Legendary rock and roll singer Eric Clapton joins singer-songwriter Neil Peart to discuss his life and career, and the importance of being a hero to the world. He also discusses his relationship with his daughter, and how he deals with the pressures of being in the public eye, and what it means to be a hero in the eyes of the public, and a villain to the rest of the world and how to deal with the press and fans who don t see him as a villain. And, of course, he talks about his new album, Mr. Blue Sky Blues, which is out now, and why he thinks it s better than the old days. The 500 is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. New Artist Spotlight is a series of interviews with musicians and songwriters from the music press and community that chronicles their lives, careers, and influences in the music industry. Join our bi-monthly newsletter, Native Creative. Subscribe today using our new hashtag to receive exclusive interviews, unlimited access to new episodes, and access to all new music releases and events happening in and around Native Creative! Subscribe to Native Creative and Native Creative, wherever you get your favourite Native Creative podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: "cjr.fm" to receive $5 and a discount of $5 when you shop at Native Creative + $10 or more when referring a Native Creative Member gets a copy of Native's new album "Native Creative's "CJCD" - Native Creative Connections' "Native Connections" - a limited edition limited edition hardcover print only in-edition print edition of Native Native Creative's Native Creative "Native Native "CODA" available only in $50 or $60 or $75,000 and $150,000 in-apparel available at Native Native "cribbed in-only in-crib # Native Creative will receive $50,000, and two-of-a-choice, and only two copies of Native "Native in-cluster "Native Crow "Cribbons" available for Native Creative Union Union "Native Cherokee "Cigar" will be available for purchase at Native Cherokee, NCG "Native American "Coding" "COGAR" and "Crowling" "Native "Cousin" "Culver "Cullen " and "Native Union " " "and " Native Union " are available for pre-order.
00:00:00.000So I'm really excited today because I am one of my greatest rock and roll heroes and now a hero in other respects too, Eric Clapton.
00:00:10.000And I grew up in the generation, which is the Clapton is God generation.
00:00:13.000I grew up with the Yardbirds, as I told you in our first kind of communications, following you since then, in Cream, Blues Breakers, Derrick and the Dominoes, when you did the tour with Bonnie and Delaney.
00:00:29.000Blind Faith, I have every album that you've ever made.
00:00:33.000And, you know, I just grew up in that era, which you're very familiar with.
00:00:38.000I want to just do a little bit of a recap of your career.
00:00:45.00018 gold platinum or diamond records, 18 Grammys, unprecedented, three inductions in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for different headings.
00:00:57.000Eric has played with every band that you've ever heard of, with Bob Dylan, with Aretha Franklin, with The Who, with The Beatles, with The Rolling Stones, with the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix.
00:01:25.000And I know, first of all, I want to tell the audience, Eric has done something he never does, which is not just to talk to somebody outside of his narrow.
00:01:39.000And not only talking to somebody outside of his circle of friends, but also talking to somebody at seven or eight o'clock in the evening, or I don't know how late it is over there, but I was told by him and others that he never talks to anybody after dinner, but he made this accommodation.
00:01:57.000So because Eric's in France and I'm in L.A., so I'm really grateful that you made that accommodation.
00:02:04.000And I will tell people up front so that if you make any dramatic errors, you have a good excuse up front.
00:02:12.000you Tell us, you know, how did you walk into this buzzsaw?
00:02:18.000Because you knew it was going to happen if you talked about this, right?
00:02:40.000And it does kind of refine, it has, for me, refined the kind of friendships I have.
00:02:46.000And it's dwindled down to the people I obviously really need and love.
00:02:51.000And inside my family, That became quite pivotal.
00:02:55.000With young kids, I've got teenage girls and an older girl who's in her 30s, and they've all had to kind of give me leeway because I haven't been able to convince any of them.
00:03:07.000I think my wife is now seeing it the same way as me, but most of them...
00:03:12.000They've always thought I'm a crackpot anyway, because I do things that are extremely unusual on any kind of level.
00:03:20.000My pastimes and my tastes, the kind of movies I like, the books.
00:03:24.000And yet they'll find themselves liking these things a little bit later.
