Controversy this. Stellar player that. Eric Clapton has lived the varied life of a man now denounced by wider audiences yet still listened to on repeat by those same detractors. Defend the work, not the man. A sterling example of where to draw the line between art and artist. Nothing But the Blues has the legendary guitarist settle into conversations with Martin Scorsese on the major impact the likes of B.B. King and Muddy Waters had on his style and body of work. He has been moved by the greats as many were yet stands as a man who can bring his exceptional guitar work to the stage and hang with the best of them. It should be no surprise the man behind Layla licks can do so – though the high-quality concert footage within this serves as an exceptional reminder.
His admiration for the big names of the genre is clear. Clapton gushes over the iconography of an era which defined him as plenty of talking heads and stock pictures of former mainstays filter through. It is a standard of documentary filmmaking as old as time, and director Scooter Weintraub brings this together like a straight-to-television piece. Snippets of older interviews are fascinating dive into how Clapton views music. Plenty of his talk is fixated on the ins and outs of blues. Only the biggest fans can riff on the genre as well as Clapton can – and thankfully he puts himself to work with the live pieces featuring throughout. Two sessions from 1994 are used nicely to flicker back and forth between standard documentary filmmaking and solid live performances.
Weintraub maintains steady qualities on both. A tribute to the blues genre on and off the stage with swift and certain guitar work from Clapton lighting a flame under the live performances. Time and again in these interviews Clapton hits the nail on the head for what blues music is. Primitive, yes. But its primal urges and the simplicity of love, heartbreak and hopelessness is adapted by the best because they were the peak of the genre – through their playing and their attitudes, the writing they could provide to those feelings of dismay. Recalling run-ins with his heroes and their feelings toward him, Clapton is never given a chance to slowly trickle out a story because Weintraub wants to flick focus back onto the impressive live covers featured throughout.
Fair enough if this is the case – and for Nothing But the Blues it works well, but it removes a sense of necessary pacing. It becomes predictable all too quickly, this constant back-and-forth between live snippet and interview keeps the flow feeling speedy but does little to benefit either the viewer or Clapton. These could be the all-time great performances of his career, but we are not to know this because before the time to process it has come around, the film is back to exploring Clapton’s half-baked anecdotes and run-ins with the blues bigshots of the time. Still, Clapton has never quite had a tremendous documentary on his work and influences cobbled together, it takes far longer than an hour and forty minutes to explore his craft.
