Eric Clapton went from setting the standard for rock guitar to making ‘full-tilt’ racist rants to becoming an outspoken vaccine skeptic. Did he change? Or was he always like this?VOTE BELOW!Queen's Brian May shared some thoughts about Eric Clapton, who recently said he will not play any live shows that require attendees to show proof that they've received the COVID-19 vaccine.
In July, Clapton made it clear that he won't grace "any stage where there is a discriminated audience present. Unless there is provision made for all people to attend, I reserve the right to cancel the show."
"I love Eric Clapton," May said in an interview with The Independent published on Saturday (Aug. 7). "He's my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways. He's a person who thinks it’s OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting the man."
"Anti-vax people, I’m sorry, I think they’re fruitcakes," May added.
Clapton previously said he feared he would "never play again" after receiving both doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Meanwhile, May -- who says he's become a bit of a "health and exercise addict" after suffering a heart attack and having three stents put in, in May 2020 -- supports the science behind the COVID-19 vaccine.
"There’s plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps," he noted. "On the whole they’ve been very safe. There’s always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I'm sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me."
"In July, Clapton made it clear that he won't grace "any stage where there is a discriminated audience present. Unless there is provision made for all people to attend, I reserve the right to cancel the show."" He's taking a principled stand against medical apartheid. What is wrong with that? It doesn't make him an "anti-vaxxer", just someone who doesn't believe that those who haven't been vaccinated should be treated like second-class citizens. What "racist" remarks did he make? You haven't given any examples of such here.
In the summer of 1976, Dave Wakeling thought he knew Clapton, too. Wakeling, who’d go on to found the English Beat, one of the U. K.’s pioneering ska bands, was 20 that year, and such a big Clapton fan that he’d once hitchhiked from his Birmingham home to London to see Clapton’s band Blind Faith in Hyde Park.
But when he saw Clapton at the Odeon theater in Birmingham in August 1976, Wakeling was gob-smacked. A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration. The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage. In remarks he has never denied, he talked about how the influx of immigrants in the U. K. would result in the country “being a colony within 10 years.” He also went on an extended jag about how “foreigners” should leave Great Britain: “Get the wogs out. . . get the coons out.” (Wog, shorthand for golliwog, was a slur against dark-skinned nonwhites.)
“As it went on, it was like, ‘Is this a joke?’ ” Wakeling recalls. “And then it became obvious that it wasn’t. . . . It started to form a sort of murmur throughout the crowd. He kept talking, and the murmurings started to get louder: ‘What did he fucking say again?’ . . . We all got into the foyer after the concert, and it was as loud as the concert: ‘What is he fucking doing? What a cunt!’ ”
Also in the crowd was author Caryl Phillips, then a high school student and admirer of Clapton’s work, especially his immersion in reggae and blues. “Clapton was to me somebody who represented the kind of crossover figure who was kind of like me in the other direction – me being a Black kid who actually liked white music, and he a white guy who actually liked Black music,” Phillips says. But like so many at the Odeon, Phillips was taken aback at Clapton’s tirades. “He said a few things about they should go back to where they came from and so on, then he’d play a couple of songs,” he recalls. “He was like a drunk who would remember that he’d been talking about something and then pick it up again a couple of songs later. He was one of the last people you expected to stand up there and speak in this way. It hung like a toxic cloud over the whole evening.” As one of the few Black people in the crowd, Phillips says he also felt “all eyes were kind of upon me, and then swiveled way from me.”
Clapton’s comments shocked his bandmates, too. “What Eric said was a total surprise,” recalls George Terry, a member of Clapton’s band at the time, “as he never mentioned he would be saying something at the concert to me or other members of the band that I knew of.”
Clapton was also in awe of Jimi Hendrix’s skills and is said to have been devastated when Hendrix died. But in an 1968 interview with Rolling Stone, Clapton referred to Hendrix with a derogatory term that was also hipster slang at the time. But maybe even more troubling was how he displayed a predilection for some racial stereotypes: “When he first came to England, you know English people have a very big thing towards a spade. They really love that magic thing, the sexual thing. They all fall for that sort of thing. Everybody and his brother in England still sort of think that spades have big dicks. And Jimi came over and exploited that to the limit, the fucking T. Everybody fell for it. I fell for it. Shit.”
In spite of all his flaws, I have to agree with him on that one point, his belief that the unvaccinated shouldn't be in any way segregated or treated as inferior. It's wrong and completely unjustified. People have the right to decide upon the kind of medical procedures they're willing to undergo, and that extends to something as simple and straightforward as an injection.
I believe a privately-run business can do whatever it wants, up to and including excluding customers and other businesses it doesn't want to associate with. The government should just stay the hell away from businesses (especially relatively small ones), the family, who a person associates with and why, their personal beliefs, values and so on. In other words, governments should just leave us alone to live our lives as WE see fit.
Right but if a business has a vaccine mandate to protect the health of its employees and customers, are you for their freedom to establish those rules to keep people safe?
It is in the interests of the business to keep both its employees and customers from harm, but that is up to the business owner to arrange, not some over-bearing, bureaucratic government official. We don't want commissars running around ordering us around.
He was a dangerously incompetent parent whose carelessness and poor decision-making led to his son Connor falling out an open window and falling 49 stories and dying... and then Clapton makes millions of dollars recording "Tears in Heaven", a song about it.
