With a 7:07 recorded time in the country-fair airplane hangout that is rock 'n' roll record-making, "Layla" IS a 707.
Demons of despair howl through the bones of the song. It is a soul-bearing piece in the epiphanic manner of Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" and Lennon's first solo album.
If we may extend the Dickens' parallel, it is a song that will last the ages: A Clapton Carol—with a special wink to the Ghost of Clapton Past.
In the song, Layla has her pleading lover on his knees, and in concert Captain Crossroads has his music lovers on their feet. He round-houses the most walloping vocals of the night in a jagged rural drawl—plays the guitar with all his heart—and the high sky of Madison Square Garden becomes a firmament of invisible sound stars.
Back on earth, I stood at the edge of the stage and got the feeling that the edge is as far as this particular guitarist ever allows anyone to go.
It was not surprising to get that feeling during "Layla" because it is the song that drives into the essential mystery of Clapton's art.
Indeed, for all his fame and all that has been written about him, his great guitar gift remains wrapped in mystery, as graspable as the sea. Congenetically, his best songs (like "Layla") try to tell us that life has an unknowable heart.
After laying the last brick in his blues-rock monument, Clapton bows deeply, takes off his guitar, waves, bows again, and hugs his bandmates.
Then the whole group joins arm-in-arm and bows together. They have much to bow about. It has not been a night of just blues, but a rainbow arc of blues and rock and pop and jazz.
As for the group's leader, the superguitarist, he seems proud of himself without being full of himself. Classy Clapton scampers offstage.
Round 15: Blues Solo Improvisation. The arena draped in black, thousands of ignited matches and lighters tap yellow dots and dashes to signal to Clapton the people's appreciation.
In the past fourteen songs, they've witnessed a greater range of authentic blues than another Garden audience got at a concert years ago, in 1983, when Clapton played here with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Now the assembly of 20,000 is standing and clapping and asking for another taste or two.
A rabid-ripping guitar chord from stage left signals back to the congregation that this showcase night of music is not over. The pop icon pops the Garden ionosphere.
A single spotlight laser-arrows Clapton in a black shirt, his white jacket off, hovering over his electric wand and breaking into a hot blues solo. The man looks pained; the eyes are bolted shut.
His face is wearing what his instrument is playing. One wonders what his mind is thinking. Where inside of himself does he find the blues? Is he remembering that night in 1980 in Madison, Wisconsin, when he barely made it through a show because an ulcer was about to burst into his pancreas?
Is he recalling the death of his grandfather of cancer in 1970? Is he remembering the day in 1974 he told his friend George Harrison that he was in love with Harrison's wife? Or is he thinking he'd like to have a cigarette?
Wherever the mind might be, the fingers are on the guitar and spinning out notes in loose-thrown cross-rhythmic star-showers.
Standing alone in the mountainous pitch-black superstructure, Clapton seems like an explorer. Those educated fingers of his surfeit the rip-up solo with blues that are old and cutting and deep—saber-toothed blues.
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Round 16: "Crossroads" (Wheels of Fire album, 1968; written by Robert Johnson, arranged by Eric Clapton). At the last so-high solo note, Clapton is re-joined by his band and he spearheads them into Robert Johnson's classic, "Crossroads."
If "Layla" is the heart of Clapton, then "Crossroads" is his spirit. One recalls that, at his toughest career crossroads, he has concentrated his way through.
No matter how enfeebling the problem, he has been resilient. That's the Clapton spirit—ever at a crossroads, be it artistic, physical, emotional, or spiritual—and ever rock-solid.
Along with being a song, Crossroads is of course the name of Clapton's six-album compilation from two years back. Intrinsically, it is not so much a compilation as it is a big box of mood—rock 'n' roll's War and Peace in scope and depth.
Well, tonight, E.C. chooses the song/collection title to go his deepest. Just about every number of the evening has tendered the favor of a Clapton solo. Now he reaches way way way down to tear out the bluest blues from a long-ago Mississippi Delta.
The themes turn on wasted emotions. But the technique is all no-wasted motion. The fingers swift-lip the guitar as Clapton wrings every last trickle of blues tears from the instrument.
With each new stance—here facing the crowd head-on, there stepping back, here hunching over the guitar, there looking heavenward—it's like looking upon a series of Rolling Stone covers on the History of British Blues.
At his most intense during the "Crossroads" solo, Clapton could not pour himself into that guitar anymore unless he slashed his wrists.
He doesn't seem conscious of anything except his fingers and the guitar and the rhythm in the room and the sounds pulsating out of his own aura.
When he enters the music completely, his body and the guitar and even the sounds are as camouflage. He seems less like a person than a silhouette, a blue silhouette. He has the texture of a dream at such moments.
The substance is the feeling he's putting out. And that of course is not onstage for the eye, or out in the air for the ear, but, rather, deep down inside the man, down along that homesick boulevard which some call the soul.
By song's end, can anyone in the place wonder why Clapton is considered the strongest link in the blue chain that runs through the heart of rock 'n' roll?
Round 17: "Sunshine of Your Love" (Disraeli Gears album, 1967; written by Jack Bruce, Pete Brown and Eric Clapton). For his departing encore notes, the choirmaster puts a hot guitar poker under Cream's greatest hit.
Over the years, the number has established itself as a kind of "First Reader" for many people who play electric guitar. It's the first tune that about half of them (maybe more) ever learn.
The song has thus become a kind of riffy Rosetta Stone in that it furnishes the key to unlocking three different musical languages: rock, blues, and pop. Presently, Clapton's fingers flick across the tune so fast, they're more like shadows than flesh and blood.
At one point during his "Sunshine" solo, Clapton stood directly in front of me in a coiled stance at the lip of the stage. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, the better to hear, and suddenly it was 1968 and I was in my teens and on the Madison Square Garden stage was an English band called Cream.
(continued on page 5)
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