Round 2: "Before You Accuse Me" (Journeyman album, 1989; written by Bo Diddley). After the crackling opening tune off the new album, Clapton follows up with the album's last cut.
Continuing to cultivate the crowd's anticipatory exuberance, the guitarist glides his band straight into the song from the previous one. There is not even a moment's break to acknowledge the audience.
The tempo slows down a mite, but the voice is harsher. Clapton forges ahead full-throated on the vocal and, as is his wont, full-throttle on the guitar, and the Strat obeys him like a steed that trusts its rider.
With each fresh bluesy riff, Captain Crossroads winds the rock clock back to its roots, joins hands with his musical ancestors.
As a matter of fact, the song of the present moment was written by an ex-boxer Chicago bluesman named Bo Diddley, and blues happens to constitute the cornerstone of Clapton's in-concert psyche. Surely, the guy's special feel for the blues is a thing of rock lore.
He grew up in the English village of Ripley; his teenage enravishment with the blues would take him from Ripley to Ripley's Believe It or Not. How a white English boy would cotton to a mature black American sound is one of those legendary rock 'n' roll conundrums—along the lines of Brian Wilson writing the Beach Boys' surf tunes even though he didn't go in the water.
A literary parallel would be Stephen Crane writing his great war novel, The Red Badge of Courage, without ever having seen combat duty.
Possibly the only answer to the young Clapton's fascination with the music is a word he used in a backstage interview just before the concert tonight. He described himself as a "wanderer."
Somehow, for some reason, at age fifteen, he wandered into the blues—a religion prayed by ecumenical hands on little stringed wooden crosses. He had already been a student of the guitar for two years, since his grandmother had bought him a hollow body Kay Jazz II for his thirteenth birthday.
He had been practicing a lot, burning the guitar at both ends. But it was with the blues that he found himself—cut the umbilical cord with a blues chord—took an unspoken blood oath with an art form. It was a sensate synthesis of sources: guys with names like Robert Johnson and Little Walter and Freddie King.
Tonight the British master plays the Bo Diddley song in a style so much his own, yet so much owing to his pedigree of influences. Like the bluesmen of yore, Clapton is a gentleman and finally greets the crowd at the end of the tune: "Thank you very much. Good evening."
Round 3: "Running on Faith" (Journeyman album, 1989; written by Jerry Williams). With his third straight song from his most recent LP, Clapton waters the Garden into a modest mellow mood.
This is where E.C. gets Extra Careful. Subtle moments demand subtle moves and, piping hymn-like backing vocals, the band sweetens its act with a soft shower of quasi-religious sounds.
In his late teens, Clapton had considered a career in making stained-glass. Now, in his mid-40s, he creates a stained-glass milieu. Standing more still than his wax-figure self in Madame Tussand's Museum, his voice tries for a supernal feel as he sings a number that puts love on a religious plane.
This singer of "Running on Faith" appears to have a cabalistic faith in himself and his work. The man has not just survived, but has done so by staying close to his blues sources with an obduracy born of indelible conviction.
Clapton's love for the blues has been more than a summer romance. By dint of his faith in blues truths, he has stayed with the relationship through thick and thin; a solid marriage.
His song at this juncture has a hint of schmaltz to it, but the angelic texture carries it off. The lead-guitar underscores the gravity of the issue with a short solo. The big bright soft hands stand out on the guitar neck like headlights on the front car grill of a funeral procession. Carloads of congregated faces follow faithfully.
Round 4: "I Shot the Sheriff" (461 Ocean Boulevard album, 1974; written by Bob Marley). Here our world-champ boxing metaphor permutates into a shootout at the fantasy factory between the sheriff and Eric. The band sidles out of faith-finding single-stepping and starts to rollick.
As the stage disposition becomes more buoyant, one wonders if Clapton learned the song to shoot at the not-so-moot point that is his fame.
To be sure, in the high noon of rock guitar, he is the sheriff (even though he fires through Marshalls). Think of it: the guy has had the rep of being the fastest—and best—guitar gun in town for a full quarter-century now. (A quarter-century is a lifetime in the ultra-speedo roll of rock time; truly, twenty-seven years was the entire span for Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Brian Jones, and Duane Allman.)
