Review/Copyright © 1990, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
NEW YORK, April 2, 1990—Salutations to Charles Dickens across wheelbarrows of shiny Stratocasters: it is the best and worst of rock 'n' roll times to anticipate writing about Mr. Eric Clapton after watching him ply his transcendent craft at Madison Square Garden for a couple of hours. And from front-row-center no less!
How to catch the smoking-blue gem of his talent without dimming its lustre with the dust of post-facto interpretation?
Musically, in all of rock 'n' roll, there may be no single note as admirable as a well-bent Clapton riff. In terms of personality, "Eric Clapton" might be the four most enigmatic syllables since "Mona Lisa." Let's face it: if the man were a place, he'd be Stonehenge. And so far as status is concerned, his position is merely pharaoh-like.
Add to the dilemma that I caught the guy tonight at a show when he was not at his best, but somewhere over it—one of those extraordinary nights when a musician so takes you by the ears that he makes you try to see the world through him.
My fear, then, is that whatever I might write here in the early-A.M. cool of aftermath could lower the artistically ferocious temperature of the performance. That is to say, this hottest of shows might lose something in its word-by-word transmogrification through the thin lines of a sunfaded legal pad.
Perhaps a fair approach would be to use the sunfaded pad as a launching pad back through the evening. Since the subject at hand is an in-concert experience—and the focus is the quality of that experience—let us return to the front row. Maybe take the show song-by-song—the better to catch my breath with—and report impressions and reactions hot-off-the-head. Maybe then there will also be less heat loss.
Since the man of the hour is a bluesman (Captain Crossroads, if you will), and the blues is a fight, it might be helpful as well as handy to conceive of each song as a round in a heavyweight championship fight.
After all, this Mr. Eric Clapton is in a heavyweight championship fight everytime he picks up a guitar: he has to be as good as Eric Clapton! Whether on stage or in studio, he has to fight with the legend of himself.
Mister Layla can never lay low. It's actually one of the hardest jobs in all of rock 'n' roll: be a heavyweight champ every time out. Play the guitar wearing boxing gloves. Be as good as Clapton, daily. But such is the audience's great expectation.
The audience tonight at Madison Square Garden—the pop cathedral, the world's ultimate 20,000-seater—is a jarring mix of age groups. They range from those who look like they play classical music for a living to those who think that Clapton is classical music.
It looks less like a rock-concert-tour crowd than a Grand Canyon-tour crowd, except that this canyon is lined with seats painted the color of Easter eggs. The man's work has obviously grazed several generations. Captain Crossroads is crisscrossing the years and winning the numbers.
Yet the feeling in the crowd is something more than hero worship. With Clapton, the feeling is deeper. One senses that the man is more than just popular: it's as if people find a little paradise in his music.
The crowd seems to view him as a relation—not of blood but of affection. At the concession stands, there are no candy bars named after him. But in the seats, there are people who have named their kids after him.
By showtime, an exultant atmosphere infuses the crowd. The air seems ready to ignite. With the lights down and the house P.A. system playing an orchestral version of the "Layla" riff, Clapton strides through the long arena tunnel that has in its time let loose many another heavyweight.
He emerges from the Garden cave to blustering cheering and clapping. Then from backstage, amidst smoke and under a sole spotlight, he materializes stage left. Without playing a note, he has already invoked the well-documented, larger-than-life presence: he seems less like a man with a guitar than like Paul Bunyan with his axe—or, more English-enchanted, Robin Hood with his quarterstaff.
The just-turned-45 rock 'n' roll bluesman stands at the center-stage mike. In his long dark brown hair and tight beard and dark-heaven eyes and philosophical expression, he seems relaxed and ready. The eyelids are angular slits and the eyebrows seem like ledges for his hundred-story talent.
The guitar is a pearl-gray Fender Stratocaster. There is only one element of flash and that is a multi-colored guitar strap which has been tastefully bejeweled in the manner that a king might bejewel a favorite drinking glass.
The razzle-dazzle guitar strap slashes down the field of a white plantation suit. Ensconced in amps and mikes and arc-lights, the frontman radiates a soft glow—a white feather in a mechanical Marshall maelstrom.
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The blue spotlights on the white suit make for a kind of violet-twilit coloration. The alignment of the flesh and the myth in a bright suit under bluish light produces a fierce luminousness, a plenitude of grace.
As the first song is about to begin, one finds oneself wishing the man a better start than that of a certain show five years ago. At Live Aid on July 13, 1985, in Philadelphia, Clapton had spent the entire hot summer day watching the other acts on television.
When he finally took the stage at twilight, the heat and an unusual case of nerves had him practically ready to faint. Then he put his mouth to the mike to begin the first song and got an electric shock. One hopes for better luck this night.
Round 1: "Pretending" (Journeyman album, 1989; written by Jerry Williams). In a chiropractor's nightmare of a stance, Clapton leans over his guitar and the band takes wing into its first tune of the evening, the tangy upbeat lead-off song from the new album.
The voice is vibrant and resonant and emotional; the guitar leads, as usual, are long and liquid—Clapton demonstrating how to rip into a song without tearing its fabric.
The band is polished and powerful, but most of the crowd, naturally, follows the white-clad lead. At various vocal and guitar pauses, the people purr their appreciation: Eric Clapton—The Wizard of Ooooooze and Ahhhhhhhs.
Under the colorific guitar strap, there is no rock-star jumping or grinding. The guy is near-to bereft of extraneous motion. So the eye goes to the fingers that are so long, they make the guitar neck look like a penknife.
At one point during the song, I dropped the concert program on the floor. If Clapton hadn't been busy at the time, he might have reached down with those lobster-claw fingers and picked it up.
The long fingers and fluid touch make his hands seem to have no muscles. The fretboard fingerwork is silk. The strings react to the exacting fingers that skip, librate, dance, seesaw, tease, waggle, pluck, wanton, jump, bend, and tilt up and down the guitar neck.
The movement is so smooth, the hands seem wristless. You get to wondering if, rich as he is, Monsieur Clapton couldn't have made more money as an international jewel thief.
Beneath the magic liquid hands, at the vortex of the whirlpool of talent, the eye finally proceeds to the physical heart of the matter, which is of course the sinuous, sensuous instrument known as the electric guitar.
Tonight's wood-metal-electronic fusion is a pewter Eric Clapton Signature Series Fender Stratocaster. It is a splendid new array of splinters, but one has to wonder if he doesn't miss the blues riffs that are probably still rattling around in "Blackie." That was a black 1956 Stratocaster which E.C. created from the best parts of three different Strats.
Whatever guitar Clapton plays—broken-in or brandy-new—he seems to have a kinship with the instrument. More to the point, he has shown himself over the years to be all guitarist—a man who has found the deepest truths of his life through the instrument, and who respects others who play the thing truly.
As well, he has a profound respect for the instrument itself, that is, if it has survived enough bluish moments. One night in 1979, for example, after Muddy Waters had opened a gig for him, somebody tried to hand the old bluesman's guitar to Clapton. He wouldn't touch it—said it wasn't for him to touch.
Another time, in September, 1970, Clapton bought a left-handed Fender Strat for his friend, Jimi Hendrix. He brought the instrument to the London Lyceum that evening, but Hendrix didn't show up as he was supposed to.
He found out the next day that Hendrix had died that night. Clapton went out in his garden and cried for hours.
Tonight, as Eric Clapton stands in the middle of another Garden and makes his guitar cry, one senses that he understands guitar and understands truth and, consequently, can sing so capably about "Pretending."
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