Clapton Was Told He’d Never Amount to Anything — He Came Back the Following Tuesday Anyway
Clapton Was Told He’d Never Amount to Anything — He Came Back the Following Tuesday Anyway
The boy played the passage again. The teacher listened with his arms crossed and his expression unchanged. When the playing stopped, he said, “I’ve been teaching guitar for 16 years. I know within the first month whether a student has it or not. You’ve been coming here for 6 weeks.” He paused. “You don’t have it.” The boy looked at the guitar in his hands. He nodded slowly. He said, “All right.” He came back the following week anyway. The teacher’s name was Gerald
Foster. He was 38 years old in the autumn of 1955 and had been giving guitar lessons from a small room above a music shop on a high street in Surrey for 16 years, since he was 22 and had concluded with the practical clarity of a young man who understood his own limitations that his future in music lay in teaching rather than performing. He was not a bitter man about this. In ab est ad astra, ad astra per aspera. He had made the assessment honestly and had built a life around its conclusion that
suited him. He was a competent guitarist, a methodical teacher, and a person who believed genuinely and without malice that the ability to identify musical talent early was one of the most useful skills his 16 years had given him. He was correct that it was a useful skill. He was incorrect on one occasion in its application. The boy’s name was Eric. He was 15 years old and had been brought to Gerald by his grandmother who had noticed that he spent a significant portion of his waking hours attempting to play the
guitar and had concluded that formal instruction might channel this energy productively. She was a practical woman who believed in the value of proper teaching and had found Gerald through a recommendation from someone at her church whose son had taken lessons there. She had paid for 6 weeks up front, which was the minimum block Gerald required, and had delivered Eric to the small room above the music shop on a Tuesday afternoon in late September with the instructions that he was to be taught properly and that she expected
him to practice. Eric had been attempting to play guitar since he was a young child. Not with instruction, with the particular unsystematic obsession of someone who has heard something that has entered them completely and who has decided without deliberation that they are going to find a way to make that sound themselves. He had listened to records. He had listened to the radio. He had spent hours with borrowed instruments and his own fingers working out shapes and positions and the relationship between the frets and the
sounds by a process of trial and repetition that had nothing to do with formal method and everything to do with a quality of attention that was in his case absolute. What this produced after several years of unsupervised learning was a technique that was unorthodox in ways that Gerald found immediately problematic. The hand positions were wrong. The approach to scales was wrong. The way Eric held the instrument was wrong. Not dangerously wrong. Not in a way that would cause injury, but wrong according to the framework of proper
classical influence guitar pedagogy that Gerald had been trained in and had been passing on to students for 16 years. Gerald spent the first three lessons attempting to correct these foundational issues with the patience of an experienced teacher who understood that unlearning was harder than learning and who had guided students through this process before. The corrections did not take in the way Gerald expected. This was not because Eric was not trying. He was trying. Gerald could see that clearly. The attention was there. The
willingness to repeat. The concentration that separated students who were going to improve from students who were not. What was not there was any apparent ability to hear the difference between the way he was playing and the way Gerald was asking him to play. Not deaf. His ear for melody and for the music he was trying to reproduce was, Gerald noted with slight puzzlement, actually quite good. But the specific technical corrections Gerald was making did not seem to register in a way that produced
observable change in the playing. By the end of the sixth week, Gerald had made a decision. He had made this kind of decision before. 16 years of teaching had given him a reliable sense of when a student’s progress had reached its ceiling, when the gap between what they were capable of and what the instrument required was not going to close regardless of continued instruction. He did not take these decisions lightly. He understood the effect they had on students, particularly young ones. He
delivered them with the direct clarity he believed was kinder than false encouragement. And he delivered them honestly based on what he had heard. He heard Eric play the passage for the third time that afternoon. He said, “I’ve been teaching guitar for 16 years. I know within the first month whether a student has it or not. You’ve been coming here for 6 weeks.” He paused. He said, “You don’t have it.” Eric looked at the guitar. He was 15 years old and had been playing in one form or another
since he was a small child. He had not come to Gerald because he needed permission to continue. He had come because his grandmother had arranged it and paid for it and expected him to attend. The assessment Gerald had just delivered landed with the particular weight that authority figures carry when they speak with professional certainty. He sat with it for a moment. He nodded. He said, “All right.” Gerald nodded in return. He said that he was sorry, that it was nothing personal, and that there
were many other pursuits that might suit him better. He said this with the genuine, somewhat awkward kindness of a man who has delivered bad news and wishes it could have been different. Eric put the guitar down on the chair beside him. He sat for a moment in the small room above the music shop with the muffled sound of the high street coming through the window and the smell of rosin and old wood that the room had accumulated over 16 years of lessons. He looked at the guitar on the chair. Then he came back the following Tuesday.
