‘Cocaine’: the song Eric Clapton refused to play for years
Most artists owe it to their audience to give them the hits every single night. No one’s coming to see Aerosmith to hear the deep cuts, and anyone who ever went to a Pink Floyd concert and didn’t get to hear ‘Comfortably Numb’ would feel a bit cheated. Although Eric Clapton has a lot more classics to choose from thanks to his collaborations with various rock legends, he eventually thought that ‘Cocaine’ was too questionable a song to sing once he got sober.
If you were talking about the Clapton that had started hard rock guitar back in the 1960s, a piece about excess may as well have been his theme song. Whereas most artists struggled with problems here and there, Clapton partied just as much as he tore up the fretboard, eventually finding himself stumbling back home on various nights.
For all of the wear and tear that he put on his body, that didn’t stop him from annihilating every studio he stepped into. There must have been some ways to work around his drinking schedule, considering that in between his stupors, he was able to crank out classics like ‘Layla’ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Just as Clapton struck out on his own as a solo artist, Slowhand brought him one of his greatest guitar licks on ‘Cocaine’. Though most of the track is modelled after the JJ Cale blues standard, half of the appeal comes from how Clapton plays it, from the intense solo to the kind of laid-back demeanour that he delivers the verses.
As the 1970s wore on, the wheels began falling off for Clapton, eventually getting way too strung out to even play. There may have been alarm bells going off since the late 1960s, but when you’ve played most of a show while lying on the stage and refusing to get up, there’s a moment when any artist would realise that something was wrong.
Once Clapton got the help he needed, he eventually retired the track from being played live, telling Associated Press, “I thought that it might be giving the wrong message to people who were in the same boat as me. But further investigation proved … the song, if anything, it’s not even ambivalent, it’s an anti-drug song.”
Even though Clapton has a point about the piece being against drug use, that usually goes right over the heads of most people. People tend to hear the music rather than listen most of the time, and it’s not that hard to misread the lyrics “She don’t lie” and “She’s alright” based on how Clapton is singing it.
While it’s commonly a good idea to play the tracks that audiences came to see, Clapton did give the song a revival of sorts, changing the end of the chorus to “that dirty cocaine”. Compared to the groove-based tone of the original version, the live versions tend to sound much better, especially when the backup singers shout the chorus along with him. It’s never easy to come back to the songs that you played in your 20s as you enter old age, but ‘Cocaine’ is one of the few tracks that Clapton seemed to improve as the years went on.