Chetan Lokur 
Fly tomorrow
Well, it’s got to be goodbye
Fly tomorrow
I’ll be way up in the sky
Way up in the sky
—John Mayall, Blues from Laurel Canyon, 1968
As a naïve teenager back in first year of law school, I believed I had a refined taste in music. One evening I told one of my seniors K, who is no more today, that no one “rocked harder” than the thrash metal bands of the 1980s. K smirked and informed me that while they certainly rocked hard, they did not come close to Eric Clapton.
I burst out laughing, knowing Clapton only from his Unplugged album and for soft, sweet melodies like ‘Tears in Heaven’ and ‘Layla’. K did not take kindly to my laughter and, playing his senior card, ordered me to accompany him to his room, where he proceeded, on his bulky desktop monitor through an external hard disk, to play me a concert titled Eric Clapton and Friends, recorded sometime in the mid 1980s. For the next hour and a half, I was transported to a place I had never been before, or since, while I saw Clapton, beads of sweat dripping down his face, belt out banger after banger while bending his guitar strings and creating high-pitched twangs which immediately made my face contort in tune with the music. I was instinctively making my ugly ‘blues face’.
Knowing just what he had done, K turned to me with a triumphant smile and declared, “This is the blues!” I had received my sacred initiation and was now a lifelong convert to the genre. K promptly transferred 100 GB worth of blues music onto my hard disk, instructing me to begin my sonic journey with an album called Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton by an artist called John Mayall.
That night was the first time I heard of, and heard, Mayall. And ever since then, I do not recall a single week that did not go by without my listening to that album, if only to listen to a song or two. Over the next few days I binge-listened to Mayall’s entire discography, and it was one of my most enriching experiences and learnings in college. This is why Mayall’s death last week – at age 90 and therefore not exactly a surprise – still dealt a hammer blow to me.
I expected British media like The Guardian and the BBC to publish glowing tributes and obituaries in his memory in the wake of his passing. But it was heartening to see the Indian Express put out a eulogy for my hero on its editorial page. For someone whose music made such a deep impression on me and gave me company through the good times and the bad for over two decades, I felt it essential on my part to do whatever little I could to salute this musical genius by penning a few words in his memory.
Mayall was not the most popular of musicians, especially in India – indeed, I have only met a handful of people, even amongst blues lovers, who claim to be his fans. However, as is usually the case with the pioneers of an art form or a movement – in this case, the British Blues – it is through the vast bodies of work of their more famous proteges that they achieve immortality. One look at the names of the young, then-little-known musicians that Mayall inducted in his ever-evolving band, the Bluesbreakers, would prove this true. John Mcvie, who later went on to lend his name to the phenomenally popular Fleetwood Mac, joined forces with Mayall in 1963 as the first bassist of the Bluesbreakers. Clapton followed suit in 1965 as his guitarist – a move which changed the course of both their lives. Their only album together – the Beano Album, so named because of its cover featuring Clapton reading an edition of the Beano comic book – is a masterpiece of the blues genre and is consistently ranked, even 60 years after its release, as one of the greatest albums of all time. It showcased Clapton as a hardcore bluesman and a guitar virtuoso, spawning the ubiquitous “Clapton is God” graffiti all over London and brought commercial success and mainstream attention to Mayall.
Following Clapton’s departure to form the supergroup Cream, Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood, the founding members of Fleetwood Mac, joined the Bluesbreakers.
And after Green’s departure, Mick Taylor, the future guitarist of the Rolling Stones, replaced him.
To have any one of these artists in one’s band would count as extreme good fortune. To have all of them become your musical comrade over the space of five years is simply mind-boggling. But this, somehow, doesn’t seem out of place for a prodigiously multitalented singer, guitarist, harmonica player, keyboardist and producer like Mayall. It is quite reasonable to infer that had Mayall not recruited Clapton and his cohort as the Bluesbreakers, we perhaps never would have had an Eric Clapton or a Fleetwood Mac. Their ascendancy can correctly be attributed to “The Godfather of British Blues”, a wholly accurate epithet for Mayall.
In 2018, when it was announced that Mayall would be headlining the Mahindra Blues Festival in Mumbai, I purchased a ticket to the show the minute they went on sale. Only rigorous incarceration in a high-security prison would have prevented me from seeing and hearing one of my musical heroes in the flesh. To witness Mayall sing and play one of his many instruments on stage barely five feet away from me took me back to that evening in 2004 spent with K in that tiny hostel room in front of the computer screen, where I took in his aura, mouth agape. Though it was clear that Mayall was past his prime, watching him perform his greatest hits and closing the event with one of India’s best blues guitarists – Warren Mendonsa – made it easier for me to imagine what the Marquee Club in 1965 London would have felt like. That night was one of the most exhilarating and emotional experiences of my life.
Mayall’s passing has reduced the already shrinking blues space in today’s music scene, and left it sadder and poorer. Clapton’s video tribute to him posted on YouTube a couple of days ago brought a tear to my eye – for Mayall was not an ordinary musician, he was the inspiration and mentor to the greatest musicians of the 20th century. As for me, well, he was virtually my gateway to an entire subculture – the counterculture of the 1960s – which led to me consuming all the music, film and literature of that period that I could lay my hands on. For that, I thank you, John Mayall. You will be sorely missed.
Chetan Lokur is an advocate practicing at the Delhi high court.