Gerald answered the door with the expression of a man who had not expected this and was not immediately sure how to respond to it. Eric said that he wanted to continue. Gerald said that he had been clear about his assessment. Eric said that he understood the assessment and that he wanted to continue anyway. There was a pause. Gerald, who was a practical man and had been paid for 6 weeks of which one remained, stepped aside and let him in. That final seventh lesson was, by Gerald’s own account
given decades later, unlike any of the previous six, not because Eric suddenly demonstrated the technical improvement that had been absent throughout. He did not. The hand positions were still wrong. The scales were still unorthodox. But something in the quality of the playing that afternoon was different in a way that Gerald found and would always find difficult to articulate. He said later that it was as if the assessment had removed something, some layer of performance or self-consciousness or
effort to play in a way that would satisfy the teacher, and what was underneath it was not the technically proficient playing Gerald had been trying to develop, but something else entirely. He could not name it in 1955. He had more language for it 40 years later when the music magazine found him and asked him to give an account of the lessons, but even then he struggled. He said it was a quality of intention, that the playing communicated something about what the player wanted from the music that was different from what most
students communicated, which was primarily a desire to get the notes right. He said that Eric did not appear to be trying to get the notes right. He appeared to be trying to get something else, something that the notes were in service of, something that the technical framework was a means toward rather than an end in itself. Gerald had been teaching guitar for 16 years and had not encountered this before. It did not fit his assessment framework. His framework was built around technical progress and
musical aptitude as he understood them, and both of those things were absent or undeveloped in the way he was accustomed to measuring them. What was present was something his framework did not have a category for. He did not change his assessment. He could not, on the basis of what he had observed across seven lessons, justify a different conclusion. He said that he stood by it, that based on what he had heard in those seven weeks, the assessment had been correct. He said this in the interview 40 years
later, calmly and without defensiveness, as if he had made peace with the contradiction a long time ago. Eric left the lesson and did not return for formal instruction. He continued playing the way he had always played, by listening, by borrowing instruments and returning them, by the long unsupervised process of working out the music by himself in the way that had produced the unorthodox technique that Gerald had spent 6 weeks trying to correct. He played in the way that Gerald’s assessment had, perhaps
inadvertently, clarified for him. Not to satisfy a teacher’s framework, not to achieve technical correctness as someone else defined it, but to get to the thing underneath the technique that he had been trying to reach since he first heard music that entered him completely and demanded a response. Gerald Foster gave one interview. He said he stood by his assessment. He said what happened afterward was not something any assessment could have predicted. He said that in 16 years of teaching and in all the years that
followed, he had never heard another student play the way Eric played in that final seventh lesson. Wrong by every technical standard he had been trained to apply and unmistakably itself. He said, “I told him he didn’t have it. He came back anyway. I think that was the whole story, really. Everything after that was just the consequence of him coming back.” He was right. Everything after that was just the consequence of him coming back. The records, the stages, the decades, the name on the
walls of London, all of it began in a small room above a music shop in Surrey on a Tuesday afternoon when a 15-year-old boy put the guitar down on the chair beside him, sat with an assessment for a moment, and then came back the following week anyway. If this story moved you, share it with someone who has recently been told they don’t have it. Because sometimes the people who come back anyway are the only ones who ever really had it at all. There is a particular kind of assessment that is simultaneously correct and incomplete.
