When Eric Clapton reached out to Derek Trucks to invite him onto to his collaborative record with JJ Cale, the slide guitar master thought he was being prank-called.
In 2006, Cale and Slowhand teamed up for The Road to Escondido, a star-studded blues album that also featured contributions from John Mayer, Billy Preston, Taj Mahal, Steve Jordan, Pino Palladino, and more.
Clapton also tried to approach Derek Trucks for the album, but it was a rocky recruitment phase. Not only did Trucks ignore the call, he was skeptical whether the real Slowhand had phoned him.
“I was here at home playing poker with my grandfather and dad and brother and a bunch of friends, and I remember just getting a call on my cellphone,” Trucks remembers of the project in an interview with Alan Paul.
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“This is early days, where you had to have a specific international plan or you couldn’t call them back. I just didn’t recognize the number so I let it go to voicemail.
“It was like, ‘Hello. This is a message for Derek Trucks. This is Eric Clapton. This may sound like a hoax but it’s not.’”
Trucks had missed the call, and because of his cellphone plan, couldn’t get hold of Clapton straight away.
“It was amazing,” Trucks adds. “I was like, ‘What is going on?’ [The message said], ‘When you get a chance, call me back.’ So I had to go down to the Verizon store the next day and get an international plan so I could call him back.
“Then he invited me out for the JJ Cale record, which I think in hindsight was more of a ‘make sure we could hang and make sure you’re not a total knucklehead’ situation.”
The pair got on, and Trucks ended up contributing to The Road to Escondido, later joining Clapton’s touring band and hitting the road with him in 2007.
A regular contributor to the Crossroads Festival, Trucks also partnered with Clapton and a whole host of other guitar greats for the Cale tribute record, The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale, in 2014.
In more recent Trucks news, the guitar hero recently made headlines when he played Jerry Garcia's $11m Tiger guitar mere hours after it was sold at auction.
