35 Years Ago: Eric Clapton Begins Turning Away From Pop Music

Eric Clapton sold his share of records and had his share of hit singles during the '80s/ To say it wasn't his best decade, however, would be a polite understatement.

From 1981's Another Ticket and 1983's Money and Cigarettes through 1985's Behind the Sun and 1986's August, the guitarist once hailed as God led listeners on a sleepy crawl down from the blues-inspired heights of his early career into an adult contemporary valley littered with synthesizers and beer-commercial anthems.

Not that his fans weren't willing to forgive a certain comedown from Clapton's classic period. His struggles with substance abuse toward the start of the decade prompted a trip to rehab, which inspired the title of Money and Cigarettes. (He felt like that's all he had left after he went through the program.) Subsequent albums tended toward the sleekly competent side of the rock spectrum, but they still made room for periodic flashes of past glories – however brief or slickly produced.

READ MORE: Top 10 Eric Clapton Guitar Solos

The decade also brought Clapton into the orbit of Jerry Lynn Williams, a Texas songwriter enlisted by Warner Bros. after label execs listened to the first version of Behind the Sun and insisted he seek outside help for new material. After agreeing to meet with Williams, Clapton came away with a stack of Williams songs that included the hit "Forever Man." The partnership would last for years, producing some of his most successful singles of the era.

"Now, I never wanted hits; I never wanted to have to deal with that," Clapton explained in 1990. "But faced with the prospect that [Behind the Sun] would be a flop, that it would be hard to promote and that it was self-indulgent, I agreed to re-record a third of it. So, Warners sent me some Jerry Williams songs, which I really loved – and off I went to Los Angeles. There, in the studio, I met [keyboardist] Greg Phillinganes and [bassist] Nathan East. They'd been hired to play on the songs by the president of Warner Bros., Lenny Waronker. I thought they were great."

Phillinganes and East were featured heavily on August, which sold well despite a relatively low chart peak and rather lukewarm reviews. Clapton didn't want to disrupt a good thing so he retained this creative nucleus for the follow-up, which started coming together in the studio in early 1989. Williams didn't have any songwriting credits on August, but was widely featured on its successor.

Listen to Eric Clapton's 'Pretending'

Eric Clapton's Biggest Hit in the Decade

Titled Journeyman and released on Nov. 7, 1989, Clapton's 11th studio LP didn't completely avoid the radio-friendly approach he'd taken for Behind the Sun and August, but it was a clear step back from the adult-contemporary abyss. That change was apparent from "Pretending," an album-opening, Williams-penned mid-tempo number with just enough middle-aged swagger and stinging Slowhand guitar to raise fans' flagging hopes for a record with a little more bite.

Those hopes were largely rewarded. Journeyman failed to produce a pop Top 40 single, but four tracks rose to the Top 10 of the Mainstream Rock chart: "Pretending" and "Bad Love" hit No. 1, while Clapton notched a No. 9 cover of the blues standard "Before You Accuse Me" and the No. 4 hit "No Alibis." The album didn't lack for sales either: its double-platinum certification gave Clapton his biggest hit in more than a decade.

Clapton's material had always been solidly grounded in the blues, and Journeyman demonstrated a renewed focus on those roots. That's heard in "Before You Accuse Me," of course, and audibly affectionate covers of Ray Charles' "Hard Times" and the Leiber & Stoller classic "Hound Dog." The LP's overall sound was far from stripped down, but still scrubbed away some of the gloss that clogged Behind the Sun and August. Clapton sounded connected to the music in a way he hadn't for quite some time.

Journeyman proved to be a pivotal point in Clapton's discography. It delivered no shortage of radio-friendly material, but also signaled his waning interest in pursuing pop hits. The next few years saw Clapton's popularity skyrocket, thanks to his intensely personal single "Tears in Heaven" and massively successful Unplugged LP. This period also found him drifting from the guitar heroics that defined CLapton's earlier work.

Listen to Eric Clapton's 'Bad Love'

Next Came a Deep Dive Into His Roots

Clapton would take five years to deliver a proper follow-up to Journeyman, and when he did, the result was the straight blues project From the Cradle. This live-in-the-studio LP tried to use Clapton's renewed clout to shine a light on artists like Lowell Fulson, Willie Dixon and Tampa Red. They were names that might not have meant anything to many of the three million people who bought the album, but whose songs helped form a musical bedrock for countless rock acts.

From the Cradle was the first in a series of blues-influenced albums. Clapton continued to release rock records, but they came fewer and farther between, dropped into the lengthy spaces between projects like 2000's B.B. King duet Riding With the King, 2004's Robert Johnson tribute Me and Mr. Johnson, and 2014's The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale. The pop hits dried up along the way: Clapton's last Top 40 single, "My Father's Eyes," arrived in 1998.

He didn't seem to mind. While taking an increasingly casual approach to record-making in general, Eric Clapton seemed eager to embrace elder statesman status and use his position to help introduce listeners to the artists who'd inspired him as a young man – particularly blues artists.

"I still feel protective towards the blues," Clapton told Q magazine after Journeyman was released. "It's a maligned art form and I get angry when I feel people are taking it too lightly. I go back to the blues because of its rawness. It's got more energy and vitality than anything I can think of. Most musicians who've been around will accept that the blues is the bottom line. It's always given me more out of life than sex, booze or any kick you can think of."