Musician Challenged the Stranger at the Bar to a Guitar Duel — Stranger Was Eric Clapton
Musician Challenged the Stranger at the Bar to a Guitar Duel — Stranger Was Eric Clapton
The musician played his best piece first. He always did when there was an audience. Lead with the thing that gets the reaction. Establish the standard. Make the other person understand what they are up against. He finished, took a small bow to the handful of people watching, and held out the guitar toward the young man sitting alone at the bar. He said, “Your turn.” Eric Clapton set down his glass of water, reached for the guitar, and the bar went very quiet for the next 4 minutes. The bar was called
the Crossed Keys, and it sat on a side street in Fitzrovia, central London, in the kind of building that had been a pub of one kind or another since the 1890s, and showed it. The ceiling was low, the lighting was warm and insufficient, and the small raised platform in the corner that served as a stage had hosted over the decades a rotating cast of musicians, ranging from genuinely accomplished to enthusiastically terrible, with the majority falling somewhere in the generous middle ground that London’s pub music scene had always
accommodated without prejudice. It was a Wednesday evening in October 1967, and the bar was approximately half full, the specific occupancy of a London pub on a midweek night when the weekend crowd has not yet arrived, but the regulars have settled in for the evening. There were perhaps 20 people in the room, a group of four at a table near the window, a couple at the far end of the bar, several individuals at various points along the counter, and a handful of people who had drifted in for a drink
and stayed because the atmosphere was agreeable. The musician’s name was David Keane. He was 29 years old and had been playing guitar professionally or semi-professionally with the emphasis shifting depending on the month for 8 years. He had a genuine talent, a repertoire that impressed people who were not professional musicians and a confidence in his own ability that occasionally outpaced its actual basis, but had never in 8 years of playing in rooms like this one been seriously challenged. He played blues and rock and
the kind of fluid improvisational guitar that London’s mid1960s scene had made fashionable. And he played it well enough that people in rooms like this one listened and nodded and sometimes asked where he was playing next. He had arrived at the Cross Keys at 9:00 with his own guitar and the intention of playing for whoever would listen. This was something he did regularly, not as a formal booking, but as an informal arrangement with the landlord, who had known David for several years, and understood that his presence on the
corner platform tended to keep people in the room longer than they might otherwise stay. David had been playing for about 40 minutes when he noticed the quiet man. He was sitting two stools down from the end of the bar, alone with a glass of water rather than a drink, and a guitar case on the floor under his stool. He was unremarkable in appearance. Medium height, quietly dressed, the kind of face that did not immediately announce itself. He appeared to be in his early to mid20s. He was listening to David play with the
particular quality of attention that musicians recognize in each other. Not the polite attention of an audience member being respectful, but the focused, slightly technical attention of someone who is listening to the choices being made rather than just the sound they produce. David noticed this and felt in response to it the specific alertness that performers feel when they suspect they are being evaluated by someone who knows what they are looking at. He played better for the next 10 minutes than he had been playing before.
The subtle lift that comes from feeling observed by a competent audience. When he finished the set, he walked to the bar for a drink and on his way he stopped in front of the quiet man and said, “You play?” Clapped and said he did. David looked at the guitar case under the stool. He said, “Any good?” Clapton said, “I get by.” There was something in the way he said it, not falsely modest, not performing humility, but with the particular flatness of someone stating a fact they have no
strong interest in either inflating or defending, that David found under the circumstances mildly provocative. He had been playing for 40 minutes to a room that had been listening. He had just played better than his usual Wednesday standard. He was not inclined on this particular evening to accept I get by as a satisfactory answer from a man sitting in a bar with a guitar case. He said, “Stage is empty. Show me.” Clapton looked at the stage. He looked at his glass of water. He looked at David with
an expression that was not quite amusement but was in that neighborhood. Then he said, “All right.” He reached under the stool and unlatched the guitar case. He took the instrument out with the careful, practiced movement of someone who has performed this action so many times, it has become entirely automatic. The specific economy of motion of a person who has been handling guitars since they were a child. He stood up, carried it to the corner platform, and sat down on the stool there. David watched this from the bar.