00:04:13.000And now, you know, I've just convinced him to play so that we can put it out on the underground, you know, and it'll leak up or do whatever it does.
00:04:23.000And so he sent this over and I'm playing along and I play, I didn't realise, but I play the same as him.
00:04:29.000And yet we were born 6,000 miles apart.
00:04:35.000I've found people a bit like me, but it's been difficult in this last couple of years, especially with, you know, mainstream media turning.
00:04:44.000And, you know, I had been inspired by Van because he came straight out.
00:05:51.000And I thought, I couldn't see what was so dangerous about it or risky.
00:05:54.000And especially since it was targeted at the UK government when they started locking down and telling, you know, there was one guy that was the chancellor.
00:06:29.000To cut to the chase, I kind of signed on with that.
00:06:34.000When I realized that there was a real parting of the ways, it only made me more determined because it's a bit To come up to date with the Rolling Stone kind of slur campaign, it becomes a compliment when it's coming from, you know, certain areas of the media.
00:06:52.000Then it's just an affirmation to me that I'm doing the right thing.
00:06:57.000And I had approached, I had come near to approaching them anyway a few months ago because a friend of mine was trying to Create a platform for a debate where we could talk about the pros and cons of the thing, you know.
00:07:13.000And I found out in the course, and I thought Rolling Stone, and I thought of David Frick, who was one of the chief editors there, and one of the great journalists who I'd always got on with.
00:07:25.000Was open-minded, good journalist, good interviewer.
00:07:28.000And he was fired about five years ago.
00:07:31.000And I got hold of him and he said, oh no, Rolling Stone now is owned by Roger Penske, who is ex-NASCAR. Do you know that?
00:07:41.000I think, I don't know what his part in NASCAR was, but it I think he's gone on to become a collector of companies or whatever you call that.
00:08:08.000They kind of helped to break up Cream.
00:08:11.000I hate to say to give them that kind of power but back then they had just started and they did a really funny thing where they interviewed me in Sausalito and then they reviewed up Gig at the Fillmore and juxtaposed them so that on page two and page three there was the review and there was the interview and When it came out, someone showed it to me and I fainted.
00:08:35.000I literally passed out from shock because I'd never been criticized on a deeply intellectual level like that before.
00:08:45.000And I thought, I actually thought they've seen through me.
00:09:23.000It was just, we didn't know what we were doing.
00:09:25.000I'll admit that we didn't know what we were doing, but it was good and the people loved it and there was something of spite in there, which I've seen now.
00:09:40.000I don't read I don't read newspapers and I don't watch TV. I would watch movies but I would not watch.
00:09:48.000I found that really disturbing once I found that I was hooked on the BBC news and I was waking up going to watch the 8 o'clock, the 1 o'clock, the 6 o'clock and the 10 o'clock news to see what they're going to dream up next for us to suffer from.
00:10:03.000You know, Rolling Stone is interesting what happened there because I grew up with Rolling Stone, and Jan Wenner has been my friend for decades, and Hunter Thompson, and then, you know, great journalists like Matt Taibbi, who's one of the great,
00:10:19.000continuing to be great counterculture journalists, who's been one of the most astute critics of the American political system and the marriage between corporate power and American politics, the kind of corporate kleptocracy.
00:10:34.000And my first piece on vaccines I did for Rolling Stone in 2005 and won a lot of awards for that.
00:10:42.000And there was an immediate pushback from the industry, from the pharmaceutical industry, and from the medical cartel.
00:10:50.000Salon co-published it, and Salon took it down under pressure from Big Pharma and said it was filled with errors.
00:10:58.000They never pointed to any error in it.
00:11:01.000Jan Wenner steadfastly kept it up on the site, and at the beginning of COVID, they took it down.
00:11:08.000After Penske took over, they took it down.
00:11:12.000The best journalists have left Rolling Stone, like Matt Taibbi, and they're left, you know, with a bunch of people.
00:11:19.000Tim Dickinson is one and a number of others who have just completely gone over to the corporate side and have bought this whole pharmaceutical paradigm hook, line and sinker.
00:11:31.000And it used to be, it was the leading counterculture org in our country for many, many years.
00:11:38.000And now it's just part of this wallpaper of pharmaceutical promotion.
