Eric Clapton and his music

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Clapton reluctantly gets personal on 'Back Home'
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY

In the late '60s, disciples deified him with "Clapton is God" graffiti. Entering his 60s, Eric Clapton finally feels he can stop calling himself a blues trainee.
"Now I can sit and play and automatically do something fresh and not be overly concerned with it," he says. "I'm really a craftsman now and not so worried about my proficiency. A good deal of my life has been spent as an apprentice, right up to my 50s, I'd say."
Yet he's not entirely relaxed.
"Each studio record hits a chord of fear in me because I know it's going to be autobiographical," he says. "My tendency is to run away from revealing my life. I'm quite a shy and private guy. I really haven't still figured out how to express personal experiences."
The guitarist, who turned 60 in March, is contradicted by the intensely personal Back Home, out this week.
Thrilled with assembled players from Steve Winwood to John Mayer but sheepish about his material, Clapton stalled work on Home to tape tracks for last year's tribute Me and Mr. Johnson.
"It was like jumping in a warm bath," he says. "I'd get embarrassed about the personal songs and say, 'Let's do Love in Vain.' We wrapped up the Robert Johnson album in three weeks. Once we delivered that, I had no escape valve."
Despite success with such lyric-driven heart-tuggers as Tears in Heaven, Clapton doesn't consider himself a songwriter. "I see my vocation as a touring musician and ensemble player, and I write when I have to. The difficulty is figuring out how to write allegorically. Great writers create a fictitious framework to describe their own situation. That's fine art. I can't get there."
Clapton's adult-contemporary fare extended his reach past the guitar freaks he lured in The Yardbirds and Cream. He says with a laugh, "My audience had been predominantly lonely air-guitar-playing blues guys in their bedrooms."
That contingent will get its Slowhand fill with the release Oct. 4 of a DVD/CD set capturing Cream's reunion last May in London. More live shows are expected this fall in New York. He also hopes to stage a second all-star Crossroads Guitar Festival, inaugurated last year in Dallas. And he's recording his next album, with J.J. Cale producing, and plotting a 2006 tour. No projects feature guitar overkill.
"Never will," he says. "When I saw the DVD for the Crossroads Festival, my section drove me crazy. I don't want to hear that much guitar playing from anybody, let alone me. Guitar soloing in its raw state has no meaning. It needs a nifty frame."

