DOUBLE IMPACT

IT IS MAY 1966, and the Decca Studios are quaking. Work stops. Employees wince. In the canteen, the seismic shudder rattles teacups and prompts angry objections. Little do the complainants realize that this racket is history being made. Had anyone been brave enough to enter the studio and fight through the wall of sound, they would have found a 21-year-old Eric Clapton at the eye of the storm, toting a Les Paul, driving a Marshall into the red and tracking the songs that would light the fuse of the blues boom on an album titled Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton — or as it came to be known, Beano, for its cover image in which Clapton is reading the comic of the same name. “Nobody had witnessed someone coming into the studio, setting up their guitar and amp, and playing at that volume,” recalls Mike Vernon, the album’s producer.

Clapton’s primal scream was understandable. By the time he came to record the album, the precocious guitarist had plenty to get out of his system. A troubled young man with a tangled family background, his eye-popping ability had seen him deified in the Yardbirds, but by March 1965 he despaired of the R&B combo’s new pop direction and was hungry to play blues. “We had completely sold out,” he wrote in his memoir. “By then, I was a pretty grizzled and discontented individual.”

NEW DIRECTIONS

While Clapton retreated to the Oxfordshire countryside