00:11:43.000You know, in the way that they've gone after you.
00:11:45.000I mean, if you think about it, if you reduce what happened to you, and I want to hear kind of what happened, but really, you know, the major element of the story is you took the vaccine, you got hurt by the first one, you believe the propaganda, you took the second one, you got essentially disabled by the second one, you spoke out about your injury, and the whole world came down.
00:12:12.000And gaslighted you and marginalized you and vilified you because you got injured by that product.
00:12:19.000And here they come after you because you're not allowed to talk about that.
00:12:24.000And that is the big problem is that they're trying, the way they're coping with the injuries from these vaccines is to pretend they don't exist and to punish people who get injured and then try to talk about it.
00:12:40.000I remember, because I looked in my phone for the dates, and the end of February was the first jab, and then the first of April was the second, and I didn't really feel the full effect of the second one for about two weeks.
00:12:58.000My hands swallowed up and they froze, and I was getting ready to come out here.
00:13:04.000To come out to where you are, not here, but to the States.
00:13:07.000And I thought, I'd been practicing, practicing, all went out the window.
00:13:11.000And I really wasn't sure if I was going to have to cancel.
00:13:15.000And I had to cancel a few other things that I wanted to do, but I thought it would be detrimental to the progress or the healing process, if there was going to be one.
00:13:24.000And that's the thing is, I didn't know.
00:13:26.000I mean, the uncertainty surrounding this thing has been mammoth, I think.
00:13:31.000I think everybody I know has got, what do they call it, the CAS, the anxiety syndrome.
00:13:38.000Everybody I know is unsettled about it.
00:13:41.000And for me, it was heightened by the fact that I had These adverse reactions.
00:13:46.000And the life-saving part of it was that I'd found a group of people who were inviting me to talk about it because I couldn't talk about it anywhere.
00:13:56.000As you said, there was nobody listening.
00:13:58.000And it was very, very difficult to know what to do or how to...
00:16:11.000It's not even substantial enough for me to be concerned about.
00:16:15.000And the support I get from some of the people that we know in common has been Phenomenal and really uplifting.
00:16:24.000And so I'm really, you know, I'm more determined than ever.
00:16:27.000You know, I'm writing songs and recording, but it's come back.
00:16:32.000You know, I've actually been working with healing.
00:16:36.000A guy that works for me just revealed to me this year that he can heal with his hands.
00:16:43.000So I do that and I do acupuncture and, you know, I meditate a little bit.
00:16:48.000And I work until, you know, it goes away.
00:16:53.000If I don't play for a few days, I can go into kind of a Almost like semi-paralytic state of being, so I have to keep going.
00:17:02.000And we just did a tour, and it was fantastic.
00:17:05.000I played in Texas, where there were really no restrictions, and they loved it.
00:17:14.000We got flack from the Stone because we played in Louisiana or New Orleans, where Apparently, and I noticed too that there was QR stuff everywhere and distancing and masks.
00:17:29.000But the agreement was, you know, I will play anywhere as long as it's a non-discriminatory situation.
00:17:37.000And I was really nervous, to be honest.
00:17:40.000I really thought, well, the way they change the rules now, I thought by the time we got there in September, the goalposts will You know, and maybe I've got to travel all the way there, go to the hotel, sit in the hotel and wait.
00:17:57.000Someone will call me from the gig and say, guess what?
00:18:00.000You know, they've broken their agreement.
00:18:03.000And then I've got to say, well, we're not going.
00:18:05.000You know, and that's still, you know, I've got that next year too.
00:18:10.000I face that predicament because they're declaring that the passport in the UK will be mandatory on the 22nd of December.
00:18:19.000And they did that really cleverly too, because they opened a box on the government website for people to write in and object, but they didn't tell anyone they'd done that.
00:18:29.000So you had to be on the underground networks to know that they'd done this.
00:18:36.000And then you fill in, I filled in my objection and put it in, and guess what?
00:18:40.000You know, it got laughed out of the Houses of Parliament yesterday.
00:18:44.000I think it was the 11th of, that was last week, I think, that they laughed it out.
