July 1, 1999
New York, NY -- Note to Michael Jackson, Bob Geldolf, Beastie Boys et al: The next time you're planning a charity concert for the starving children of the world or the oppressed people of Tibet, consider stepping back and handing the reins over to the one some still call "God." In the span of a single week, Eric Clapton has raised a staggering $5 million in a guitar auction and fronted a sold-out benefit concert at Madison Square Garden -- all in the name of a tiny drug rehab resort on a tiny island in the Caribbean. The lesson here? If Slowhand fronts it, the funds will come.
Granted, many of those in attendance at Wednesday night's three-and-a-half-hour Benefit Concert for the Crossroads Centre at Antigua were drawn by Bob Dylan, who took a night off from his current tour with Paul Simon to join Sheryl Crow, Mary J. Blige and David Sanborn in rallying around Clapton's pet charity. But despite the formidable guest list, it was Clapton who tied everything together. It was Clapton who opened the show, Clapton who stepped gracefully into the background to allow each of his guests a chance to strut their stuff, and Clapton who stepped back in to pick up the slack when said stuff wasn't up to snuff.
"The talking is done," announced the guitarist after taking the stage and briefly recounting a busy run of interviews related to his fund-raising crusade for the rehab center. "I'm not going to do any more talking -- I'm just going to play for you." As the worshipful cheers rolled his way, Clapton responded with one of the finest performances of the evening, a soaring reading of "My Father's Eyes" from last year's Pilgrim. Throughout the evening, Clapton fared best when sticking to his soulful ballads ("Tears in Heaven," "Wonderful Tonight") and rock anthems ("Badge"); too many of the blues numbers rang hollow in the cavernous venue. His playing, however, was uniformly impeccable: his warm, liquid notes flowed effortlessly from solo to solo like the proverbial "River of Tears" he sang about in another of the evening's selections from Pilgrim.
After a half dozen songs, Clapton introduced the evening's first guest (not counting saxman David Sanborn), his former paramour Sheryl Crow. Sporting an elfin-short hairdo, boots and a Princess Leia-as-hippie white sundress, Crow performed a tight, pseudo-greatest hits set highlighted by Clapton's mournful slide guitar in "Difficult Kind." "Wouldn't it be nice to have Brownie in my hands right now," Crow quipped at one point, referring to the Fender Strat Clapton auctioned off for half a million the week before. They got along fine without it, though. Crow's set closed with a fierce duet with Clapton on Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" that found Sanborn all but blowing out his temples with a sax solo that gave the celebrated guitarist a run for his money.
The crowd stayed through Crow's set, but they got up and left in droves when Mary J. Blige came out. Those that bee-lined it for the restrooms missed what started out as a spirited -- and genuinely refreshing -- change of pace. Blige's enthusiasm quickly got the best of her, however: her brazen strut, self-promotion and posturing (peaking on the ridiculously over-the-top "Not Gon' Cry") jarred like fifteen minutes of Married with Children dropped smack in the middle of an NYPD Blue episode. Clapton, relegated to a quick, inconsequential noodle here and there between the exaggerated hysterics looked lost at his own party.
He was quick to reclaim control -- and the crowd -- once Blige made her exit. A steady stream of greatest hits ("Tears in Heaven," "Change the World," "Old Love," "Badge," and "Wonderful Tonight") set the stage for that hit, or closer to the mark, that riff: "Layla." The response was monstrous, and deservedly so -- though Sanborn overstayed his welcome by bleeding all over the epic coda that gives the song its soul.
At last, it was time for Dylan. The bard was greeted with a standing ovation when he came out, the enraptured hoots and shouts of "BOB!" lasting throughout "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." Alas, the emperor was tired and indisposed, if not outright naked. Dylan blathered tunelessly through one of his prettiest melodies like one reading a list of numbers off a page. He didn't start to warm up until three songs into his set with a ragged-but-right duet with Clapton on "Born on Time," but only on the broken, patched-back together beauty of Out of Time's "Not Dark Yet" did the grizzled icon live up to his legend. But that moment of greatness was over all too soon, and Dylan's set petered to an ignominious end with a silly, funky run through "Crossroads" with Clapton and Sanborn.
After leaving the stage, presumably to put Bob back to bed, Clapton returned for a roaring "Sunshine of Your Love" that kicked off with a stuttering intro and stormed to gargantuan proportions. The rafters were still shaking in the aftermath of the anthem when Crow and Dylan came back (whither Blige?) for an all-star jam through Jimmy Reed's "Bright Lights, Big City." Following the heavy dollop of Cream, it was a bit of an anti-climax. "It's not over, man," said one optimistic fan five minutes after the band had left the stage, but the bright house lights put an end to that.
Written by RICHARD SKANSE for RollingStone.com News
