I Can't Hold Out by Eric Clapton

The 1974 LP, 461 Ocean Boulevard, was a comeback project for Eric Clapton, having successfully entered recovery from his cocaine addiction. The first track, Motherless Children, comes screaming at you with an insane and loud guitar riff. Though Clapton goes through many musical moods on 461, from the slowly soulful Christian-themed confessional Give Me Strength to the poppy I Shot the Sheriff, the quality never lets up. To this day, it remains one of my favorites.

This is an old, and a bit racy, Elmore James tune, Clapton once again giving homage to his beloved blues. I say it's "a bit racy." But even by 1974 standards, the tune was tame, slightly suggestive but still G-rated. Like an old Looney Tunes cartoon, you could play this song in front of your kids without clamping your hands on their ears. (Contemporary artists seem to have lost this knack. James displays it in I Can't Hold Out.)

Clapton, who has always disdained his own voice, delivers on this entire LP and, as always, his guitar work is second to none.

Depression and movement

Here's a link to an interesting study of depression, using cell phone connections with the permission of study volunteers.

One take-away is that good advice to those suffering from the blues is "Take a walk."

Get up and get moving. Depressive states can function in a downward spiral. You want to crawl into a hole and be away from people, which makes the depression worse, which in turn makes you dig deeper into the hole, making the depression even worse.

Another take-away for me, which we talked about in a Bible study class this past Tuesday, is break your patterns. Someone has said that "a rut is a grave with the ends kicked out." Do something you don't usually do:

• Call up a friend to have lunch together.
• Drive to work or home by a different route.
• Read news from a section of your preferred news source that you don't usually read. For example, if you usually devour sports news but ignore business news, flip things.
• Learn something new.
• Pray for others.
• Serve others in Christ's name.
• Some mornings, I decide to shave my face in a different order.

But, above all, cultivate a relationship with the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Even when you feel low, the God we know in Jesus has promised to be with us always (Matthew 28:20). God also makes all things new (Revelation 21:5, 2 Corinthians 5:17).

Most moods--from the blues to profound happiness--come and go. Persistent depression may be a clinical matter requiring a person to seek out medical help.

But the blues don't need to paralyze us. Moving toward--reaching out to--God, the world, and others, and not away from them, is a good way to keep the blues at bay and to lead a productive, God-honoring life in spite of the blues. (Winston Churchill famously called his own depression, "the black dog.")

By the way, if you have a friend suffering from the blues, reaching out to them is also a great way to help mitigate their sadness and give them hope.

'What I Do When I Feel Blue'

As I was preparing my sermon for this coming Sunday, I ran across a piece I wrote nearly four years ago with that title. Here is a link to it. I hope that you find it helpful.