00:19:03.000Let me ask you a fact, because when you're going against an orthodoxy like this, it's like being in a fundamentalist culture where you're saying, essentially in a theocratic culture, where people have these deeply held righteous certainty about how the world is supposed to look, and you are looking at the world completely differently and saying, wait a minute, That is mass psychosis.
00:19:36.000You're not answering these really basic questions that everybody ought to know if you want to impose this kind of orthodoxy on the society.
00:19:44.000And you need some kind of, I think, spiritual dimension or life to be able to find peace inside of yourself, Trusted authorities in the society who are saying, you're wrong, you're crazy, you're dangerous, etc.
00:20:11.000So, where do you go for that kind of peace?
00:20:15.000I had been drinking and doing dope a lot of my life, and about 34 years ago, I got sober.
00:20:24.000And as a result of that, I began a kind of spiritual journey, but it was...
00:20:32.000I mean, for me, I started going to 12-step meetings and I was introduced to the concept of spirituality as not being a religious affair or anything orthodox.
00:20:45.000It doesn't have to be anything that anyone else has to agree with.
00:20:49.000I can kind of imagine my own belief system, my own God.
00:20:53.000And because I was raised, you know, in a poor family, in a poor little village where we all went to I had a fairly pleasant religious upbringing.
00:23:15.000That's what I learned from being a member of a 12-step program is I ask for help all the time.
00:23:22.000And then before we began talking tonight, I just asked the same thing is like, help me to say, help me to be true, help me to be honest, you know, help me to be To help other people.
00:23:34.000And when I saw Brexit coming down the road and the connivance that was going on for the success of that, I thought these guys are just a bunch of public school boys doing this for some kind of jade.
00:24:17.000And I can hear this voice in me that says, Don't believe this.
00:24:21.000And I, you know, in a way, I didn't want to not believe it.
00:24:25.000I quite enjoyed, you know, the first period of lockdown was kind of like the way we live anyway.
00:24:30.000We didn't go out, we didn't go anywhere, we watched a lot of...
00:24:33.000But then when it started, when they started talking about mandating things, and I think I said to my Irish doctor...
00:24:40.000I said, Dermot, do you think, you know, when they talk, because the people from Barrington, the Declaration, they had been saying, I had followed their philosophy and their views, because it was very, very sound.
00:26:40.000I sent me You know, send me a quad, and I said, a four milligrams of quad, and I will never take drugs again.
00:26:49.000And I went on kind of a tear, and I was taking books off the shelves, and looking, maybe I left something here, and I picked up an old antique red walnut commode, an antique toilet, which was a seat that had been made into a table, and it had a little bowl in it.
00:27:08.000It was from 1810, and somebody had given it to me recently, and I don't know why I picked it up.
00:27:13.000I picked it up over my head, and it was shaking, and a lot of it fell out of it.
00:27:18.000It was what I'd been praying for five minutes before it.
00:27:21.000I said, thanks God, I found one on my own.
00:27:37.000Although it wasn't a light-light experience, but it happened over a couple of weeks, and my desire for drugs and alcohol was completely lifted.
00:27:44.000And I had tried for 14 years, earnestly, sincerely, and honestly to quit.
00:27:53.000And now, suddenly the compulsion disappeared.
00:27:57.000And one of the things you mentioned, Bill Wilson, is that he had that spiritual awakening And his desire for alcohol was lifted.
00:28:07.000And then three months later, he was in Akron of Ohio, and he was putting together a deal to purchase the Firestone Tire Company, which would have set him up for life as a multimillionaire in the middle of the Great Depression.
00:28:22.000And he had put every penny he had into that deal, and all of his energies for two years, and he got out to Akron to sign a deal, and the whole thing fell apart.
00:28:33.000And he was standing in the hotel lobby, and he could hear the lounge where people were drinking, and he could hear the clinking of the ice, and the glasses, and the laughter, and it was calling to him to come in there.
00:28:45.000And he had this sensual revelation, which was the only way that he was going to stay sober, is if he helped other alcoholics.
00:28:53.000That's when he started making calls to local creatures and to the Salvation Army.
00:29:52.000I haven't been to a live meeting for a long time, for a Almost two years at least, but I do this, you know, and I think I'm sure that the Zoom thing has made it difficult for people to get involved with recovery like that.
