GEARING UP FOR SLOWHAND

Originally posted on January 14, 2007 at 19:21

I'm really getting excited about tomorrow night's Eric Clapton concert at Impact Arena in Muang Thong Thani, Bangkok. Through the resources of a good friend, we scored primo VIP seats right on the aisle on the main floor (a great taping location — too bad I left my Nomad JB3 and mics back in Albuquerque...).

I realized today that I haven't seen ole "Slowhand" perform since May 1999 in Phoenix. My favorite show I attended was probably the one in Ames, April 1990, although the Kansas City show a few months later was the most emotional concert I've ever been to because of the helicopter crash which killed Stevie Ray Vaughan following Clapton's Alpine Valley show a couple of days before.

It seems that recently there has been a more-than-usual amount of bootleg Eric Clapton recordings surfacing on the various BitTorrent sites, most notably on ZOMB and DIME. And the majority of these have been high-quality soundboard recordings or FM broadcasts. I even found a soundboard of the first Clapton I ever attended — back in July 1985 in KC! I've only had time to listen to a select few of these, however...

Actually, today, I played quite a bit of his music on the living room stereo. My wife and Nadia were dancing around to a nice compilation I'd made of some of Clapton's hits plus a few of my own choice favorites. I also played a recording of a recent show (July 7th in Lucca, Italy — a heavily-edited radio broadcast) to give Tim a better idea of which songs she has a chance of hearing tomorrow night.

However, in checking out the setlist of last night's Singapore show just a moment ago, I see that only five of the songs played on that July recording were repeated. In fact, I think we're in for an even bigger treat if he plays a similar set in Bangkok — the "Lion City" show opened with an amazing FIVE tracks from 1970's Derek and the Dominos album (I find some humor in that his guest guitarist on this tour happens to be Derek Trucks of Allman Brothers Band; his uncle, Butch Trucks, was a founding member of that band along with Duane Allman who just happened to have played a major role on the Derek and the Dominos Layla LP!). I'm especially looking forward to seeing "Little Wing" performed live (I always perferred the Layla version although I think the definitive cover of this Jimi Hendrix-penned song was the Stevie Ray Vaughan instrumental version). The acoustic set seems rather tasty with versions of "Outside Woman Blues" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down & Out." In listening to other recordings of earlier legs on this tour, I've fallen in love with the 12-minutes-and-more renditions of "Little Queen Of Spades."

It'll be an awesome show. Nadia is very disappointed that she can't go with us — she's fallen in love with Clapton and I don't know how many times she's watched his Live At Hyde Park DVD (I ended up making her a copy out of fear she'd completely wear mine out!). I'll be standing/dancing in the aisle armed with pen & paper (to jot down the setlist and comments) as well as my camera (I hope to film at least a couple of songs in their entirety; watch this space for a few samples next week...).