Miracles Still Happen

There’s nothing like the music of a man with nothing much to prove anymore to himself or the world.

Last Saturday was one of my happiest Saturdays in recent memory. I chanced upon a DVD of Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood playing at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2008, and bought it in a flash. The rest of the day was spent watching it, and re-watching it.

I am not much of a music man, and the current bunch of superstars who my daughter swears by—Beyonce, Rihanna, Kanye West and so on—leave me cold. In fact, I can’t find much music in their songs, but I will be the first to admit that I am hardly an expert, possibly just a relic of a half-imagined past. One’s listening habits as a teenager and a young man may just have fossilised one’s ears to some extent. So, with all relevant apologies, I couldn’t help but have an uplifting experience listening to these men in their sixties.

I have never read a book filled with such self-loathing as Clapton’s autobiography. It is a 350-page tirade about what a vile person he has been through most of his life: drinks, drugs, sex, betrayal of friends and lovers. He says his most shameful moment was during the George Harrison-organised Concert for Bangladesh—he was so doped out that he could later remember nothing of what he did on stage. I watched the film of the concert as a college student, and thought Clapton looked awesomely cool, smoking a reefer while playing the guitar, and sticking it at the end of the instrument while he sang. In fact, that remains my iconic image of Clapton, not the current professorial- looking bespectacled gentleman. Such is the matter of differences of perception.

Clapton cleaned up his act, is a teetotaller now, and is happily married with children. The only aspect that is unchanged is his fearsome mastery of the guitar. And he does not make a big show of it, his entire being focused on his instrument, except a “Thank you!” for the applause. He looks a man doing his job, with nothing much to prove anymore, to himself or the world.

Winwood, on the other hand, remains one of the most under-appreciated rock musicians of all time. One of the reasons I respect The Economist as a magazine is that, many years ago, its review of a history of rock’n’roll stated that any such history is of no worth if it has no mention of Steve Winwood. A virtuoso with several instruments, he created some truly marvellous stuff for his band Traffic, and then Blind Faith, where Clapton was a compatriot. And the concert I watched proved that he had lost none of his talent. One of the great joys of the show was seeing Clapton and Winwood both on the lead guitar, totally in sync, hands and fingers moving as carbon copies.

And then Winwood was on the organ, playing Glad, which can cure the darkest Dostoyevskian hero of his depression with its elegant, joyful melody. Clapton takes a back seat during this (as he quite frequently does during the concert, leaving centre stage to his less famous friend), and one just wants to hear the piece again and again and feel that life is good. And anyone who has heard Georgia on my mind sung by Ray Charles will know that it takes guts to sing it in a concert. Winwood does, and one can only revel in it.

Both are Englishmen, and it still surprises me that boys on a rainy island across the Atlantic could pick up and extend a music genre created spontaneously within the African-American community on plantations in the US. But they did, and some of the best British musicians came to rock through the blues. The Beatles were not immune to it, nor was Jethro Tull, which considers itself fundamentally a blues band. As Clapton says on the DVD, Britain sent blues back to the US repackaged, and the US sent it back with some more innovations, and never has there been such a healthy collaboration between the two countries on music. But, as the Clapton-Winwood concert taught me, miracles still happen.

Eric Claptonrock musicSteve Winwood