"What do coffee and Eric Clapton have in common?"

"They're only good with Cream."

If he had simply done the opening riff and solo to "Crossroads" and then vanished off the face of the Earth, we would still be talking about Eric Clapton today.

Those four white-hot minutes with Cream, wherein he shredded the strings of his Gibson SG in a manner Robert Johnson never imagined, was a game-changer for blues-rock in the late '60s.

Solos like that were why "Clapton is God" was famously written on the subway wall in London and why he's often ranked among rock's greatest guitarists.

Of course, in Eric Clapton, we've always had a reluctant guitar hero. After 1970, he toned down the fire in his playing, to move on to other things, like a series of softer-rock hits that would expand his fan base and keep his career afloat.

On the occasion of a new tour, that brings him to the Mellon Arena tonight with Roger Daltrey, it's worth asking whether Mr. Clapton is still in discussion with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page as one of the greatest?

Roosters to Dominos

If you're 12 years old, you have a year or so to mess around with your little "Guitar Hero" toy before you get down to business.

Eric Patrick Clapton, of Surrey, England, got his first acoustic guitar when he was 13 and battled through the frustration and finger pain to learn the licks and scales of blues masters such as B.B. King and Buddy Guy. His first public concerts were on the streets, as a busker, while he was in college, and he formed his first band, The Roosters, when he was 17.

The Clapton buzz started in earnest when he joined the Yardbirds in late 1963 and began touring England. During that stint, he acquired the lifelong nickname of "Slowhand" -- because he would change strings on stage to a "slow handclap" from the crowd -- and scored his first hit, "For Your Love," with the Yardbirds, just after he left the band (replaced by Jeff Beck, soon to be joined by Mr. Page).

Looking for more of a pure blues-rock scenario, he transitioned to John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers on and off in 1965, lifting his reputation to a new level. The living document from that era is the 1966 album "Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton" that came out after he left and found him jamming through blues covers by Willie Dixon, Freddie King, Mose Allison, Robert Johnson and the like on a Gibson Les Paul through an overdriven Marshall amp.

The Clapton name still wasn't well known on this side of the Atlantic until he partnered with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker to form the venerable power trio Cream (immodestly shortened from "cream of the crop") in 1966 and released "Disraeli Gears" a year later. Between '67 and '69, they delivered such enduring and rather eerie rock classics as "I Feel Free," "Sunshine of Your Love," "White Room" and "Crossroads."

"I might have been about 16 or 17," says Pittsburgh blues guitarist Duane Irate Jones. "At the time, Mike Bloomfield for America and Clapton for England were the top new generation of blues players. They were playing the hottest riffs that we had heard so far, as far as rock 'n 'roll. The Beatles were too pretty with it. The Stones were a little rougher. Somehow, Clapton opened up a whole world. We used to put that 'Blues Breakers' album on at 16 speed on the turntable because it was in the same key an octave lower and slow the riffs down and just listen over and over and learn them."

Dave Iglar, who plays some Clapton covers in his blues-rock sets in local clubs, says the guitarist was "one of the pioneers who fused blues from '50s and '60s into rock 'n' roll. He wasn't the type of guy where you worked real hard to learn his stuff or talked about his licks that much, but he was always there from the beginning. Everyone talked about learning Hendrix riffs, how difficult it was. It wasn't quite that way with Clapton."

John Purse, who teaches at Pittsburgh Guitars and has played in such bands as the Dirty Faces, says, "in my formative years, as a kid, I would try to play [Blues Breakers and Cream]. All of that stuff was new then. Now, it's cliche of the guitar hero with long, extended solos. But it was new at the time with the loud amplifiers and the Cream-y distorted tone people were getting.

"He established that tone, the 'Woman Tone,' I guess he calls it. He was playing an SG at the time, and you flip the neck tip pick-up on and you roll off the high end and it just screams through a Marshall and has this unique tone. Just to establish a signature sound, that's difficult to do. When you hear it, you go, 'Oh, that's Clapton.' "

The chief problem with Cream was that the rhythm section couldn't stand each other from the day they formed the band to recent reunions, and Mr. Clapton grew weary of playing peacemaker. So, he closed out the '60s with the short-lived Blind Faith for one album, backed up Delaney and Bonnie and Friends on tour, and even played with the Plastic Ono Band.

While in Cream, he had stepped to the mike occasionally, but his friendship with Delaney Bramlett and members of The Band would help change the focus of his career into that of self-contained singer, songwriter, guitarist -- for better or worse.

