Eric Clapton

Kicking things off with the blazing, jubilant "Motherless Children," 461 Ocean Boulevard is one of the four or five solo Clapton records that any self-respecting rock fan needs to have. He had just finished peaking with Derek & the Dominoes at the time of this recording, and you can hear it - he's in full stride, a major talent at the top of his powers.

Between laid-back and listless, between the tastefully restrained and the downright
niggardly, the line can be perilously thin. Eric Clapton's new album teeters precariously on
the very edge, flirting with, but in the nick of time always just skirting, dullness. It's a
tribute to Clapton's charisma and talents that 461 Ocean Boulevard doesn't succumb to the
danger Clapton courts by playing unobtrusively with an unimpressive band. Still,... More >

By opening the first side with "Motherless Children" and closing it with "I Shot the Sheriff," Clapton puts the rural repose of his laid-back-with-Leon music into a context of deprivation and conflict, adding bite to soft-spoken professions of need and faith that might otherwise smell faintly of the most rural of laid-back commodities, bullsh*t. And his honesty has its reward: better sex. The casual assurance you can hear now in his singing goes with the hip-twitching syncopation he brings to Robert Johnson's "Steady Rolling Man" and Elmore James's "I Can't Hold Out," and though the covers are what make this record memorable it's on "Get Ready," written and sung with Yvonne Elliman, that his voice takes on a mellow, seductive intimacy he's never come close to before. (Grade - A)