00:30:11.000You know, where I live, I live in L.A., and they, in the little place where I live in Brentwood in L.A., they kept the live meetings going.
00:30:21.000So I actually, during the COVID, I've been going to nine meetings a week.
00:31:06.000And for those who are watching, I go, and the boss man here, it sounds like, goes to these, I can't say it about it, but this is what I do, and there's a 12-step programme.
00:31:17.000They're well known now, I think, but Which is, in order to keep my sobriety or keep my sanity, I have to give it away and I have to help.
00:31:27.000Everything I do has to have that basis to it.
00:31:31.000So for me, the purpose of talking about my experience with The vaccine was it so that someone in a room somewhere who was suffering side effects knew that he wasn't the only one.
00:31:46.000If you talk to somebody about the yellow card system, which is, you know, the reportage of side effects, most people don't even know it exists.
00:32:19.000I feel that's my calling now as much as anything else is to just stick my neck out and say, well, it happened to me and if it happened to you, then you should tell someone.
00:32:30.000I'm talking to you about this and it's ridiculous because the lengths you go to to make sure people are aware is unbelievable.
00:32:43.000Let me just ask you one other thing because we've gone on a thing longer than either of us.
00:32:47.000And David, although it's pure pleasure for me to listen to you talk, you know, rock and roll started as a protest movement.
00:32:57.000It's part of the DNA of rock and roll, but you're seeing a lot of hip-hop artists come out, which I think is encouraging, but it's kind of weird how rock and roll has essentially just embraced this orthodoxy There's some film in it.
00:33:16.000We were talking about Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and those guys.
00:33:21.000I'm pretty sure George would have been one of the crew too.
00:33:27.000But rock and roll got watered down a long time ago.
00:34:32.000So Francis, who is, I think, Alice's older brother, was my age exactly.
00:34:41.000Lord Harlick, during the Kennedy administration, was the British bachelor to watch him.
00:34:48.000He was kind of one of the closest friends, personal friends, and trusted advisors that my uncle had, and really helped him solve the Berlin crisis of 1962.
00:34:59.000He became a liaison with Khrushchev, between my uncle and Khrushchev, and also during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he played a key role of bringing Harold Killen, was the British prime minister, kind of Bringing his point of view, and he was very much aligned with Jack that we had to keep the world out of war.
00:35:18.000But anyway, I went up at one point, I went to the London School of Economics for a year, and I went up to Oswood Street in Shropshire on the Welsh border, and I was amazed about how different the Welsh people were from the Brits,
00:35:37.000and just how unique culture that was, and seeing the gypsies, I remember I was on their front porch one day in Shropshire, and some gypsies, I think they were Irish gypsies, came by in one of those wooden caravans with the horses pulling on them and came up to that front porch, and he had a pitchfork that was carved out of wood.
00:35:59.000The entire pitchfork was very beautiful, like a work of art.
00:36:03.000It was an old-style pitchfork, and that gypsy just wanted that horse than anything.
00:37:45.000You know, the interesting thing to me is that people from my political party, the Democratic Party, in our country are the major promoters of this.
00:37:56.000And we have essentially abolished the Bill of Rights in our country.
00:38:03.000And it's the Democrats who are saying, we've got to stop these people from talking.
00:38:09.000If you think about that, what it really means is that they've lost faith in democracy because they believe that you can't trust the public with dangerous ideas.
00:38:21.000Of course, everybody knows that when you start censoring speech, you're on your way to totalitarian government.
00:38:31.000We all have these lessons that we learned as children, and somehow, you know, my party forgot about it.
00:38:38.000I was talking to a psychiatrist actually this morning, who's a good friend of mine.
00:38:43.000He's a social psychiatrist, a brilliant, brilliant man.
00:38:46.000And I said, how do you change a mass psychosis when you have a whole bunch of people who are subscribed to an orthodoxy that's completely irrational and, you know, clearly driven by fear?
00:39:01.000But they all have a moral certainty that allows them to shut off any incoming information.
00:39:08.000So they're not getting anything from the outside.
00:39:11.000Everything is coming from circular inside of their heads.
00:39:38.000Is it permissible to vaccinate a child and put them at risk in order to save an adult life?
