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Lot Essay
This 1939 Martin 000-42 was the main six-string acoustic used by Eric Clapton for his acclaimed appearance on MTV Unplugged, which would turn out to be one of the pivotal moments of his career. The enduring image of Clapton playing this guitar during the show graced the cover of the accompanying album Unplugged, which became the bestselling live album of all time. Clapton’s performance on Unplugged has since been credited with reviving the use of the acoustic guitar in popular music. One of four acoustic guitars used during the performance, including a classical, a 12-string and a Dobro, Clapton played this Martin 000-42 for eight of the seventeen songs he performed during the “unplugged” set, including his acoustic arrangements of ‘Layla’, ‘Before You Accuse Me’, and ‘Old Love’, as well as an early version of ‘My Father’s Eyes’. Following the success of Unplugged, Clapton continued to use this guitar on stage for many of the acoustic performances incorporated into his live shows from 1993-1998.
It is believed that Clapton purchased the 1939 Martin 000-42 from Pete Alenov of Pete’s Guitar in St. Paul, Minneapolis, in late 1991. Interviewed for Minneapolis local news in 1994, Alenov recounted how Clapton asked him to send six acoustic guitars ahead of his upcoming Unplugged appearance, adding: He called me one morning right before Christmastime and was just amazed with all the guitars and was very inspired by the sound of them. Speaking to Christie’s Musical Instrument specialist Kerry Keane in 2004, Clapton remarked that this was the finest Martin he owned and called it an incredible playing instrument. After having purchased his first Martin, a 1966 000-28, in 1970, Clapton became drawn to the vintage models created prior to World War II – considered to be Martin’s golden era – and began collecting them. The Martin thing started with having seen pictures and footage of Big Bill Broonzy playing a 000-28 – the narrow-waisted acoustic guitar, explained Clapton. Of the high-end pearl inlaid guitars made by Martin in the pre-war period, the 000-42 is one of the rarest. Between 1934 and 1943, only 113 short-scale 000-42 guitars were produced with a 14-fret neck. Martin designed these guitars with a shorter body so that players could more easily access all the frets, making them highly desirable among fast-playing finger-style blues guitarists.
The guitar was first seen with Clapton when he recorded his instalment of MTV Unplugged in front of a small studio audience at Bray Studios, near Windsor, UK, on 16 January 1992. By the time MTV approached Clapton to open the show’s third season, Don Henley, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Paul McCartney, Sting and many other popular musicians had already been featured. When interviewed by producer Alex Coletti after the show, Clapton admitted I kind of avoided watching [MTV Unplugged] because I thought, well, I’d like to do this one day and I don’t want to be influenced by the way other people are doing it… I wanted to do it as if it were brand new. The “unplugged” acoustic format allowed Clapton to pay tribute to the traditional blues musicians that had influenced him in his youth, including Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Robert Johnson, while also reimagining some of his own best-known hits. He was also driven by the opportunity to showcase five new songs written in the months following the tragic death of his four-year-old son Connor the previous March. Writing in Guitar World magazine a year after the show, Coletti shared his belief that the unique intimacy afforded by the Unplugged format made it the ideal place for Clapton to unplug his soul for us with such great dignity and grace.
After Clapton and his band opened with the instrumental ‘Signe’ on the classical guitar, he first brought out this Martin 000-42 for Bo Diddley’s ‘Before You Accuse Me’, revealing to Coletti that it was one of the very first records I ever heard, and followed up with Big Bill Broonzy’s semi-instrumental ‘Hey Hey’ with Andy Fairweather Low pitching in on rhythm guitar. That was probably one of the first blues albums I ever heard, said Clapton. It was a piece I used to play in pubs when I was very young. I never felt that I’d mastered it, but that’s why we do it with two guitars. After introducing three new songs on the classical, including the moving debut of ‘Tears in Heaven’, Clapton continued on the Martin 000-42 with Jimmy Cox’s ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’, which had been part of his pub repertoire as a teen. It was one of the first songs that I felt I could sing, Clapton recalled, because it’s a melodramatic song, and I could put all this angst into it, you know. It came back when I had Derek and The Dominos, we did a version of it, but this is the way I originally did it with the acoustic guitar… it’s just part of the old history that’s in my head, it will never go away.
