I'm standing in a restaurant in downtown Denver before the long-awaited gig from former Blind Faith band members Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, wearing my 24-year old Clapton tee shirt, when this woman around forty years of age approaches me and gushes about what a big Winwood fan she is, and how she's so looking forward to seeing Clapton live for the first time. That's fine. I told her that I've been a Clapton fan since '74, but I've never seen Winwood live before. For a moment, it seemed like the seventies again; real Yin Yang. Cosmic, man.
So my wife and I get into the auditoreum and find our sixteenth row seats, and I look around, and I'm amazed at the diversity of the audience. Granted, most fans were like that lady in the restaurant, but there were quite a lot of kids in their teens and twenties, and--whoa! A veritable sea of grey hair! Seems that a lot of the original crowd who were in their twenties back when Eric was fronting for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, and of course, Blind Faith, had also decided to show up live (the concert, not the crowd, well barely ... some of them) instead of just buying the Madison Square Garden concert DVD and curling up on the couch with the big screen TV and a glass of Chardonnay.
The performance kicked off with a crashing, pulsing rendition of Blind Faith's, Had To Cry Today, complete with some very good bright, pulsating stage lighting. It brought the audience to its feet, and that's where most of us stayed. It just kept rolling, and getting better and better for two hours. Steve Winwood, who is surely one of the most talented musicians to grace a stage for the past forty years is equally at home playing keyboards or electric guitar, but he also more than held up his end of an acoustic guitar duet with Clapton that featured Layla.
The band was tight. The other musicians, drums, bass, and two backup singers were more than qualified to be on stage and gave a great performanc. But there was one other giant on stage; Chris Stainton on keyboards. I think the first time I saw Chris playing with Clapton was in '79 or '80 on the Just One Night tour, that produced the double album of the same name. Stainton delivers. He's the guy who, just when you think the guitar solos can't get any better, pops up from behind the keyboard and delivers a blistering piano solo that just leaves the other band members as well as the audience, well, gobsmacked--as Eric would say. And Chris was certainly on form last night. The band was great: Cocaine, Voodoo Chile, Mr. Fantasy; Only two people should be allowed to play Georgia on My Mind in public: Ray Charles (who's dead) and Stevie Winwood.
Somewhere around the performance of Pearly Queen, I noticed how the stage lights were illuminating a lot of smoke in the theater. The atmosphere was starting to smell like someone set fire to the southern end of a north-bound mule. I looked ahead of me a couple of rows and watched two guys whose evident smoking and drinking had turned them from the graceful dancers that I'm sure they must be when they aren't smoking, to a pair of lobotomized chimps in concrete boots. I doubt they will remember much this morning about a truly professional, polished, and talent-laden concert. And at 150 bucks a seat, I guess that's why they call it Dope.
But I digress. Remember that 24-year old tee shirt that I bought in Chicago at the Behind The Sun Tour? I only wear it for Clapton concerts. It's almost as good today as it was back then. Clapton and Winwood, on the other hand, are much better.
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