![]() I think you get a nice tone that way there’s a beautiful sound to be gained from the finger actually touching the string. I could never really find the right combination of flat pick, finger picks or thumb picks so really the easiest way to learn to play – though it’s quite strenuous on the fingertips – is finger-style. In an interview filmed the afternoon of the taping, Eric said, “When I first started playing, I played a lot of finger style. ![]() Eric would also debut five new songs, all penned in the months following the tragic death of his young son, Conor in March 1991. The music was minimalist, alternating between his pop songs and the traditional blues that influenced him as a youth. With Eric’s episode, the show would have its finest moment. By the time MTV approached Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Don Henley, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Allman Brothers Band, Sting, Elvis Costello and others had been featured. The show’s premise was simple: musicians associated with amplified music would “unplug” from their amps and effects and go acoustic performing stripped down and sometimes radically reworked songs. On the 25th Anniversary of the filming and recording of this landmark work, the Where’s Eric! Team looks back at Eric Clapton’s one and only all-acoustic concert. The album, released in August, became the biggest seller of Eric’s career. It proved so popular, a “Part 2” featuring a few songs not included in the original broadcast was put together for a June air date. When MTV Unplugged with Eric Clapton debuted on television in March, it became the series’ highest rated show. It turned out to be some of the finest music ever recorded by Eric. Little did they know music history would be made on Soundstage 1 as MTV filmed the opening episode of Unplugged’s third season. On this date in 1992, 300 music fans boarded coaches in London that took them to Bray Studios, near Windsor. ![]() The version on Clapton’s Unplugged album is a masterful example of how an artist can sometimes channel pain into memorable music.Janumarks the 25th Anniversary of the recording of Eric Clapton’s blockbuster album, Unplugged, before a live studio audience. Clapton also sang a plangent version of Tears In Heaven, a lament for the child who, less than a year earlier, had accidentally slipped from the 53rd-floor window of a New York City apartment building. This included the instrumental Signe, which had been written on a boat after his son’s death and was now chosen to open the show. “A lot of the music in Unplugged was linked to the passing of my son and the long dark period after it,” he said. The recording of the Unplugged album came during a traumatic time for Clapton, when he was still processing his grief over the tragic death of his four-year-old son, Conor. “It was encouraging that my abilities in their most basic form had some kind of appeal” East, used to playing an electric bass, had to quickly get used to a new acoustic double bass. Ferrone had to replace his drumsticks with thunder-rods – small strips of wood that allowed him to reduce the volume of the drumming. Keyboardist Chuck Leavell, a noted member of The Allman Brothers Band and a veteran keyboardist for The Rolling Stones, was joined by Nathan East (bass), Steve Ferrone (drums) and Ray Cooper (percussion). Clapton and Fairweather Low rehearsed for a week in Chelsea and then spent two days with the rest of the band working out how to play the set acoustically. The audience had all been asked to wear dark clothes, to fit in with a set that used drapes to create the feel of a nightclub.Ĭlapton credited guitarist Andy Fairweather Low with restructuring four of his original songs and a range of blues classics so they would work in an acoustic context, calling him the “backbone” of the project. The studio audience of 300 was made up of 100 invited guests and 200 winners of a BBC Radio 1 quiz, and they met in central London on Thursday, 16 January 1992, to be taken in coaches to Bray Studios, in Berkshire, for a concert beginning at 6.15pm. The album was the audio recording of a concert shown as part of the MTV Unplugged series – a show that began in 1989 and which had already featured Sting, Paul McCartney and Mariah Carey – and filming was kept secret. “I was shocked at the sales – and very pleased” ![]() Listen to Eric Clapton’s ‘Unplugged’ album here. ![]() Released on 25 August 1992, Unplugged became the best-selling live album of all time, with 26 million copies sold worldwide. I mean wouldn’t sell anything,” the guitarist recalled in 2012. “I didn’t really want it to be an album, to be honest, and I bet Roger that it wouldn’t sell. It was in payment of a bet Clapton had with his then manager, Roger Forrester, about whether the Unplugged album would be successful. Eric Clapton’s signed cheque for $100 ended up framed in a Warner Records executive office. ![]()
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