Keeping hold of the Martin 000-42 and hinting to the audience See if you can spot this one…, Clapton then launched into the highlight of the show – a radical acoustic reworking of his 1970 rock standard ‘Layla’. It sort of mystified me that I’d done it the same all these years, and never ever considered trying to revamp it, Clapton told Coletti. I thought this was another great opportunity to just take it off on a different path and put it to a shuffle. For a start, making it acoustic denied all the riffs really, they would have sounded a bit weak, I think, on the acoustic, so it just seemed to become jazzier somehow. And, of course, I’m singing it a whole octave down, so it gives it a nice atmosphere. Cut from the original broadcast but included from the 2013 re-release onwards, Clapton then introduced an early version of another new song ‘My Father’s Eyes’, which he went on to play for the first time on this guitar. I never met my father, explained Clapton, and I realized that the closest I ever came to looking in my father’s eyes was when I looked into my son’s eyes. So, I wrote this song about that. The song would eventually evolve into the version released as the lead single on his 1998 album Pilgrim. After several numbers on the Dobro and 12-string, Clapton returned to this guitar for the Robert Johnson cover ‘Malted Milk’, which he called a very beautiful song and very simple, and revealed that Johnson was the most important influence he’d had in his life. Closing the set with the Martin, he played the Big Maceo cover ‘Worried Life Blues’ and ‘Old Love’ from his 1989 album Journeyman, the latter featuring an extended, improvised solo during the song.
When Clapton’s MTV Unplugged performance was first broadcast in March 1992 it was greeted with instant acclaim, becoming the series’ highest rated show. Clapton was initially reluctant to release the subsequent live album, revealing in his 2007 autobiography: I was fairly dismissive… I just wasn’t that enamored with it, and as much as I’d enjoyed playing all the songs, I didn’t think it was that great to listen to. When it came out, it was the biggest-selling album of my entire career. Following its release on 25 August, Unplugged would in fact become the best-selling live album of all time, with over 26 million copies sold worldwide, and earned Clapton six Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Rock Song for the acoustic version of ‘Layla’, released as a single that September. The success of Clapton’s acoustic performance on Unplugged revitalized his career, exposing a new generation of fans to his music, and inspired rock musicians everywhere to return to their acoustic guitars. According to Eric Clapton’s Six-String Stories, the renewed interest in acoustic guitars led to a dramatic increase in Martin’s sales figures.
The overwhelmingly positive reception to Unplugged led Clapton to feature an acoustic set on future tours and inspired him to record the all-blues album From The Cradle in 1994. Having opened the door to my true musical tastes with ‘Unplugged’, wrote Clapton in his autobiography, I decided it was time to say thank you to the blues, and to the players and singers who had inspired me so much throughout my life… It was what I had always wanted to do. After Unplugged, Clapton frequently played this guitar on stage, starting with the first of his “all blues” seasons at the Royal Albert Hall in London from 20 February – 7 March 1993, used during the opening acoustic segment of the show for pre-war blues covers such as ‘Alabama Women’, ‘How Long Blues’, and ‘Four Until Late’. It remained his primary stage acoustic for live performances until 1995, predominantly used to perform songs that had influenced him such as ‘Malted Milk’ during his opening acoustic sets on the 1994-95 From The Cradle Tour and further Royal Albert Hall residencies.
When Martin was developing its first Eric Clapton model 000-42EC for release in 1995, Clapton requested that the construction should be based on the structure of this pre-war 000-42. A Martin publicity photograph from the time shows Clapton holding this guitar in one hand, with the new signature model in the other. Although Clapton began to use his Signature Martins, which had built-in pickups, for larger concert venues from 1996 onwards, this guitar continued to serve as his main stage acoustic for performances of ‘Layla’ and ‘Change The World’ on the 1997 Far East Tour and the first leg of the Pilgrim US Tour in 1998. Speaking to Kerry Keane in 2004, Clapton’s then guitar tech Lee Dickson revealed that this 000-42 was used extensively in the studio over the last five or six albums, adding, we always have that 000 there. Clapton’s Six-String Stories confirms that the guitar was used on 1994’s From the Cradle, 1998’s Pilgrim, 2001’s Reptile, 2004’s Me and Mr. Johnson, and the 2000 collaborative album Riding with the King with B.B. King.
