The PBS program was a telecast of eight songs from Eric Clapton’s 70th birthday tribute concert in 2015 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and as is PBS’s usual maddening habit in pledge-break programs like this, we had our noses rubbed again and again in the fact that what we were seeing on TV was only a portion of a concert we could only get to see if we gave PBS a whacking great amount of money (like $180). My first horrible thought was that the producers of the concert would do it the way similar telecasts are generally done in the U.S., with a plethora of guest stars each plowing their way through one song or another from Clapton’s repertoire whether it suited them or not, but I was pleasantly surprised that the entire concert was performed by Eric Clapton and his band with no additional guests. What’s more, he was in absolutely phenomenal form: his chops have weathered the years and his former history of substance abuse (heroin and alcohol) surprisingly well, and his current band — aside from two rather buxom long-haired Black backup singers — isn’t that much younger than he is: the keyboard player (who stayed on electric organ instead of synthesizer most of the night) is a grey-haired, grey-bearded white man, the bassist (who used a five-string electric instrument and took up an old-fashioned bass fiddle for the two acoustic numbers) a bald Black guy, and the drummer another grey-head of indeterminate race.
One might compare Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to
Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke — two contemporary pop-music geniuses, one
of whom died young with much of his potential tragically unfulfilled, and one
of whom not only stayed alive but continued to produce great music — though in
the case of Clapton and Hendrix is was the white guy who survived and the Black
one who croaked early, not the other way around as with Louis and Bix. I’ve
read Clapton’s autobiography and in it he makes the interesting comment that he
had the soul of a sideman — he’s always been at his best surrounded by other
musicians at his level and he never really wanted the added responsibilities of
stardom — and after a brilliant start to his career with the Yardbirds (where
he got the nickname “Slowhand” because he would break strings so often during
his solos that audiences would start a slow hand-clap while waiting for him to
put a new string on his guitar and resume), John Mayall and His Bluesbreakers
and the “supergroup” Cream, a detour through the all-too-appropriately named
“Blind Faith” with Stevie Winwood (he and Clapton would collaborate far more
effectively in a round of concerts in 2008), then his first solo album and the
Derek and the Dominoes project, which produced his searing electric love anthem
“Layla,” then he started to slip. In 1974 Clapton released the album 461
Ocean Boulevard, which was hugely
successful and broke one of Clapton’s biggest hits, “I Shot the Sheriff,” but
after some good blues guitar on the opening track, a cover of Blind Willie
Johnson’s “Motherless Children,” for the rest of the LP we got Clapton the pop
singer rather than Clapton the blues-rock guitarist.
The pattern continued
through additional albums like Slowhand and Backless, and his
sales fell off in the 1980’s and made a comeback due to a terrible tragedy: his
son Conor fell out of an open window of a 53-story building. In 1992 Clapton
responded with a horribly sappy song called “Tears in Heaven,” which he
recorded acoustically as part of an MTV Unplugged set that also included an acoustic version of
“Layla” that turned it from a passionate love anthem to a mild display of
affection. Since then he’s bounced back and forth between pop and tributes to
the great American blues artists he originally tried to play like, and
fortunately for his 70th birthday concert he stuck mostly with his
blues repertoire: “Somebody Knocking at My Door,” “Who’s Been Fooling You?,”
his cover of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads” (which he originally started playing
in 1968 as a member of Cream) and “Cocaine.” The other songs included among the
eight PBS broadcast (which apparently includes only about half the full
concert) included “I Shot the Sheriff” in a considerably more passionate
version than the one he recorded in 1974, when the song’s composer, Bob Marley,
was still a little-known cult artist desperately trying to build a U.S.
following. I remember hearing Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff” in 1974 and
thinking it was one of the dumbest songs I’d ever heard — “He says he shot the
sheriff but he didn’t shoot the deputy — so what?” Then I heard Marley’s version and I was totally
blown away: I said to myself, “So that’s what that song is about!” Clapton began his 2015 Albert Hall version
with his Black backup singers chanting the original wailing melody and then
came in on voice and guitar, both far more powerfully than he had on the
original record. (There was a pledge break after “I Shot the Sheriff” and the
female host — there were two, one of each of the mainstream genders — made the
silly statement that it was “an iconic Eric Clapton song.” Being me, I
responded by yelling at the TV, “It is not! It’s an iconic Bob Marley song that Clapton covered!”)
After that he broke for
an acoustic set of “Tears in Heaven” (which sounds less treacly now that
Clapton is farther distant from the tragedy that inspired it, but it’s still not
a very good song: Duke Ellington’s “Reminiscing in Tempo” it isn’t) and “Layla”
(the woman who’d made an ass of herself in the previous pledge break redeemed
herself somewhat when she lamented that Clapton no longer seems to perform the
electric version live), and he also did the song “Wonderful Tonight” as a bow
to his pop years. (I’d always assumed this was a cover of a J. J. Cale song,
but according to Wikipedia, Clapton wrote it himself.) All in all, it was a
marvelous show — good enough it piqued my curiosity to see the whole concert on
DVD or Blu-Ray, though not enough to pay the extortionate “contribution” rates
PBS and its local stations demand — with Clapton playing surprisingly well;
he’s lost some chops but he can still play rings around a lot of younger
players, and perhaps because of the sense of occasion, he turned in an
excellent performance. He’s never had a great voice but it’s good enough to put
most of his songs over, and age has given him a sense of lived experience that
adds weight and gravitas to his
show, while at the same time he’s remained fresh and vital enough as a musician
that this concert could be enjoyed on its own merits and not written off as
just another “remember how good he used to be?” nostalgia item.
