Quote:
Originally Posted by sharksfan2000
People have been discussing a lot of guitarists in recent threads here and on the Pre-Rumours boards - Bloomfield, Clapton, Hendrix, SRV, and others, as well as Green and Kirwan. It got me thinking...so many of these great players had their careers sidelined or ended altogether by drugs, illness, or an early death. Who among these guitarists do you feel probably reached their full potential before things went bad for them? Which ones do you think never did reach the heights they were capable of?
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Wo, what a question. That's a handful - and a head full - to contemplate and size up squarely. Not sure if it can be done, at least to full justice. You pulled a stumper in some ways sharky! Congratz
It's a big "what if" game of course. What about Green for starters...I wonder if he'd taken his playing style about as far as he could when he started to go downhill in 1970. To be sure, it's wonderful that he's still with us and still playing, but few would argue that his post-1970 work is anywhere near what he was doing prior to that. He certainly was searching for something new once he left Fleetwood Mac, but it never seemed like he found it, and perhaps he never would have even had his health remained good. So maybe we're already hearing the best he could have given us.
Good point you make, framed well into the bargain. But no, Peter did not hit his peak imo. Now you all know my biases, but I think he did with Jeremy after those first two releases (something I bet both he AND Jeremy knew), but not with Danny. No chance. [Along the same lines though, and in fairness, I really wished Jeremy and Danny had done a Kiln House volume two, just to see where they and Christy may have taken things on a more subdued but polished path]. Did Peter reach the top of his own private curve? I think he may have wondered this himself by 1970, only to succumb to doubt regarding his Mac accomplishments, to the conventional framings we often expect in songs, and guilt over having reached the kind of success, accolades and wealth most only dream of.
And what about the other players mentioned above (and others besides them too). It's sad, and even tragic, how things ended up for many of these guitarists, but I often think most of them would not have given us anything better than they already had. Hendrix could be the big exception, but I'm not even sure about him sometimes. I think Clapton hit his peak early...his Derek & the Dominoes work is fine, but to me it's not nearly as groundbreaking or exciting as his playing with Mayall and much of his work with Cream.
Agree totally, only with D&D Clapton hit his songwriting apex. His guitar work with Allman is still phenomenal, arguably not quite as much of a rush as it was in his earlier days from Yardbirds to Blind Faith. But that said, I do hold Layla And Other Love Songs to be his greatest
coup de grace evah, as do many others.
Many great musicians did their groundbreaking work early in their careers and then spent lots of time trying to live up to that early acclaim. Some pushed farther and acheived even greater things but many did not.
How true, how true. Like great athletes, you train and work hard during your formative years, eventfully flower to a peak period at some point in your youth (take that "youthful" span however you care to), hang on for the ride as best you can for a while, then slowly reside a bit, eventually revisiting past glories - at least to some extent. Like life itself, no?
The knack, much like growing older ever so gracefully, is to keep going, keep pushing, putting your best foot forward at all times. It's just that you can't always fool the audience (unless you're Kiss, or some glam bam hair band) and especially your longtime fanbase, who know the pulse better than anyone. And thus the catering, the surrender in so many ways, we often see to revisiting old glories, and living in the past.