Richmond, which was just me and a drummer doing Chuck Berry songs.”
“The mike had no stand. So I had to stack two chairs one on top of the other and tape the mike to the top of this improvised stand. Mick, Keith, and Brian played wherever they could, at Ken Colyer’s 51 Club on Charing Cross Road, at the Marquee, and at the Ealing Club. I would occasionally stand in for Mick there when he had a sore throat. For a time we were all quite close. Then they got the residency at the CrawDaddy and really took off, going in four weeks from audiences of just a handful of people to several hundred,” Eric Clapton said in his autobiography.
He had the chance to perform with The Rolling Stones and some of its members multiple times during his career. That happened on special events or as a guest in their concerts. He once said that they were what Rock and Roll was all about because of their toughness and relentlessness.
Eric Clapton wasn’t happy when Mick Jagger had an affair with his girlfriend
Although he had a great friendship with the members of the Rolling Stones for most of his life, there was a period when he wasn’t very happy with Mick Jagger. That happened around the turn of the 1990s, when he was dating the French model and singer Carla Bruni, who is now married to former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
According to Clapton, after introducing her to Mick during the Rolling Stones’ “Steel Wheels” tour, he immediately warned him to stay away from Carla because he had previously tried to seduce Pattie Boyd, whom Clapton had famously “stolen” from his friend George Harrison. However, his warning wasn’t enough and, according to Clapton, the two ended up having an affair.
“While it was still going strong, the Stones came through town on their Steel Wheels tour. Carla mentioned that she was a fan of theirs and asked me if I would take her to see them. We went to the show, and afterward I took her backstage to meet the guys. I remember saying to Jagger, ‘Please, Mick, not this one. I think I’m in love.’ In the past he had made several unsuccessful passes at Pattie, and I knew Carla would appeal to his eye. For all my pleadings, it was only a matter of days before they started a clandestine affair. In the interim, I went to Africa to play a short tour, starting in Swaziland and going on to Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.”
Eric Clapton continued:
“On my return, I visited Carla’s family home in St. Tropez, where I got a fairly chilly reception from Carla. But also got the chance to meet a couple of her previous boyfriends. They seemed like great guys and commiserated with me on my plight, implying that Carla tended to move through men quite quickly, sometimes quite ruthlessly.”
“A short while later, after Carla had stood me up a couple of times. I got a call from the girl who had introduced us, telling me that Carla was definitely seeing Mick and it was serious. I had heard rumors, and now apparently it was true. The obsession gripped me for the rest of that year and took some grizzly turns when I found myself guesting with the Stones on a couple of shows, knowing that she was lurking somewhere in the background.”
He continued:
“What did I learn from Carla? Not much at the time, but as time passed, I learned to differentiate between lust and love. A little bit later between pleasure and happiness. To her credit, once the seduction was complete, she didn’t continue to lead me on. At no time did she ever really express any deep feelings for me. But in my madness, I was able to convince myself that this was the love of my life.”
“The deception involved in her affair with Jagger drove a deep wedge between me and him. For a while I found it hard to think of him without malice. Later on, of course, I quietly felt both gratitude and compassion toward him, first for delivering me from certain doom, and second for apparently suffering such prolonged agony in her service,” Eric Clapton said.
By the 1990s, Carla Bruni was among the 20 highest-paid fashion models, earning more than 7 million in her biggest year. As a singer she recorded her debut album in 2003. Since then released five more, the most recent one being a self-titled record released in 2020.
Eric presented Keith with a Telecaster he used to record some classic Stones’ songs
An indirect contribution Clapton made to The Rolling Stones was giving Keith Richards as a present a 1950s Telecaster guitar. The guitar player used that when recording hits like “Before They Make me Run”, “Brown Sugar” and “Honky Tonky Women”.
Named “Micawber” by Richards, the instrument was given to him by Eric Clapton for his 27th birthday. It was around that time that the Stones were about to record “Exile on Main St.” (1972). Keith named the guitar after Wilkins Micawber, a character from Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield. The character is known for his optimism and his belief that “something will turn up.”