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Eric Clapton (That’s right Tressler, I’m doing a concert review right in your face and on your turf mother fucker!!) Couldn’t wait to see this show. In my eyes Clapton is still God, or at least a god. A guitar deity at the least. I’m assuming this will likely be one of Clapton’s last tours, but who knows? Anyway, here are my notes from the show . . . Show starts promptly on time, Clapton runs a tight ship and it’s obvious throughout the night, evident in a plethora of the show’s aspects. ‘Let It Rain’ is the opener and makes for a perfect start. It’s a long tune with a great jam from Clapton’s solo debut long ago, and they hit stride with it right away riding the cascading piano playing that drives the song. This is followed powerfully by the blues classic, ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. Good version, not the best. Then comes a surprise, ‘Walk Out In The Rain’, a definite deep cut that stumped most of the nineteen-or-so-thousand in attendance. This was a real highlight of the first half of the show no matter how you slice it, but it was made sweeter somehow by the depth of the cut. It’s funny when watching a living legend how often you find yourself transfixed, unaware of your surroundings or even at times what song you’re in the middle of listening to. The chucking choppy guitar riff gives away the next song’s genre before I can place it as Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. Out of where I least expected it comes the most original guitar solo I’ve ever heard Clapton play. Breaking out of his consistently awesome yet familiar blues rhythm and structure to find something unique to the night, Clapton floored me with some wildly creative and original guitar work here. Now we change gears to some “acoustic” blues, the Robert Johnson set in support of the album ‘Me & Mr. Johnson’. Surprisingly this seems to be what much of the crowd has been waiting for. I didn’t think they’d come to see a bunch of old Johnson tunes like ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’, ‘Me & the Devil Blues’, ‘Kind-Hearted Woman’ and ‘I Want a Little Girl’, but they dug it. These were all fast versions too, short and to the bluesy point. Back to the electric set, back to ’70,
to a rocking and dark Derek & the Dominos jam made famous
on that year’s ‘Live at the Fillmore’ - ‘Got
To Get Better in a Little While’. This was a sick jam and
that’s all there is to it, had to be a good twelve minutes
long at least. Then, another song Clapton’s been playing
for over thirty years, the blues standard ‘Have You Ever
Loved a Woman’. They went around the horn on this one with
crazy, unique solos by all on a historic Clapton cover. ‘Badge’
follows perfectly, rousing chorus and all. The crowd here is actually
pretty weak, but it fortunately took nothing away from the quality
of the show. Surrounded by the aging and aged Boomers that I am
I can’t help but notice that the music, to them at least,
seems to have lost it’s original spark. Objectively, the
spark is still there, if anything it’s the Boomers who’ve
lost something from their youth - that we all eventually do. After
‘Badge’, which arguably falls into the same category
as the following songs, Clapton appeases the masses with the obligatory
‘Wonderful Tonight’, ‘Layla’, and ‘Cocaine’.
They’re all great, but frankly there are a number of songs
I’d rather hear than those I hear on the radio five times
a day. Great over-played songs that were definitely outdone by
the earlier sections of the show.
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