Customer Rating: 
Summary: seminal and timeless! a must for all guitar lovers
Comment: This is a fantastic album. Clapton's playing from one so young (he was 21) and Mayall's singing and keyboards, and arrangements, are just spine-chilling. Best moments for me - Clapton's solo on "Have You heard" and the whole band/arrangement/composition "Double Crossing Time". Oh, and by the way, you get to hear Clapton's first lead vocal on record - "Ramblin on my Mind". Great band, great performances and SO well recorded - hats off to Mike Vernion and decca!
I first heard it in 1972 on a dansette "gramophone" and it an album I keep coming back to again and again. A "must have" album for any lover or student of electric guitar and blues.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beyond brilliance
Comment: I first listened to this album when it was released during the 1960's
I was 17 years old and could not believe what I was hearing!
A truly ground breaking album that influenced most aspiring guitar players of that era.
The Bluesbreaker album features the young Eric Clapton at his best, in my opinion he has never surpassed the sublime guitar breaks on this album, he was truly inspired when this was recorded, with the great John Mayall's haunting vocals and keyboard skills, John Mcvie's bass work and Hughie Flint on drums, it is a brilliant piece of work.
If I was only allowed to own one CD, this would be it!
Customer Rating:
Summary: can you imagine...
Comment: I was going to mention Clapton's christening of the Les Paul, Marshall setup, but others have beaten me to it. I liken it's impact to what happened to harp playing when Little Walter and other's deciding to blow through the PA or an early guitar amp. They REDEFINED the sound of the instrument.
So all I'll add is the rhetorical question...can you imagine being a teenage Brit, having been reared on the sounds of the Beatles, Jerry and the Pacemakers, or even the Dave Clark Five, wandering into a London club because someone had recommended the Bluesbreakers, and hearing THIS STUFF? Probably as epiphanic as being a white guy in mid 50's Chicago and having the nerve to wander into the Dew Drop Inn and hearing Muddy, Wolf, or later, Otis Rush and Buddy Guy. Simply put, a life changing experience.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The most important guitar album of all time!
Comment: The best guitar player of the time on top of his game. Classic tracks. The perfect combination of guitar and amp. Incredible solos... Listening to this album it is easy to see why rock took the directions it did. This is the blueprint for pretty much every rock/blues album that followed, and in my opinion the closest Clapton ever got to this ever again is on Layla... This is Essential.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The album that changed my life.
Comment: On a week's holiday with my parent's in Littlehampton in Sussex during the summer of '66, as ever, I found a record shop. Without much money as I was still at school, (just), I had the choice, in my mind anyway, between two albums; The Mother's Of Invention's 'Freakout,' and 'Bluesbreakers.' Maybe there had been a lot of publicity at the time about 'Freakout,' I can't remember, but for some reason I was torn between which one to buy. Probably the fact that I was a Yardbirds fan and had listened to 'Five Live' a great deal made up my mind, and I plumped for 'Bluesbreakers.' It was to be the wisest move and the best purchase I ever made. As a then, and still now, 'would-be' guitarist, this album, for its time in rock history, had everything you wanted and more, and has pretty much stayed that way over the ensuing years. To play with this degree of skill and feeling at Clapton's age of 21 at the time, was and is incredible. At 15, he was almost an old man to me being 6 years older, yet even so, the bluesmen I had heard were in their 30's and over, (really old men!), and even now this album begs the question "Why was Clapton so great at such a young age?" We will never know, and if put to the question, probably neither would he? It was just something he was drawn to and did, and has had the good fortune to do so for the rest of his life. If you're a guitarist, Clapton fan, blues enthusiast, whatever, and you don't own this album, simply buy it now - it will remain a classic for as long as planet Earth keeps turning.
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