00:39:46.000Do you think that we know we can make a risk assessment of vaccines when nobody's turning in their yellow cards, nobody's reporting injuries?
00:39:55.000Do you think it's okay to stop people from Reporting injuries.
00:40:00.000And what he said to me is it's the only way to get rid of, to challenge people who are completely fortified by moral certainty.
00:40:09.000You can only do it through the Socratic method.
00:40:27.000I'll send you a link because he's come up with something called mass formation, which is where it's the same.
00:40:34.000It's a method and it's a technique where you separate everybody and then you take away They're fundamental beliefs and security and you frighten them.
00:40:44.000And then you get them all back together again, concentrating on one image, which is the virus.
00:40:51.000So I would find that, you know, up until even recently, people were still talking about the virus.
00:40:58.000As if it was the main thing, not about the government or the way it's been handled, but the virus, that's still the major threat.
00:41:07.000And so what they did was, the people at SAGE, we all know, you know, they came up with this model, and it was based on that.
00:41:15.000You get everyone to isolate, and then you attack them.
00:41:40.000One of the things I learned, if you looked, there was an event called Event 201.
00:41:44.000It was put on by Bill Gates in New York with it.
00:41:48.000Afua Haynes, the deputy director of the CIA, now the head of a national security agency under Biden, and they were drilling a pandemic, a coronavirus pandemic, this is in October of 2019.
00:42:02.000The real pandemic's actually circulating, nobody knows, and it began circulating September 12th.
00:42:08.000In October, perhaps they're doing a tabletop Exercise simulating a pandemic and how they can handle it.
00:42:17.000And they're not drilling how do you keep people healthy?
00:42:21.000How do you get them vitamin D? How do you get them zinc?
00:42:24.000How do you get them to exercise, to lose weight, to stop drinking sugar drinks and all this?
00:42:29.000It's all about how do you use this pandemic opportunity to militarize and monetize the response.
00:42:36.000And what I found out in researching my book is that that was not just this one-on event.
00:42:42.000They had been doing that year after year after year since 2000.
00:42:46.000And they had involved hundreds of thousands of people in these practices, including frontline workers all over our country, all over Europe, all over Canada, so that you had this whole system that was primed to use the next pandemic to impose totalitarian controls.
00:43:04.000And they all drilled, how do you stop people from talking?
00:43:15.000Drilling it again and again and again.
00:43:17.000And the people who participated in those drills were essentially being indoctrinated into the idea that this is how you handle a pandemic.
00:43:26.000And in each one of these simulations, they involve a very famous person like Madeleine Albright or Sam Nunn or, you know, Bill Gates or people that everybody knew.
00:43:38.000So it kind of anointed the whole thing with gravitas and legitimacy.
00:43:44.000All of the techniques that use, and this goes back to what you're saying, are techniques that were developed by the CIA. And the CIA was involved in every single one of these pandemics.
00:44:10.000And they had, particularly in the 60s and 70s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, they were researching very intensively ways to control individuals and to do mass control over all societies.
00:44:24.000And the essential plan, and this goes back to what you said, Is how do you take over an indigenous society?
00:44:31.000How do you impose control from outside?
00:44:49.000You fill the media with propaganda so nobody can distinguish lies from truth.
00:44:54.000You give them different narratives that are all clashing and so total confusion.
00:44:59.000And then when everybody's in chaos and you use fear to make everybody scared that somebody outside is going to hurt them, then you come in and you impose centralized control from outside on that chaos.
00:45:38.000They were telling us to do something that's against our conscience, which is to dismantle the Constitution, dismantle rights, bully people, vilify people like you, silence Discussion.
00:45:51.000And we do, and 67% of people will do it, they're told.
00:46:06.000The funny thing is, I have to take that first step myself by turning, making, not turning the TV on.
00:46:14.000Because if I was to turn the TV on to one of their press conferences, and Chris really was Or Patrick Vallance or whatever his name is, was giving, making an announcement.
00:46:23.000I would probably think, well mate, just give, just see.
00:46:28.000You know, give them, give them a little bit of credit.
00:46:31.000I have got, I'm human enough to be able to be sucked in.