When Clapton eventually parted with this guitar as part of his Crossroads Guitar Auction at Christie’s in 2004, to raise funds for the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, he told us This is an incredible guitar. I would never be able to part with it if I didn't have one as good which I've kept. The guitar achieved a world record price for an acoustic guitar at the time and has since been exhibited at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
REFERENCES:
A. Coletti, ‘Eric Clapton: Amazing Grace’, Guitar World, US, Vol. 14, No. 6, June 1993.
P. Alennov, interviewed by Russell Rhodes, St. Paul, Minnesota, Warner Reprise Video, 11 August 1994, Conus Archive. https://www.footage.net/ClipDetail?supplier=conus&key=14637773
D. Boak, Martin Guitar Masterpieces, New York, 2003, pp. 19-20, 96-97.
E. Clapton and L. Dickson, interviewed by K. Keane and M. Friedman, February 2004.
E. Clapton, The Autobiography, London, 2007.
It is believed that Clapton purchased the 1939 Martin 000-42 from Pete Alenov of Pete’s Guitar in St. Paul, Minneapolis, in late 1991. Interviewed for Minneapolis local news in 1994, Alenov recounted how Clapton asked him to send six acoustic guitars ahead of his upcoming Unplugged appearance, adding: He called me one morning right before Christmastime and was just amazed with all the guitars and was very inspired by the sound of them. Speaking to Christie’s Musical Instrument specialist Kerry Keane in 2004, Clapton remarked that this was the finest Martin he owned and called it an incredible playing instrument. After having purchased his first Martin, a 1966 000-28, in 1970, Clapton became drawn to the vintage models created prior to World War II – considered to be Martin’s golden era – and began collecting them. The Martin thing started with having seen pictures and footage of Big Bill Broonzy playing a 000-28 – the narrow-waisted acoustic guitar, explained Clapton. Of the high-end pearl inlaid guitars made by Martin in the pre-war period, the 000-42 is one of the rarest. Between 1934 and 1943, only 113 short-scale 000-42 guitars were produced with a 14-fret neck. Martin designed these guitars with a shorter body so that players could more easily access all the frets, making them highly desirable among fast-playing finger-style blues guitarists.
The guitar was first seen with Clapton when he recorded his instalment of MTV Unplugged in front of a small studio audience at Bray Studios, near Windsor, UK, on 16 January 1992. By the time MTV approached Clapton to open the show’s third season, Don Henley, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Paul McCartney, Sting and many other popular musicians had already been featured. When interviewed by producer Alex Coletti after the show, Clapton admitted I kind of avoided watching [MTV Unplugged] because I thought, well, I’d like to do this one day and I don’t want to be influenced by the way other people are doing it… I wanted to do it as if it were brand new. The “unplugged” acoustic format allowed Clapton to pay tribute to the traditional blues musicians that had influenced him in his youth, including Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Robert Johnson, while also reimagining some of his own best-known hits. He was also driven by the opportunity to showcase five new songs written in the months following the tragic death of his four-year-old son Connor the previous March. Writing in Guitar World magazine a year after the show, Coletti shared his belief that the unique intimacy afforded by the Unplugged format made it the ideal place for Clapton to unplug his soul for us with such great dignity and grace.
After Clapton and his band opened with the instrumental ‘Signe’ on the classical guitar, he first brought out this Martin 000-42 for Bo Diddley’s ‘Before You Accuse Me’, revealing to Coletti that it was one of the very first records I ever heard, and followed up with Big Bill Broonzy’s semi-instrumental ‘Hey Hey’ with Andy Fairweather Low pitching in on rhythm guitar. That was probably one of the first blues albums I ever heard, said Clapton. It was a piece I used to play in pubs when I was very young. I never felt that I’d mastered it, but that’s why we do it with two guitars. After introducing three new songs on the classical, including the moving debut of ‘Tears in Heaven’, Clapton continued on the Martin 000-42 with Jimmy Cox’s ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’, which had been part of his pub repertoire as a teen. It was one of the first songs that I felt I could sing, Clapton recalled, because it’s a melodramatic song, and I could put all this angst into it, you know. It came back when I had Derek and The Dominos, we did a version of it, but this is the way I originally did it with the acoustic guitar… it’s just part of the old history that’s in my head, it will never go away.
