In the Peter Blake painting that adorns the new Eric Clapton CD, Me and Mr. Johnson – a personalized tribute to early-20th-century Delta blues singer Robert Johnson – there is one Clapton and two Johnsons. The first Johnson is a small, framed close-up portrait based on the '30s dime-store photograph that for decades was the only image of Johnson in circulation. The second is based on a more formal studio shot that surfaced in 1990 for a box set: Johnson in a dark suit, white dress shirt, and striped tie cradling his acoustic guitar.
Clapton is dressed to match this Johnson. Save for Johnson's white handkerchief and tilted fedora, Clapton presents himself as Johnson's inverted racial double: a distorted reflection? a crossbred clone? This isn't Me and Mr. Johnson at all, but me as Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson as me – blackface without the black face. Greil Marcus saw this coming when he wrote about Clapton's Johnson obsession in 1975's Mystery Train: "after years of practice and imitation, Johnson's sound was Clapton's sound: there was no easy way to separate the two men, or any need to."
Yet there is a need, an urgent one, to separate them because they are, after all, separate – different people with unequal roles in the racial drama of American musical history that over and over again finds white musicians profiting from the black musicians who inspire them (even Elton John had to point this out as black singers started vanishing from American Idol). As beautifully as Marcus argues for Johnson as "a failed, orphan Puritan," Johnson was still born black and broke in the post-reconstruction South; his "Me and the Devil Blues" is about the devil for sure, but the one right here on earth.
| You know, you don't have to stay here; there's always the rest of San Francisco Bay Guardian writer Josh Kun's latest Frequencies column "Me and Mr. Clapton" to read
posted in articles on May 19, 2004 11:53 PM | t (0)
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