Round 7: "Bad Love" (Journeyman album, 1989; written by Eric Clapton and Mick Jones). After three numbers from a couple of decades or so ago, the Endowed One boomerangs the crowd back to the present and to the power with some strafing blues.
The band plays the song faster than on the recorded version. In sharp atmospheric strokes, Clapton once again achieves the form-fitting interlocking of blues and rock so that they cohere in the ear.
It is a music of tears carrying lyrics of fears. In the middle of the number, there is a striking moment when the music stops, the lights fade to a hoodooed blue, and the lead-guitar begins to wail.
As the blue music falls upon the gathering's shoulders, one is reminded of the fact that Clapton once said that his favorite book of all time was Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens.
In the novel, Barnaby has a talking raven named Grip. With his guitar "grip" during "Bad Love," Clapton evinces the bad bird. The sense of grimness is that implacable. It's as if the guy at center-stage is a lone raven in a dark ravine. Only an artist of broad imagination and wondrous skill could conjure up such an aphotic mood.
Round 8: "Lay Down Sally" (Slowhand album, 1977; written by Eric Clapton and Marcy Levy). The concert reaches its exact mid-point here and this most adroit of guitar players shows his unswerving sense of structure.
After shuttling from present to past to present—and shuffling from fast to slow to fast—he loosens up the set list. It's an agreeable break from the frenetic rocking and impassioned blues.
Clapton's fingers wink and the guitar makes carefree eye contact as the song rolls along blithely. Even the guitarist's face relaxes: he looks as if he could be juggling six apples and not miss a note ... or an apple.
Actually, just now there's the trace of something paradoxical in the performer. Watching Clapton, one gets the feeling of a middle-aged veteran at work, but along with it there is the sense of a boy just ripping away.
The guitar picks are by Ernie Ball and anyone can see that's just what the picking guitarist is having up there: an earnest ball. At age two-score-and-five, he plays with the love of a teenager who just bought his first guitar. (Yet another side-swipe at the Dickens' set list: A Tale of Two Claptons.)
Round 9: "No Alibis" (Journeyman album, 1989; written by Jerry Williams). Sally's fine-fun lay-down has mollified the crowd and so it's time to return to the new material and sizzle again.
On to the stage Clapton brings singer Daryl Hall, of Hall & Oates fame. The lead-guitarist tips into the microphone, an English Eiffel Tower ever in control, and Hall backs him up on a few vocal licks. The song itself is sinewy yet spry.
Clapton's fingers jump all over the guitar like they had frog legs for dinner. But it is a style devoid of waste. The man performs more with his mind than his body.
It's a fact: Captain Crossroads moves less like Jimi Hendrix on a guitar than like Bobby Fischer at a chessboard. It's less like watching a rock 'n' roll shaman than like watching a computer hum.
But while there are musicians in the world who are better at playing with the guitar, there aren't too many who play it better.
The stockstill stance and the song title "No Alibis" remind one of a certain night in the late 70’s. Clapton got hold of a samurai sword and climbed out onto the 26th-floor ledge of the Rainbow Hilton Hotel in Honolulu.
He came in off the ledge but, the sword still in his hand, three cops arrived and the guitarman had to stand stockstill—three guns pointed at his head—no alibis.
Round 10: "Old Love" (Journeyman album, 1989; written by Eric Clapton and Robert Cray). The lights dim and a slow, spiraling intro lets the crowd know that Mr. E.C. is once again about to labor in the venial vineyards of the blues.
This song off the new album is one of the most rippable that Clapton has ever written. He tucks a cigarette into the neck of the guitar and, under a solitary yellow spot, sings dolefully of old love.
He looks like a loner as he plays. Yet the tune is one of rapt attachment. The cigarette burns. The song burns. The hurt burns.
The guitar smokes. Clapton takes a couple of steps back to improvise. Instead of standing stage-center, he turns to his right and begins to walk around the stage, behind the drums, stopping to solo at several points.
Cigarette smoke helixing out of the top of his guitar, the bandleader alchemizes the enormous amphitheater into a little blues club.
These aren't elongated improvisational riffs caterwauling like a hundred banshees on an Irish coast at midnight, but, rather, tight, sharp, well-placed essays. Clapton rips and the clapping ripples.
Slowhand deals a fast hand here. It is downright bewildering to watch such close-to-violent emotions in such a tranquil frame. Yet excoriating finger finesse is why the man is not just a star, but a lodestar ... in a bluesy constellation.
