Eric Clapton – I Shot The Sheriff

His only American No.1 is a song he didn’t write, in a style he didn’t play, and he had to be talked into recording it

Eric Clapton has been making records since 1963. He has one No.1 single in the United States, and it is a reggae song written by somebody else, which he did not want to record and only cut because his band talked him into it. I Shot the Sheriff reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on September 14, 1974, and nothing he wrote himself in the sixty years on either side of it ever got there.

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Bob Marley wrote it, and the Wailers put it on Burnin’ in 1973, where it sold to the audience reggae already had and not much beyond it. George Terry, the guitarist in Clapton’s band, brought the record into the sessions at Criteria Studios in Miami in the spring of 1974 and pushed for it. Clapton turned it down. The rest of the band kept at him until he agreed, and Tom Dowd recorded it with the group that made the whole album — Terry on second guitar, Carl Radle on bass, Jamie Oldaker on drums, Dick Sims on organ, Yvonne Elliman singing behind him.

The context those sessions carried matters to everything that came afterward. 461 Ocean Boulevard was the record Clapton made coming out of heroin addiction, after years of being effectively absent, and it does not sound like a man trying to prove he can still play. It sounds deliberately unhurried, a guitarist who had spent a decade being called the best alive choosing to sing instead. RSO put the single out in July 1974, ahead of the album. It went to No.1 in America on September 14 and into the top ten in Britain; the album reached No.1 on the Billboard chart on August 17 and stayed a month. The cover also did something for the song’s author that the original had not — it carried I Shot the Sheriff and, behind it, Marley, into a mainstream rock audience that had not been listening.

Toyota Park, June 26, 2010

Thirty-six years later the song was a fixture, the one people wait for, and Clapton played it in Chicago in the middle of an eleven-hour festival he had organized himself. The third Crossroads Guitar Festival ran at Toyota Park in Bridgeview, just outside the city, in front of more than 27,000 people. Bill Murray introduced him. He opened with Crossroads, brought out Citizen Cope for Hands of the Saints, played I Shot the Sheriff, and then Jeff Beck came on for Shake Your Money Maker and Steve Winwood after that. Rhino filmed the day and released four hours of it that November.

What the festival is for

Crossroads is not a brand exercise. Clapton founded the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a treatment facility for addiction, and the festivals exist to fund it. Which puts an unusual weight on this particular song in this particular set: the record that gave him his only American No.1 came off the album he made getting clean, and here he is playing it, three and a half decades on, to pay for a place where other people can do the same thing. He has never made much of the connection publicly. It is simply what the evening was.

Reviewers of the Rhino release were not universally kind to this portion of it — more than one found him looser and more engaged on the collaborations with Winwood than on his own material earlier in the set. That reading is defensible and it also misses something. A man fronting his own band on a song he did not write, did not want, and has played several thousand times is not going to sound like a discovery. What he sounds like is somebody who long ago made his peace with the fact that the biggest hit of his life arrived by accident, and who keeps playing it because a room full of people in Illinois came a long way to hear it.