The best of Eric Clapton

By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES - Eric Clapton's new album celebrates a crucial career move. To second place.
"My relationship has been primarily with the guitar," he says. "Now my full-time job is my family. This album represents a place I've been striving for. I've been moving toward this as a resolution of all my aimless wandering."
Much of Back Home dwells on the serenity and joy he has found in marriage, a fresh shot at fatherhood and a stable home life that seemed unattainable for a globe-trotting superstar who flitted from one shallow romance to the next.
"I haven't been all that reliable in relationships," says the 60-year-old bluesman. "I got used to being in fairly wishy-washy relationships. I was probably attracted to flaky people, and that allowed me to be flaky. I had reached a kind of curmudgeonly resignation and just thought I'd end up dating less and less until I ended up in an attic watching videos and listening to cassettes. Then I met Melia, who was not flaky."
She was working for Armani, sponsor for an A-list party to kick off the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, an addiction treatment facility founded by Clapton after his own recovery from drug and alcohol abuse.
Initially, Clapton expected the usual drill: combustion, on-and-off sparks, then fizzle.
Melia "really cared about me and had my interests at heart," he says. "Our agenda is all about making us work. That's quite unusual in this culture. She comes from a secure family. I have not been around that sort of thing. It's scary. It's full-time commitment. You keep your word, and I'm not used to that. I'm used to being ambivalent."
The guitarist recalls hollow pangs beneath the casual lifestyle and career victories, then recognized an unsettling potential future when he visited B.B. King backstage after a London concert a few years ago.
"He was sitting in his dressing room with his manager," Clapton says. "There was something about that scene. This is it. This is what B.B. does. I know that's the way he wants it, but that's not what I wanted."
Early into his romance with Melia, Clapton realized that apart from desiring this unfamiliar bond, he needed it, a point hammered home in Back Home's tender tales of domestic contentment, from gorgeous love song Run Home to Me to So Tired, cataloging the exhaustion and euphoria of raising babies. They wed in 2002 and have three daughters: Julie, 4, Ella, 2, and Sophie, 7 months.
Clapton is divorced from Pattie Boyd, ex-wife of George Harrison, and has a grown daughter, Ruth, from another relationship. In 1991, Conor, his 4-year-old son by an Italian model, died in an accidental plunge from a high-rise New York apartment. Clapton poured his sorrow into Tears in Heaven and My Father's Eyes, hits that he decided to retire.
"I imagine I was a difficult guy to have around during that period because that's all I would play," he says. "That's the only vein I wanted to settle in. Performing them was part of a grieving process that had to happen. And then it ended. They served their purpose for me. When we started to rehearse them for a tour, I couldn't find a way in. It felt wrong, unless I wanted to revisit the sadness. Why would I want to go there?"
He's open to the notion of more kids, but "it's about manageability, and the age difference is pretty big. Melia's half my age. The older I get, the less inclined I am to have more kids, because they'll only know me in my senior years."
Clapton, still trim and endowed with a full head of hair, feels none of the panic or dread that blooms in boomers.
"The downside is the odd health issue that comes up," he says. "The exterior starts to go to pot, but it's a small price to pay for what you get on the inside. When I was a kid, I wanted to be older. I hated being a teenager. I hated being in my 20s. I felt, 'I haven't got the right voice, the right body.' My enjoyment was all about music being made by much older men. I didn't identify with pop. Even when I was 30, I wanted to be older. I'm actually where I always wanted to be."
A cozy nest and a steady march toward the pipe and slippers have not ended Clapton's passionate love affair with the blues. He remains a proponent and practitioner, untroubled by the genre's modest profile.
"I like the value you get from something when it's a minority," he says. "If the blues community became too big, it would get watered down. I like it delicate, because people strive to keep it alive."
Nor is he concerned by mainstream pop's mountain of pap and the overshadowed talents fighting for recognition.
"It's the same as ever, only bigger," Clapton reasons. "Either you want to play and make great music or you want to be on TV. When I was in The Yardbirds, most of the band wanted to be on TV. When I surf and settle on VH1 or MTV, I see a community that steers toward that, but I'm attracted to the community that doesn't. There's always been this gross veneer of commerciality that drives the whole thing and this wealth of incredible music in the underground. I like having to engage my curiosity to find out who somebody is."

''Cream Farewell Concert'' on DVD;

Image Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ: DISK), a leading independent licensee, producer and distributor of home entertainment programming in North America, today announced the October 4, 2005 release of the 1969 rock film "Cream Farewell Concert, " in a special Extended Edition DVD. Presented by producer and Cream's then-manager Robert Stigwood ("Tommy, " "Grease, " "Saturday Night Fever"), and directed by Tony Palmer ("200 Motels, " "Wagner"), "Cream Farewell Concert" was filmed at London's Royal Albert Hall on November 26, 1968, the same 8, 000-seat venue where the seminal '60's British super group reunited to play for capacity crowds in May of 2005, generally acknowledged as one of the "must-see" events of the decade.

Image Entertainment's "Cream Farewell Concert" Extended Edition DVD contains the 80-minute version of the film -- a home video premiere -- which restores three songs cut from the previously available 48-minute broadcast version: "Crossroads, " "Sitting on Top of the World, " and "Stepping Out"; both versions are included on the DVD. In addition, the DVD offers three audio options: Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS Digital Surround Sound, and the original monaural soundtrack. The film itself is a heady mix of concert footage and incisive interviews with the band, set to colorful lighting effects by UK underground artist Mark Boyle, who created lighting designs for such touring acts as The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Soft Machine during rock music's heyday of the late 1960's and 1970's.

Between its formation in 1966 and breakup a mere two years later, the power trio of virtuosic British musicians -- drummer Ginger Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton -- enjoyed immense popularity, releasing four albums and selling 35 million records. Their sound deftly mixed high-volume blues with psychedelic rock and improvisation, blazing a new path for every hard rock and progressive rock group that followed. Cream was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, and classic songs such as "Sunshine of Your Love, " "Badge, " and "White Room" remain rock radio staples.

British rock journalist Chris Welch, author of the Cream biography "Strange Brew, " writes of the group, "It seemed almost frightening ... there had been nothing like it heard on the planet. This was heavy rock at the instant of creation, a kind of super nova explosion which is still radiating outwards." As narrator Patrick Allen says in the film's introduction, "Their motto is simple: Forget the message. Forget the lyrics. And just play."

Ну вот собственно и "БЭК ХОМ"...

