The LP that most influenced me as a guitarist is (almost naturally for a blues/rock guitarist of my generation) “John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers featuring Eric Clapton. Also called the Beano album because Clapton is reading the comic book of the same name on the cover. This LP was at our house because my (much) older brothers bought and played this and many other blues records
So I don’t want to talk so much about this album but rather about Freddie King’s 1971 LP ‘Getting Ready’. Because that was the 1st LP I bought myself and it had at least as much influence on my career as the Beano album. Although my aforementioned brothers also had Freddie King records, that was mainly material from the early 60s.
Only much later, by the way, did I discover that people like Clapton, Richards, Beck, Hendrix had also listened to these records and derived a lot of inspiration from them. In the early 1970s I lived in my hometown of Assen and was in high school there. I did make music with friends and/or classmates back then. In those days bands regularly performed in the theater De Kolk in Assen (now DNK; at the same location but renovated). Of course Cuby & the Blizzards but also Living Blues and others. It must have been around 1972 that Freddie King was programmed. Actually I had no idea what to expect, but with some music friends we went to De Kolk. And I have not regretted it to this day. Perhaps the most impressive concert I have ever seen
Now in my case that is not so difficult because I am not exactly a concert-goer. Anyway…to be confronted with such American showmanship at that age, in the early seventies of the last century, in a provincial town like Assen…mindblowing. The band began to play. All black musicians except for the white 2nd guitarist..and then Freddie King came on. 2 meters tall, one meter wide and one meter deep in my experience and the guitar pruning and pruning hard. At the end of the show he put his Gibson ES in the neck while he kept looking at the audience. Compared to Freddie’s head, that guitar looked like a ukulele. And his voice…devastatingly good. So full of soul and blues.
So yes…not surprising that the next day I rushed to the record store (where De Koppelpaarden café now sits) and bought the record ‘Getting Ready’ and plucked it out note by note, as I had done with the Beano album. There were more of those, by the way: Gary Moore, Eddie van Halen to name a few. I still have the record …full of scratches from putting the needle back over and over again to pick out a guitar piece.