![Randolph Restores Clapton's Musical Faith]( "Randolph Restores Clapton's Musical Faith")
Randolph Restores Clapton's Musical Faith
Thu Aug 5 Associated Press
There appears to be two types of people when it comes to Robert Randolph: those who haven't heard his music and those like, for example, Eric Clapton, who swear he's the next coming.
Of what tends to be the main variable. But even the most devout of these fans, even the privileged few who were able to sit within The House of God Church in Orange, N.J., and watch a neighborhood teen begin to tame the lap pedal steel into something "Sacred," would have had a hard time predicting Randolph's year, which has included worldwide touring success, a Grammy nomination and performing with guitar icon Clapton.
"We started touring with Clapton in Europe, and it was just so much fun," Randolph remembers, sitting backstage hours before a June show at Madison Square Garden, wearing a Knicks jersey. "The first day of the tour he came in backstage and I was playing acoustic Dobro and he just sat down and said, 'Wow, this is amazing. ... We starting talking for about 30 minutes, just about music, and as days went on in the tour, he came in to ask if we could do a U.S. tour with him too, 'cause we've been having so much fun, and then I started playing with him on stage as well."
Clapton has spent his career perpetually accompanied by the specter of paternal bluesman Robert Johnson, culminating in a recent album covering his songs. So it's entertaining to think of Clapton drifting around backstage and being almost unconsciously attracted to Randolph's reverberations of gritty Delta blues, like a cartoon dog drawn, toes fluttering gleefully off the ground, to an open window by the visible aroma of a cooling pie.
Yet for musicians like Clapton, who construct musical spaces just to tear them apart and begin again like kids with Lego sets, that could be the way things work — if you leave yourself open to change, things tend to gravitate toward you. So there's something appropriate and a bit haunting about the fact that Clapton should have his musical faith restored by a 25-year-old bluesy, slide-driven virtuoso chasing his own idea of God — whose name happens to be Robert.
"I often get into a deep depression of 'It's all over,'" Clapton confides via e-mail, "as I was kind of blessed to live during the birth and the death of rock 'n' roll. I'm gonna see the beginning and the end in my own lifetime. And then I meet someone like Robert and hear him, and it gives me belief that the thing is gonna lead ahead for a while."
When the show begins, Randolph turns in a relatively short set including a blazing rendition of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," an innovative treatment of the "Beverly Hills Cop" theme song, band staples like "Nobody" and "I Need More Love," and a searing version of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)." The crowd, sparse at first, inhabited by middle-aged suits and small, broken islands of unaffectedly boogieing hipsters, ends with an uproarious standing ovation from what has become a packed Madison Square Garden.
It's a neat microcosm of the way the band has won over an increasingly large contingency throughout the country, as if time slowed and a dream materialized before them, during what has really been one vast, celebratory set. They just keep playing, and, well, things just keep happening.
Later, as the night grinds to a halt, Randolph comes back out to join Clapton in heated renditions of "Sunshine Of Your Love" and "Got My Mojo Working," laughing and trading blistering solos.
"We've been doing kind of the same songs with him when I sit in but its different each night," Randolph says, "because you never know what's going to happen within the improvisation — sometimes we solo for a long time, sometime it goes shorter, other times we'll just feed off each other. He'll take the two solos or three solos, we'll go back and forth. And it's fun every day that we get to play with him, as much as just sitting and watching him, how professional he is and how great he plays and sings every night too, he's on and he's 60 years old and it's just amazing."
On stage with Clapton, electric moments puncturing the night, Randolph almost manages to steal the show. Not that Clapton has a problem acknowledging the possibility.
"I suppose at some point in my career I might've been very intimidated by Robert's ability, and going on after someone like that could be difficult," he admits. "He takes every audience to that place and you can either use that and enjoy it, or be a little overwhelmed and intimidated. And I think I'm probably just about mature enough now to not be threatened by it. But I mean, that's a huge talent to go on afterwards, really it is. I mean, I'm not kidding — he's a hard act to follow."
Which is the feeling one might have had watching Clapton — get this — playing rhythm for Randolph, who's as oblivious as ever while launching into a ferocious solo that even had an 80-year-old spectator trying to replicate the shimmyings of her daughter and son in law. The revered icon shook his head in approval and disbelief and pointed over at the lap pedal steel prodigy from the instrumental left field of Irvington, New Jersey, who pointed back, laughing, as if to say, no ... YOU.
