Capturing most if not all of these threads was a mild-mannered young man named Eric Clapton, an undeniably gifted guitarist hailed as a god then and just as revered as he enters his fourth decade in the business. Yet another quirk of the blues blokes was their tendency to use the form as a vehicle for interminable soloing, a trait surprisingly absent from the purported source material. Secondly, myths of primitivism, sexual and otherwise, ignited the passions of UK blues fans that wanted to escape their blasé middle-class roots and strict moralist upbringing, thus the countless 12-bar rape anthems that so many sub-Zep groups churned out. For a while, every hip white Brit wanted to be black, but what did that really mean to kids whose contact with African-Americans was filtered through scratchy 45s? For starters, it was viewed rather mysteriously as a rejection of the capitalism in pop music, an attitude summarized most notoriously by the boos that greeted a Muddy Waters performance when he dared use something so crassly commercial as an electric guitar. Though still regarded today as an authentic extension of the stuff that started in the Mississippi Delta some decades prior, it was in fact fueled less by close contact with original blues than by Britain’s distance from it, a separation that allowed outlandish fantasies to flourish unchecked by reality. Of all the strange movements in rock history - and there have been more than a few - perhaps none are quite so eccentric as the British blues boom of the mid-’60s.
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