Some songs sound exactly like their titles. “I Can’t Stand It” is one of them: four words, a tight jaw, and the unmistakable air of a man who has reached the end of his rope. Eric Clapton wrote it himself in 1980 and released it early the following year as the first single from Another Ticket, and it did rather better than he can have expected, climbing to number ten on the American chart. It’s not one of the songs people tend to bring up when they talk about his greatest work, which is a shame. There’s more going on beneath its jumpy surface than you’d think, and the circumstances of its making turn it into a small, odd piece of history.
Trouble at the Label
Here’s the background. Clapton started recording what would become Another Ticket with the producer Glyn Johns, who had worked on his previous album, Backless. But the sessions didn’t please the record company, and Clapton, rather than argue the point, packed up and went to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, where he worked with the producer Tom Dowd. Dowd was an old friend, an engineer-turned-producer who had been at the controls for Layla and for a good portion of the great Atlantic records of the sixties. Under his guidance Clapton wrote new songs, this one among them, and the label, to everyone’s relief, was happy.
The band that played on the record was a good one. Albert Lee, a famously nimble guitarist, was in it, as was Gary Brooker of Procol Harum on keyboards and vocals, along with the drummer Henry Spinetti and the keyboard player Chris Stainton. Together they gave the album a crisp, uncluttered sound. The record was credited to Eric Clapton and His Band, which tells you something about the collective feel. There’s an easy, working-band energy to the track, and you can hear them enjoying the bounce of it, like a group of friends who’ve found a good pub and don’t intend to leave.
A Very Plain Complaint
The lyric is blunt. A man is stuck in a situation, probably with a woman, and he’s fed up with it. He’s trying to hold things together, but his patience is wearing thin, and by the time he gets to the chorus he’s more or less shouting it out. There’s no poetry in the complaint, and there doesn’t need to be. The directness is the appeal. We’ve all had moments when we couldn’t find a more elegant way of putting it, and the song understands that. It doesn’t try to dress up the feeling as anything grander than what it is, which is irritation reaching boiling point.
It’s worth remembering, though, that bluntness in a song doesn’t always mean simplicity in a life. Clapton in 1981 was in rough shape. He was drinking heavily, he had trouble with his back, he was taking painkillers, and the tour that followed the album didn’t last long. Looked at that way, a song about being unable to put up with something has an extra edge. I wouldn’t claim it’s a confession, exactly. But it’s hard to hear a man sing the title phrase with that much conviction and not wonder what, in his own life, he’d had enough of. The answer, I suspect, was quite a lot.
The Sound of the Thing
It’s an upbeat, driving rocker, with a lively rhythm and a tune that sticks. There’s a sort of nervous energy to it, rather like someone drumming their fingers on a table while they wait for an apology. Clapton’s guitar is crisp and restrained, and his vocal has a slight snarl on it that suits the lyric. There’s a short solo, tidy and economical, and then back to the chorus. At just over four minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. In fact, it leaves you wanting to hear it again, which is the best thing you can say about any single.
The track was a hit in America, reaching the top ten, and Clapton was rewarded with a BMI citation for it. Notably, it came at a time when he showed very little interest in making videos. The first one he made came in 1985, so while MTV was putting everyone’s face on television, he stayed resolutely out of frame. I find that rather charming. A hit record without a promotional film feels like a throwback, a record that had to succeed on its own terms, with nothing to lean on but the tune and the guitar. Those days are largely gone, and I think we’re the poorer for it.
An Overlooked Corner of the Catalogue
One respected critic observed, in so many words, that the song has aged well, which seems about right. It isn’t a classic in the way that “Layla” or “Cocaine” are, and it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of the later ballads. But it has the virtue of being a perfectly tuned bit of rock music, written by a man in a hurry and played by a band in good form. That’s more than enough. There’s a lot to be said for a song that does a modest job properly, and a great deal to be said for one that doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
It also had an afterlife that I find rather pleasing. When Clapton re-recorded “After Midnight” for a beer advert in the late eighties, “I Can’t Stand It” was chosen as the flip side of the seven-inch single. So the song found its way onto the back of a much more famous record, where it quietly sat for years, doing its job. There are worse fates for a track. Plenty of songs vanish altogether, whereas this one has spent four decades turning up in the corners of other people’s records, like a dependable relative at family gatherings.
The album it came from did well, too. Another Ticket reached the American top ten and went on to earn a gold record, which was a relief to everyone concerned after the wobbles in the studio. It was also a record on which Clapton wrote more of his own material than he had for some time, credited on six of its nine songs, and that matters. For years he had been leaning on other people’s compositions, with the occasional blues standard thrown in for good measure. Here was a man putting his own name back on the label, and “I Can’t Stand It” was the proof that he could still turn a plain, workmanlike idea into something people hummed in the shower.
The Last Word
So what does “I Can’t Stand It” mean? It means exactly what it says. It’s a short, sharp burst of frustration, set to a tune you can tap out on the steering wheel. There’s no hidden code and no elaborate metaphor, and I think that’s why it works. In the middle of a career that has so often been described in terms of grand emotion and spiritual searching, it’s refreshing to find a record that simply wants to complain. Clapton sings it as though he’s glad to have got it off his chest, and by the end, so are we. Sometimes that is precisely what a good song is for.