Gerald’s assessment of Eric’s technical ability in the autumn of 1955 was correct by every standard he had been trained to apply. The hand positions were wrong. The technique was unorthodox. The progress across six weeks was insufficient to suggest that continued instruction would produce a competent guitarist by Gerald’s definition of competence. These were accurate observations. The assessment built on them was logical. The conclusion was within its own framework sound. What the framework could not
accommodate was the question of whether technical correctness, as Gerald understood it, was the relevant standard for the specific thing Eric was trying to do with a guitar. Most students come to a guitar teacher wanting to learn to play guitar. They want to acquire the skill to achieve the technical proficiency that will allow them to produce music that sounds like music. This is a reasonable thing to want, and Gerald’s framework was excellently suited to identifying which students were likely to achieve it and which were
not. He had been doing this accurately for 16 years. Eric did not want to learn to play guitar in this sense. He already had a relationship with the guitar that erases him seeing or sin. A long, unsupervised, technically incorrect relationship that had developed according to its own logic over several years. He had not come to Gerald to acquire a skill. He had come because his grandmother had arranged it. What he was actually doing in that small room above the music shop across seven weeks of lessons that Gerald assessed as
insufficient was not learning to play guitar. He was continuing to do what he had always done, finding his way toward the music that existed inside him, using the guitar as the instrument that could get him there. Gerald’s framework had no category for this. It was not an assessment framework for people who had already found something and were working out how to express it. It was a framework for identifying people who had the capacity to learn a defined skill. Applied to Eric, it produced an accurate
answer to a question that was not quite the right question. Gerald understood this, eventually. He said in the interview that he had spent years thinking about those seven lessons. Not with regret, exactly, though regret was present, but with a genuine intellectual curiosity about what he had missed and why. He said that the seventh lesson, the one after the assessment, had given him a piece of information he had not known how to use at the time. That the playing, wrong by every standard, had something in it that his 16 years had
not prepared him to name. He named it 40 years later as intention. The quality of knowing what you are reaching for, even when the technique for reaching it has not yet developed to match the ambition. The gap between what the hands can do and what the music requires is not always a sign of insufficient talent. Sometimes it is a sign of talent that has not yet found the technique it needs and that will find it eventually because the reaching does not stop. Gerald stopped the lessons. Eric continued the
reaching. He continued it through the rest of his adolescence and into his early 20s. Through the bands and the sessions and the long nights of playing that produced the technique that Gerald’s framework would have recognized as correct had Gerald been in a position to assess it. By the time the technique caught up with the intention, the intention had been reaching for years and it covered a great deal of ground. The music that resulted was the consequence of that gap, of the years spent reaching for something that the
hands could not yet fully achieve, which produced in the playing a quality of striving and urgency and emotional directness that more technically accomplished playing often lacks. Gerald’s assessment ended the formal lessons. It did not end the reaching. And the reaching continued across decades and through everything that a life in music accumulates became everything. The small room above the music shop is not there anymore. The music shop itself closed in the 1970s and the building has changed hands
several times since and is now something else entirely. Gerald Foster retired from teaching in the late 1980s and died in 2001. He gave one interview. He said he stood by his assessment and acknowledged what it could not have accounted for in the same breath, which is a kind of intellectual honesty that deserves recognition. He said, “I told him he didn’t have it. He came back anyway. I think that was the whole story.” He was right. The whole story was in the coming back in sent there of
you to be a it surreal said me and sat to do or sure as he used to do. In the 15-year-old boy who sat with the assessment for a moment and then returned the following Tuesday ready to continue the reaching. That is where everything that followed began. The records, the stages, the decades, the name on the walls of London. In the decision made without drama or defiance to continue anyway, to keep reaching for the music that was waiting somewhere beneath the wrong hand positions and the unorthodox scales. If this story moved
you, share it with someone who has recently been told they do not have it because sometimes the people who come back anyway are the only ones who ever really did.