The room, which had been paying the low ambient attention of a pub settling into its Wednesday evening, had shifted slightly, the arrival of a new person on the platform, creating the minor reorientation of attention that any change in a small room produces. Perhaps 12 of the 20 people present were watching with some portion of their attention as Clapton settled the guitar across his knee and adjusted his position on the stool. Then he began to play. David set his drink down on the bar. What came out of the guitar in the
first 30 seconds was not what David had expected. He had expected competence. The I get by had rec-calibrated his expectations towards something solid and unremarkable. The kind of playing that a person who spent Wednesday evenings in bars with guitar cases typically produced. Solid, honest, perhaps with one or two moments that stood out. What he heard instead was something that reorganized his understanding of what the instrument in the quiet man’s hands was capable of. Not in the showy technical way that sometimes impressed
audiences who were not themselves musicians, not fast runs and flashy positions and the performance of difficulty. Something more fundamental than that. A quality of sound, of phrasing, of the relationship between what was being played and what was being communicated that David had heard only a handful of times in 8 years of paying close attention to guitar players. He stood at the bar and listened. By the end of the first minute, the four people at the table near the window had stopped their conversation. By the end of the
second, the couple at the far end of the bar had turned on their stools. By the end of the third, everyone in the room was listening, not with the polite attention that live music in a pub usually generated, but with the specific silence of people who have encountered something that is demanding their full attention and receiving it without resistance. The quiet man played for 4 minutes. When he stopped, the silence lasted for several seconds before anyone in the room made a sound. Then the couple at the far end of the bar began
to applaud, and the four people at the window table joined them, and within a few seconds, the entire room was applauding with the slightly dazed warmth of people who have just experienced something they were not prepared for. The quiet man nodded once, stood up from the stool, and carried the guitar back to the bar. David was still standing where he had been standing when the playing started. He had not moved. He had not touched his drink. He looked at Clapton, who was replacing the guitar in its case with the same careful
economy of motion he had used to take it out, and he said the first thing that came to him, which was not a compliment or an expression of admiration, but a genuine question. Who are you? Clapton latched the guitar case. He straightened up. He looked at David with the mild, slightly amused expression that had been present throughout the evening’s exchange, and he told him his name. David Keane stood at the bar of the Crossed Keys in Fitzrovia on a Wednesday evening in October 1967 and heard a name
that he recognized immediately. A name that had been appearing in music press and on record labels and in conversations among people who paid attention to guitar players for the past 2 years attached to a reputation that David had registered without quite believing the way you register very large numbers without fully processing what they mean. He said, “I thought you were taller. It was the wrong thing to say, and David knew it the moment it came out. And Clapton, because it was Clapton, had been Clapton the entire
evening, looked at him for a moment and then laughed, not unkindly, the laugh of a man who has heard stranger responses to his name being recognized and found this one, at least original. They sat at the bar for the next hour and a half. David said in the account he gave of that evening many years later that the conversation had been as surprising as the playing. That Clapton had none of the self-presentation that David had expected from someone with his reputation, none of the careful management of image that the music
industry encouraged in its successful practitioners. He talked about guitar the way someone talks about something they are genuinely still trying to understand with curiosity rather than authority with questions as well as observations with the openness of a person who is not confused being good at something with being finished with it. David asked him why he had been in the crossed keys on a Wednesday evening with a guitar case and a glass of water alone without anyone apparently knowing he was
there. Clapton said he liked playing in rooms where nobody knew who he was. He said it was the only way to find out whether the music was actually working. Not the performance of the music, not the reputation that preceded it, but the music itself in a room full of people who had no reason to be impressed in advance. He said, “When you walked up and said you play and I said I get by, that was real. Nobody gets by in those rooms unless they actually get by.” David Keane told this story for the rest
of his career. He told it not as a story about being humiliated, though losing a guitar duel to Eric Clapton in a Fitzrovia pub on a Wednesday evening, was by any objective measure a comprehensive defeat, but as a story about the thing Clapton had said at the end of it, about playing in rooms where nobody knows who you are, about the difference between the music working and the reputation doing the work the music should be doing. He said it had changed how he thought about performing. That he had started in the months after that
Wednesday evening seeking out rooms where nobody knew him, not as an exercise in humility, but for the specific reason Clapton had given to find out whether the music was working, whether it could hold a room on its own terms without the assistance of a name or a reputation or an audience already disposed to be impressed. He said it was the most useful piece of advice he had ever received about playing guitar. He said it had been given to him by a man who described himself as someone who got by in a bar where nobody knew who he was
on a Wednesday evening in October 1967. If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs to be reminded that the only real test of whether something is working is whether it works when nobody knows your name. There is something worth examining in the choice Clapton made that Wednesday evening. Not the choice to accept the challenge, but the choice to be in that bar in the first place. By October 1967, he was not unknown. Cream had formed the previous year and was already generating the kind
of attention that would make it one of the defining bands of the era. His name appeared in the music press with increasing frequency and reverence. He could have been anywhere on a Wednesday evening in October 1967. He was in the Crossed Keys with a glass of water listening to another guitar player with the technical attention of someone genuinely evaluating the choices being made. He said he did it to find out whether the music was working. By 1967, Clapton’s music was working in every measurable sense. The audiences, the
reviews, the sales, the reputation. What the external evidence could not tell him was whether the music worked on its own terms in a room of people who had no reason to be impressed in advance without the reputation doing the work the music should be doing. The feedback loop of recognition and expectation creates its own self-confirming environment in which it becomes very difficult to separate what the music is doing from what the name attached to it is doing. Clapton was deliberately removing himself from that environment.
For specific evenings in specific rooms where the experiment could be run cleanly, where nobody knew who he was, where the music had to work without assistance, David Keane provided the purest possible version of that experiment. He challenged Clapton at the bar without knowing who the quiet man was on the basis of nothing except the guitar case under the stool and the quality of attention the man was paying to the music. The challenge was genuine. David’s best piece first. The standard established, the invitation extended,
and the quiet man accepted and played, and the room went silent, and the music worked. And then David asked who he was, and found out the music had worked. In a room of 20 people who had no reason to be impressed in advance, with a challenger who had led with his best material, and a handful of regulars who had no stake in the outcome, the music had made everyone stop and listen. The experiment had produced a clean result. Clapton said, “Nobody gets by in those rooms unless they actually get by. He
had gotten by. He had always gotten by in the technical sense that the music had always worked. But the rooms that knew who he was, could no longer tell him that. The rooms that didn’t know, the Wednesday evenings in Fitzrovia, the glass of water clapped in with the guitar case, those were the only rooms left where the information was reliable. David Keane understood this eventually. It took several months after that Wednesday to fully process what Clapton had meant. When he did, he started
seeking out rooms where nobody knew him and played better in those rooms than anywhere else because the absence of expectation removed the performance of competence and left only the competence itself. He said he didn’t teach me a technique. He taught me how to find out if I had one. That is the most accurate summary of what happened in the crossed keys that October. Clapton sat down on a corner stage and played for 4 minutes. And a room of 20 people stopped what they were doing and listened. And
afterward, the man who had issued the challenge asked who he was and was told, and they sat at the bar for an hour and a half and talked about guitar. Sometimes a quiet man comes in with a glass of water and a guitar case. Sometimes someone notices and says, “You any good?” The answer, if the person is honest, is always the same. I get by. Show me what that means in a room where nobody knows your name because that is the only room where the answer is