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Round 11: "Tearing Us Apart" (August album, 1986; written by Eric Clapton and Greg Phillinganes). Clapton shoots some new fireworks into the constellation of his concert station with a trenchant rocker from a few years back.
It takes just seconds for him to jump-start the crowd out of slow old love and into today's love that's so rapidly tearing us apart. The concert's cadence picks up without the audience even knowing it.
The subtle rhythmic lift reveals a performance proficiency grounded in thousands of hours of experience. The number aches with the eternal sound of a hounded soul. Dishing out high-speed runs, Clapton takes the back route around the stage again, much to the obstructed-view sealers' delight.
The guitarist's work on the piece rings of competence and dependability and an unappeasable desire for excellence. You get the feeling that mediocrity is toxic to him.
He reminds one of a player of another stick of wood: Joe DiMaggio, a.k.a. The Yankee Clipper. Like Ric the Ripper, DiMaggio was smooth without being slick—another heavy hitter, another man heartbroken over his obsession with a beautiful woman (in his case, someone named Marilyn Monroe).
I suppose, to carry the analogy one step further, if the all-time greatest rock guitarists were narrowed down to a nine-man baseball team, Clapton would bat clean-up. Who can be better counted on to deliver? Who else to put at the heart of the order but the one who plays with the most heart?
Listen to the crowd listening to Clapton. If Yankee Stadium is The House That Ruth Built, then tonight Madison Square Garden is The House That E.C. Brought Down.
Round 12: "Wonderful Tonight" (Slowhand album, 1977; written by Eric Clapton). Now there is a sanctification of the air as Clapton turns his Fender down to tender and warms over an old chestnut of his own composition.
Music is dialogue between souls and here the talk turns intimate. The song is so lovely that it congests the throat with emotion. It also vaunts the lead-guitarist as much more than the sum of his famous fingers—far more than the legendary "10."
The voice soft as buttermilk, the guitar as delicate as a seashell, Clapton performs the song as if he cherishes it. This is his most personal work of the evening, made all the more effective by its being slowed down from the album version. The song discloses its composer as a wide-ranging stylist who holds within himself a genuine dignity.
Standout though he is, Captain Crossroads knows very well that one of the chief reasons he can do his job this evening is the A-l band around him.
Back in 1969 at the Toronto Peace Festival, Clapton once did a show with John Lennon, and the band's only rehearsal was on the airplane on the way to the gig.
That obviously isn't the case tonight. The band is well-rehearsed, to say the least. The rock 'n' roll conductor has chosen to people his stage with seven extremely talented if relatively unheralded musicians.
After a dozen songs of pleochroic moods and styles, the seven are introduced to the tune of Sly Stone's "Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin."
They include: Phil Palmer (second guitar); Nathan East (bass); Steve Ferrone (drums); Alan Clark and Greg Phillinganes (keyboards); and Tessa Niles and Katie Kassoon (back-up vocals).
Round 13: "Cocaine" (Slowhand album, 1977; written by J.J. Cale). After a lull in the action, however brief, Clapton knows it's time to re-energize the crowd. So the fine-carved talent goes back to work on the fine-carved wood with an acrimonious song from over a decade ago.
These days Clapton takes neither drink nor drugs, but in the early 70’s he spent three years as a drug addict. So he knows what he's singing about.
He also knows something about addiction's little brother, obsession. He has been so obsessed with the West Bromwich Albion football team that he used to sign hotel registers as "W.B. Albion."
He loves Ferraris so much, he once drove to Italy just to see one of his being built. He's so enamored of the styles of Gianni Versace, he gave the clothes designer two full pages in his current concert program.
His taste for chocolate is so fervid, George Harrison built his song "Savoy Truffle" around the Clapton sweet tooth.
But there's nothing sweet tonight about Clapton's rendering of "Cocaine." His fingers in snake-like motions, he spits out the words of the song. One wonders if he's thinking about the great guitars he sold to feed his drug habit of two long decades ago.
Round 14: "Layla" (Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs album, 1970; written by Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon). Framed by a shadowy stage and a protracted instrumental build-up, Clapton crowns the show with "Layla," his twenty-year-old torch song of love and pain.
Based on a story by the Persian writer Nizami, the number is more than Clapton's magnum opus: it is the proclamation nailed to the monastery door of his talent.
(continued on page 4)
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