Ups and downs

His solo career launched in a big way in 1970, first with Delaney and Bonnie backing him and co-writing on "Eric Clapton," which came out in August and included such keepers as "Blues Power" and J.J. Cale's "After Midnight," a song that would later open the floodgates for the use of popular rock tunes in TV commercials. It also included the jangly "Let It Rain."

"Sometimes I'll cover 'Let It Rain,' " Mr. Iglar says "and you strike out the first few chords of the bar and pretty much everyone knows what it is right way."

For whatever reason, Mr. Clapton was still itchy to get back into a band situation, and by December, he had helmed Derek and the Dominos' "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs," full of heartbroken tunes inspired by his passions for George Harrison's wife, Patti Boyd. Songs like "Key to the Highway" and "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" employed a fierce two-guitar attack, with Duane Allman adding the sizzling slide playing.

Mr. Jones says he "never got into that album," and Mr. Purse says "it hasn't hit me much," but "Layla" clearly had its following. It's No. 115 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time -- right behind "Fresh Cream" at 101 and "Disraeli Gears" at 112 -- and the title track, "Bell Bottom Blues" and "Little Wing" (his tribute to good friend Hendrix, who died that September) became staples of classic-rock radio.

Sadly, "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" would never get a follow-up, partly due to the death of Mr. Allman in a motorcycle accident the next year.

Oddly, it also ended the chapter of "God" as guitar burner.

In the early '70s, he was plagued by heroin, alcohol and woman troubles and was lucky to survive. It didn't result in searing blues. Instead, when he re-emerged in 1974 with "461 Ocean Boulevard" his focus shifted toward cleaner, smoother pop songs like his cover of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff," followed a few years later with "Slowhand" and its run of radio-ready singles: "Cocaine," "Wonderful Tonight" and "Lay Down Sally."

He was making more money and crossing over to pop radio, but Mr. Purse can tell you that young guitarists don't come to him clamoring to play "Lay Down Sally." At the time, they surely wanted to learn Zeppelin riffs, along with those by Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Joe Perry and other hard-rockers.

Mr. Iglar takes the long view on the guitarist's evolution. "Anyone who has a career that goes for 40 years is going to have ups and downs. I might not have agreed with all the turns he took, but I think a big part of his artistry is that he went through so many transformations. I probably wouldn't have wanted him to stay the same as Cream for the last 50 years. That was a cool thing at the time."

After a pretty steady run of lowlights in the '80s, he bounced back into critical favor with the pure blues album, "Journeyman," in 1989, followed by the Grammy-winning, seven-times platinum "Unplugged" in 1992, led by "Tears in Heaven," a grief-stricken ode to his 4-year-old son who died after falling from a New York apartment building window.

Since then, he has fallen back on the blues a number of times -- on 1994's "From the Cradle"; his 2000 collaboration with B.B. King, "Riding With the King"; and his acoustic Robert Johnson tribute "Me and Mr. Johnson."

Meanwhile, he's been gregarious in his collaborations the past few decades, touring or recording with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mark Knopfler, Sheryl Crow, Cream, Steve Winwood, Derek Trucks, Robbie Robertson and now Jeff Beck. A recent 11-song set from the tour featured four Derek and the Dominos tracks, along with "Crossroads" from Cream. A review from the Bloomberg News described the 64-year-old guitarist as "quietly laid-back."

Legend lives on

So, what of his legacy?

He's three-times inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (with the Yardbirds, Cream and as a solo artist). The 2003 Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, voted on by critics and musicians, ranked Mr. Clapton No. 4 behind Mr. Hendrix, Mr. Allman and B.B. King.

Obviously, these lists are as subjective as favorite ice cream flavors.

"I would put him at like 8 or 9," Mr. Jones says, adding, "I like Jeff Beck a lot better -- he's more adventurous. Clapton's real smooth. Beck, even though he uses more effects, there's something rough about it, like he doesn't practice enough or something, and that sort of gives it an edge. And Hendrix, of course."

"Hendrix and Page are my top two," Mr. Purse says. "Not just because they were good guitar players, but just because of the songs, basically, and the sound of the whole thing."

"I think he's taken criticism for not being one of the modern technical shred guitar players that's become popular," Mr. Iglar says. "He would have to be in the top five simply because of his huge role in writing the 'code' for the language of modern guitar. EVERYONE learning to play the guitar in the '60s and '70s learned Eric Clapton licks and songs. He was and is a living textbook of the evolution of the electric blues-based rock 'n' roll that influenced guitar vocabulary forever."

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.