Clapton's work as a guitarist and writer remains unchanged in my view. He's free to take whatever stance he wants on the vaccines, though any racist remarks seem wholly unnecessary.
You should know that Clapton has alcoholic neuropathy as well as long side effects to his nervous system due to drug abuse. He was unable to perform for a while due to that long before Covid.
i dont really get factual information from artist so i dont really care. i got the vaccine cause 1. i was paid to get it. 2. it's not going to kill you unless you have some kind of allergic reaction to it. And i'm not allergic to anything. Except stupidity.
I don’t think it’s an anti vax statement to say you won’t play at a gig that doesn’t allow people the respect of choosing what they put in there own bodies.
Dunno, never liked his music & don't know anything about him. Looks like a hot mess though - think they should warm up a ventilator for his ugly ass
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What racism? This is the first I have heard of it; and you only talked about his opposition to a vaccine mandate. Also, how can a fully vaccinated person be anti-vax?
In the summer of 1976, Dave Wakeling thought he knew Clapton, too. Wakeling, who’d go on to found the English Beat, one of the U. K.’s pioneering ska bands, was 20 that year, and such a big Clapton fan that he’d once hitchhiked from his Birmingham home to London to see Clapton’s band Blind Faith in Hyde Park.
But when he saw Clapton at the Odeon theater in Birmingham in August 1976, Wakeling was gob-smacked. A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration. The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage. In remarks he has never denied, he talked about how the influx of immigrants in the U. K. would result in the country “being a colony within 10 years.” He also went on an extended jag about how “foreigners” should leave Great Britain: “Get the wogs out. . . get the coons out.” (Wog, shorthand for golliwog, was a slur against dark-skinned nonwhites.)
“As it went on, it was like, ‘Is this a joke?’ ” Wakeling recalls. “And then it became obvious that it wasn’t. . . . It started to form a sort of murmur throughout the crowd. He kept talking, and the murmurings started to get louder: ‘What did he fucking say again?’ . . . We all got into the foyer after the concert, and it was as loud as the concert: ‘What is he fucking doing? What a cunt!’ ”
I have never heard anything about racism about Mr Clapton. Considering the source (Rolling Stone Magazine) I would take all this with a grain of salt. I consider Layla one of the great instrumental of our time.
In the summer of 1976, Dave Wakeling thought he knew Clapton, too. Wakeling, who’d go on to found the English Beat, one of the U. K.’s pioneering ska bands, was 20 that year, and such a big Clapton fan that he’d once hitchhiked from his Birmingham home to London to see Clapton’s band Blind Faith in Hyde Park.
But when he saw Clapton at the Odeon theater in Birmingham in August 1976, Wakeling was gob-smacked. A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration. The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage. In remarks he has never denied, he talked about how the influx of immigrants in the U. K. would result in the country “being a colony within 10 years.” He also went on an extended jag about how “foreigners” should leave Great Britain: “Get the wogs out. . . get the coons out.” (Wog, shorthand for golliwog, was a slur against dark-skinned nonwhites.)
“As it went on, it was like, ‘Is this a joke?’ ” Wakeling recalls. “And then it became obvious that it wasn’t. . . . It started to form a sort of murmur throughout the crowd. He kept talking, and the murmurings started to get louder: ‘What did he fucking say again?’ . . . We all got into the foyer after the concert, and it was as loud as the concert: ‘What is he fucking doing? What a cunt!’ ”
Also in the crowd was author Caryl Phillips, then a high school student and admirer of Clapton’s work, especially his immersion in reggae and blues. “Clapton was to me somebody who represented the kind of crossover figure who was kind of like me in the other direction – me being a Black kid who actually liked white music, and he a white guy who actually liked Black music,” Phillips says. But like so many at the Odeon, Phillips was taken aback at Clapton’s tirades. “He said a few things about they should go back to where they came from and so on, then he’d play a couple of songs,” he recalls. “He was like a drunk who would remember that he’d been talking about something and then pick it up again a couple of songs later. He was one of the last people you expected to stand up there and speak in this way. It hung like a toxic cloud over the whole evening.” As one of the few Black people in the crowd, Phillips says he also felt “all eyes were kind of upon me, and then swiveled way from me.”
Clapton’s comments shocked his bandmates, too. “What Eric said was a total surprise,” recalls George Terry, a member of Clapton’s band at the time, “as he never mentioned he would be saying something at the concert to me or other members of the band that I knew of.”
Clapton was also in awe of Jimi Hendrix’s skills and is said to have been devastated when Hendrix died. But in an 1968 interview with Rolling Stone, Clapton referred to Hendrix with a derogatory term that was also hipster slang at the time. But maybe even more troubling was how he displayed a predilection for some racial stereotypes: “When he first came to England, you know English people have a very big thing towards a spade. They really love that magic thing, the sexual thing. They all fall for that sort of thing. Everybody and his brother in England still sort of think that spades have big dicks. And Jimi came over and exploited that to the limit, the fucking T. Everybody fell for it. I fell for it. Shit.”
@supercutebutt I suppose sometimes even really talented people can be really toxic. The guy that played Kramer on Seinfeld comes to mind. I never saw Mel Gibson the same way either. Same for Robert DiNiro.
@supercutebutt No I just think DiNiro wanted to show his liberal friends what a tough guy he is. I don't agree with what he did just as I do not like the wide spread Joe Biden chant that we have been seeing at sporting events across the country.
