Foxhound
retired
I attended the Eric Clapton/Jeff Beck concert on February 21st at the Air Canada Centre (a venue built primarily for hockey games I might add).
This review appeared in the "Toronto Star" the next day:
Now I'm a huge Jeff Beck fan but since I also really like Eric Clapton I came in with an open mind willing to give both fellows a fair listen. But I have to say that for the most part I agree with the writer of the above article - and the big Eric Clapton fan with whom I attended the concert also agrees. I'll fill in the details of my concert experience later tonight.
This review appeared in the "Toronto Star" the next day:
Ben Rayner said:Eric Clapton no match for Jeff Beck
Slowhand sleepwalks through set at Air Canada Centre show
This was supposed to be a guitar battle, not a complete capitulation.
Oh, well, we knew going in who the cool kid was gonna be on this Eric Clapton/Jeff Beck co-headlining tour. So I guess the major disappointment stemming from Sunday night's Air Canada Centre gig by the two aged British guitar heroes – one set by Beck, one set by Clapton, one anticlimactic six-string duel between the two – was that Clapton didn't even bother showing up to prove us wrong.
It's not like Beck, who famously succeeded Clapton in the Yardbirds back in 1965, was up there throwing it in his old friend/foe's face, either.
His opening set, while spiked with the kind of artful white-noise fireworks and jazzbo '70s-fusion quirks that everyone kind of anticipates from Jeff Beck, was still a pretty mild-mannered one. He brought a 12-piece orchestra along with his ace bass/drums/keys backing band and kept the all-instrumental vibe soft and cinematic, almost – dare I say it? – Knopfler-esque in its blues-derived inoffensiveness.
During most of his time onstage, he leaned heavily on drowsy material such as Jeff Buckley's "Corpus Christi Carol" and Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" rather than fully uncorking the mindbending, high-volume Strat theatrics he reserved for moments like an awe-inspiring assault on the freaky latter half of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life."
You'd think the prospect of being mildly shown up by Jeff Beck at half-power would have moved Clapton to rally beyond the usual, rote white-blues sleepwalk. But no, the guy might as well have strolled out in his jammies for his set, kicking it off with lackadaisical, seated acoustic versions of "Driftin' Blues" and "Layla," and then failing to inject any electricity into what should have been an electric set of can't-miss crowd pleasers, including a lifeless run at the Dominos' "Tell the Truth," the world's longest and lamest "I Shot the Sheriff," and a perfunctory, groove-deficient "Cocaine" that should have been retitled "Thorazine."
Seriously, this was one of the laziest big-venue performances I've seen in years. Dude didn't bother to break a sweat. Beck came out to inject a little fire into the proceedings an hour later – consistently stepping back from his incendiary lightning bursts of blurred fretwork to let Clapton step in, only to watch Clapton dole out a few rote blues licks and return to the mike for another verse of "Shake Your Money Maker" or "Little Brown Bird." And what was one of the first tunes they turned all those years of honing their era-defining rock 'n' roll axe-craft to covering? Henry Mancini's "Moon River." Say no more.
Now I'm a huge Jeff Beck fan but since I also really like Eric Clapton I came in with an open mind willing to give both fellows a fair listen. But I have to say that for the most part I agree with the writer of the above article - and the big Eric Clapton fan with whom I attended the concert also agrees. I'll fill in the details of my concert experience later tonight.
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