It was in a London subway station in 1965 that E.C. was sloganized into the best in the west. The graffiti said "Clapton Is God" and the phrase jumped at a full gallop from graffiti to grapevine to grand mythology.
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Nowadays, the fame is off the scale. No guitarist in rock 'n' roll is more assiduously observed and talked about.
If fame were a number, Clapton's would be infinity. He's not of this planet: he just visits for concerts and recording sessions. So runs the well-oiled machine of his myth. He has won so many awards that, if his reputation gets blown up anymore, it will just explode.
Then they'll probably make up another new award: ladies and gentlemen, here with us tonight to receive the first annual Rock 'n' Roll Hindenburg Award . . .
The rock guitarist's fame has become something like a religion: many worship, but few understand. His mystic-mythic status has been both his salvation and his cross: salvation because it pays his bills (and then some!) and is a fine reward at the moments when he deserves it; cross because it makes his life unreal at the moments when he doesn't feel he deserves it.
Either way, the fellow has long been overburdened by the daily super-high expectation of quality. So one has to wonder if he utilizes "I Shot the Sheriff' as a public showdown with his own reputation as ace guitarslinger of the wild western world.
In point of fact, it is midway through the Bob Marley number this evening that Clapton closes his eyes and discharges his first absolutely outrageous solo.
Since the man on lead-guitar shoots his best ammo when he improvises, the solo is a stunner. The action on the guitar is so fast, you wonder if he spent the day boiling the guitar in motor oil.
If the guy's hands were on a steering wheel instead of a guitar, he'd be doing 190. The smoldering little notes fly out like scattershot in all directions, yet the handicraft is unerring.
Momentarily, one has a sense of the heat of the Madison Square Garden spotlights. One also has a sense that, when Clapton plays seriously, it's not just a treat, it's a treatise. He's one of the few "living legends" who isn't a lying legend. He's as good as, his rep, maybe better.
Round 5: "White Room" (Wheels of Fire album, 1968; written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown). Having purged the air with a lengthy guitar solo, Captain Crossroads now decides to perfume the place with psychedelia.
He spouts forth a tune from Cream, a group which started in 1966 and ended in 1968. Fact is, when Cream played, it was the Bermuda Triangle of rock bands: you never knew where the three people in it were going to go next, or why. This was also the group that turned a guitar jam into a joust.
For many listeners, Clapton's work in Cream is the cream of his entire canorous crop. It's as if any band he's been in since has been a semi-band—more or less Clapton and Co.
They regard his groups since Cream as Cream and Sugar—softer, more nectared; more suggestive of a tea-and-crumpets party than a blues jam; more on the Saturday Night Live side than Saturday night on Chicago's South Side.
Tonight, the Clapton coterie punches out its number so adeptly that, for the first time in the evening, the lead-guitarist looks as if he's having fun. Cantillating through the song's lower ranges, he seems a soaring rooster at the axis of a six-stringed weathervane.
Quite a sight: a white man in a white suit singing a psychedelic-colored number about a white room.
Round 6: "Can't Find My Way Home" (Blind Faith album, 1969; written by Stevie Winwood). With the momentum back up to a burning ten, Clapton turns over center stage and vocal duties to his bass player, Nathan East.
One is reminded of another Garden performance almost twenty years ago, on August 1, 1971. That day the guitarist played this very hall with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr in the Concert for Bangladesh.
It's hard not to reflect on how the Clapton charisma permeates the kingsize venue just as potently as the entire Bangladesh contingent did two decades ago.
The song at this point in time is too high for the Clapton throat. So it goes to the bassist for more mellifluent treatment. East comes through with a creditable rendition of the Winwood piece.
As East sings north, the bandleader goes south—steps back—and scans the crowd. He has been applauded vigorously all night. Yet, institution that he may be, applause is never old-shoe to him. It's never something he takes for granted and here he seems to be sending out radar to probe just what kind of audience he's playing to.
It's notable that while it is Nathan East who sings the Blind Faith song, and it's Stevie Winwood who wrote it, the audience attaches the creation to Clapton.
More than likely, that's because of his persistent band-jumping throughout his long career. Blind Faith, for example, didn't even last a full year. It started up in early '69, and folded up in late '69.
For Clapton, bands are like airplane landings: if you can walk away from them, you're a success. One hopes that he holds onto his present group at least until the evening is over.
(continued on page 3)
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