Keeping hold of the Martin 000-42 and hinting to the audience See if you can spot this one…, Clapton then launched into the highlight of the show – a radical acoustic reworking of his 1970 rock standard ‘Layla’. It sort of mystified me that I’d done it the same all these years, and never ever considered trying to revamp it, Clapton told Coletti. I thought this was another great opportunity to just take it off on a different path and put it to a shuffle. For a start, making it acoustic denied all the riffs really, they would have sounded a bit weak, I think, on the acoustic, so it just seemed to become jazzier somehow. And, of course, I’m singing it a whole octave down, so it gives it a nice atmosphere. Cut from the original broadcast but included from the 2013 re-release onwards, Clapton then introduced an early version of another new song ‘My Father’s Eyes’, which he went on to play for the first time on this guitar. I never met my father, explained Clapton, and I realized that the closest I ever came to looking in my father’s eyes was when I looked into my son’s eyes. So, I wrote this song about that. The song would eventually evolve into the version released as the lead single on his 1998 album Pilgrim. After several numbers on the Dobro and 12-string, Clapton returned to this guitar for the Robert Johnson cover ‘Malted Milk’, which he called a very beautiful song and very simple, and revealed that Johnson was the most important influence he’d had in his life. Closing the set with the Martin, he played the Big Maceo cover ‘Worried Life Blues’ and ‘Old Love’ from his 1989 album Journeyman, the latter featuring an extended, improvised solo during the song.
When Clapton’s MTV Unplugged performance was first broadcast in March 1992 it was greeted with instant acclaim, becoming the series’ highest rated show. Clapton was initially reluctant to release the subsequent live album, revealing in his 2007 autobiography: I was fairly dismissive… I just wasn’t that enamored with it, and as much as I’d enjoyed playing all the songs, I didn’t think it was that great to listen to. When it came out, it was the biggest-selling album of my entire career. Following its release on 25 August, Unplugged would in fact become the best-selling live album of all time, with over 26 million copies sold worldwide, and earned Clapton six Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Rock Song for the acoustic version of ‘Layla’, released as a single that September. The success of Clapton’s acoustic performance on Unplugged revitalized his career, exposing a new generation of fans to his music, and inspired rock musicians everywhere to return to their acoustic guitars. According to Eric Clapton’s Six-String Stories, the renewed interest in acoustic guitars led to a dramatic increase in Martin’s sales figures.
The overwhelmingly positive reception to Unplugged led Clapton to feature an acoustic set on future tours and inspired him to record the all-blues album From The Cradle in 1994. Having opened the door to my true musical tastes with ‘Unplugged’, wrote Clapton in his autobiography, I decided it was time to say thank you to the blues, and to the players and singers who had inspired me so much throughout my life… It was what I had always wanted to do. After Unplugged, Clapton frequently played this guitar on stage, starting with the first of his “all blues” seasons at the Royal Albert Hall in London from 20 February – 7 March 1993, used during the opening acoustic segment of the show for pre-war blues covers such as ‘Alabama Women’, ‘How Long Blues’, and ‘Four Until Late’. It remained his primary stage acoustic for live performances until 1995, predominantly used to perform songs that had influenced him such as ‘Malted Milk’ during his opening acoustic sets on the 1994-95 From The Cradle Tour and further Royal Albert Hall residencies.
When Martin was developing its first Eric Clapton model 000-42EC for release in 1995, Clapton requested that the construction should be based on the structure of this pre-war 000-42. A Martin publicity photograph from the time shows Clapton holding this guitar in one hand, with the new signature model in the other. Although Clapton began to use his Signature Martins, which had built-in pickups, for larger concert venues from 1996 onwards, this guitar continued to serve as his main stage acoustic for performances of ‘Layla’ and ‘Change The World’ on the 1997 Far East Tour and the first leg of the Pilgrim US Tour in 1998. Speaking to Kerry Keane in 2004, Clapton’s then guitar tech Lee Dickson revealed that this 000-42 was used extensively in the studio over the last five or six albums, adding, we always have that 000 there. Clapton’s Six-String Stories confirms that the guitar was used on 1994’s From the Cradle, 1998’s Pilgrim, 2001’s Reptile, 2004’s Me and Mr. Johnson, and the 2000 collaborative album Riding with the King with B.B. King.
When Clapton eventually parted with this guitar as part of his Crossroads Guitar Auction at Christie’s in 2004, to raise funds for the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, he told us This is an incredible guitar. I would never be able to part with it if I didn't have one as good which I've kept. The guitar achieved a world record price for an acoustic guitar at the time and has since been exhibited at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
REFERENCES:
A. Coletti, ‘Eric Clapton: Amazing Grace’, Guitar World, US, Vol. 14, No. 6, June 1993.
P. Alennov, interviewed by Russell Rhodes, St. Paul, Minnesota, Warner Reprise Video, 11 August 1994, Conus Archive. https://www.footage.net/ClipDetail?supplier=conus&key=14637773
D. Boak, Martin Guitar Masterpieces, New York, 2003, pp. 19-20, 96-97.
E. Clapton and L. Dickson, interviewed by K. Keane and M. Friedman, February 2004.
E. Clapton, The Autobiography, London, 2007.