This article originally appeared in The Detroit News June 9, 2026.

A quiet, reserved man sat on stage, an acoustic guitar in his hands.

“See if you can spot this one,” he said to the studio audience.

The guitarist started playing a stripped-down, shuffling version of the 1970 hit “Layla.”

A few notes in, the crowd started cheering. The guitarist grinned. They had spotted it.

Eric Clapton’s 1992 “Unplugged” album, performed before a live audience near London, was a massive hit. In addition to the reimagined “Layla,” Clapton played a number of blues classics and a new single, “Tears in Heaven.” Clapton wrote the song after the tragic death of his four-year-old son, which added emotional power to the performance.

The iconic performance supercharged Clapton’s career. The album won three Grammy Awards. It eventually sold 26 million copies, making it Clapton’s best-selling album, and it became the best-selling live album of all time.

Clapton’s performance was elevated by the instrument in his hands, a 1939 Martin 000-42. Clapton said it was the finest Martin guitar he had ever owned.

Before his performance, acoustic guitars were in trouble. The popularity of folk music had declined, and Dylan went electric. Disco, electric keyboards and hair metal drowned out the acoustic.

The company that made Clapton’s guitar, C.F. Martin & Co., nearly went bankrupt in the 1980s. But with the advent of MTV’s “Unplugged” series, acoustic guitars became cool again. Sales soared. Martin guitars enjoyed a fivefold increase in production by the end of the 1990s.

A single performance changed an artist’s trajectory and revitalized the musical instrument industry. But here’s the rest of the story:

We have Martin guitars today because an entrepreneur fled a system of restrictive regulations.

In the early 1800s, Christian Frederick Martin worked as a cabinet maker in Vienna. At the time, craftsmen operated under a rigid guild system — what we would today call occupational licensing. John Stubbings documents Martin’s journey in his new book, “The Devil Is in It: A History of the American Acoustic Guitar.”

As guitars grew more common in Europe, some cabinet makers focused on the popular instrument. “This,” writes Stubbings, “put the noses of the closed-shop violin makers seriously out of joint.”

The powerful violin guild argued that its craftsmen enjoyed the exclusive right to make musical instruments and in 1826 filed a legal petition. The petition, which sought to monopolize the guitar trade, named Martin as a target.

C.F. Martin eventually grew tired of the regulatory battles. He moved to New York City in 1833, where he started an instrument shop. Free of the guild’s meddlesome regulations, the Martin family built a guitar empire. Martin has been the guitar of choice for generations of artists including Elvis, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Ed Sheeran.

Martin’s guild battles aren’t merely a relic of Old World Europe. The same mindset exists today, where established firms use regulations to lock out competitors.

The state of Michigan requires people to get a license for more than 160 occupations, says my colleague Jarrett Skorup. Licenses are costly and the rules are arbitrary. If you want to become a barber, you need to complete more training hours than it takes to complete law school. Funeral directors need more training than paramedics.

As they did in C.F. Martin’s day, licensing rules stifle creativity, entrepreneurship and economic mobility. Thankfully, the Michigan Legislature is considering bills that would lift occupational rules.

Just think — without the proper teaching certificate, Eric Clapton wouldn’t even be allowed to teach music in a Michigan high school.

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