Eric Clapton playing on Aretha's 'Good To Me As I Am To You'

I decided to listen through Aretha's 'Lady Soul' album (1968) and one of my favorite tracks on it is 'Good To Me As I Am To You'. She never released it as a single but when I looked the song up it turns out that in December of 1967, when Eric was still a member of Cream he was called in to play guitar for the song. It kinda just makes me like it more, like a collaboration of sorts, though they recorded the parts separately lol.

 

1968, Eric Clapton's greatest year of recorded releases. In addition to "Good to Me as I Am to You," there is EC's star turn on "My Guitar Gently Weeps." Cream's "Wheels of Fire" was also released that year. Plus, "Sunshine of Your Love" was a chart hit.

 

Cool! I didn't know EC played on this track. An excellent reason to dig up my MFSL gold 2-fer cd.

 

In his Aretha Franklin entry in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh calls Clapton's contribution a "guitar obbligato." You know it's gotta be good when critics start describing it in Italian.

 

Lol, up there with the classical composers of the 18th century I see.

 

Bobby Womack, Joe South (Games People Play) and Jimmy Johnson (Muscle Shoals) also play guitar on the album. Cream, like Aretha, were also on the Atlantic label in the US, so I guess there was no contractual issue with Clapton.

 

Wow, I didn't know they were label mates, nice to know.

 

More like a "guitar obligation", as the guitar solo was added as a favor to Ahmet Ertegun, who was the person to suggest that Eric get to do it in the first place.

 

Man, you know how to take the romance out of everything...