Как я и ожидал в звуке 5.1 - еще интереснее!!!
Долби Сурраунд спасает пластинку! :))))
Конечно, любимый мной "душераздирающий" Эрик уже 4 года как потерян для общества, но пластинка клевая, за исключением ЛОСТ энд ФАУНД и смазанной концовки в виде 2х скучных песен.
На ДВД ничего особо интересного нет - интервью и запись вокала на 5 песнях в студии, без музыкантов.
К этому изданию, ДВД + СД, прилагаются 4 медиатора "EC BACK HOME"...
Все удовольствие - около 28$!!!
Кликните на картинку, для увеличения.

2SergeK:

А картиночка семейной идилии все умиляет!

2Primal Scream:
Там есть еще одна картиночка... Дочурка, старшая, взрослеет... на маму (мулатку) становится похожа...
Ё-мое... Собираю чемоданы... Хорошенькая...

2SergeK:

Только не раньше воскресенья!

2Primal Scream:
>Только не раньше воскресенья!
:)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Не, я долго буду собирать, пусть подрастет еще чуток!
Эрик мне теперь неинтересен, а вот дочка его, очень даже...

2SergeK:

>Эрик мне теперь неинтересен, а вот дочка его,
>очень даже...

А папкино наследство?

2Primal Scream:
>А папкино наследство?
Дык он же все гитары распродаааааал... Ни фига не осталось! :(((((((((((((

2Primal Scream:
Упсссс!!! Только что проверил... По гороскопу она мне идеально подходит! Решено!

2SergeK:

Вот и хорошо! Тем более у тестя стабильные авторские отчисления.

2Primal Scream:
Моя ЛЮБОВЬ, в детстве... С родителями.
Думаю, наш друг JLH (следящий за темой о красоте) увидит, что и мама как-раз в МОЕМ вкусе. :)))

2SergeK:

Ты прав. У Хукера обостренное чутье на красоту.

"Донт блэйм ми"
У меня на крысату алергия...Шож делать-та: фсю жизнь она меня окружаить, преследуить и развращаить... И вот результат :((((
Помните байку про парикмахера-еврея у Дома литератороф, у которого была красавица жена Цыля и уродина любовница Рая...На вопрос: зачем Вам, уважаемый, такой "довесок"?, - он отвечал:
"Для зверства..."
Как там у Эзопа: "И к уродству привыкаешь...и к крысоте женсчины"...
Короче, уважаемый Кашин, маме унд дочке -- зачот тчк
Ненужные средства тестя возьму в любой валюте зпт
Бесценный багаж ненужных деревяшек сос трунами -- остафте себе тчк
Ваш
JLH

Eric Clapton performs during a special extended edition of the Larry King Live show to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, in New York Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005.

(CNN) -- Before the end of his first stanza, Eric Clapton plied melody into the horror that victims of Hurricane Katrina faced.

From his stool on the set of "Larry King Live," Clapton lent his talent Saturday night to King's celebrity-chocked fundraiser for people who survived the wrath of the Category 4 storm that strafed southern Florida and ravaged the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Clapton, actor John Goodman, country-crooner LeAnn Rimes, Clay Aiken of American Idol fame and entertainer Bill Cosby participated in the first part of the 3-hour "How You Can Help" special.

Послушать и посмотреть исполнение BROKEN HEARTED на этом шоу, можно здесь...
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html...stoftv/2005/09/03/lkl.clapton.mayer.cnn&wm=9

Eric Clapton was joined by John Mayer for a special acoustic performance of "Broken Hearted" on CNN's "How You Can Help?" show hosted by Larry King on Saterday 3 September, 2005. The men performed live from CNN's New York City studios. "Broken Hearted" is from Eric's 1998 CD, Pilgrim. The performance can be viewed on cnn.com.

It was announced that Eric will donate the Martin Acoustic he played to the "Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert" which will take place on 17 September 2005 at the Rose Theater in New York City. The concert is being organized by jazz great, Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

New Orleans native Harry Connick, Jr. was interviewed about the devestation he witnessed in his home city on Friday. LeAnn Rimes, who was born in Mississippi and gave a concert in Biloxi the week before the storm, performed live via satellite from Virginia Beach. Other guests included former President Bill Clinton, Sela Ward, Bill Cosby, Celine Dion and numerous officials from relief organizations working in the Gulf Coast region.

The program also provided viewers with phone numbers, Web sites and other contacts for organizations assisting in the relief effort. It was simulcast on CNN International and CNN Radio.