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Clapton tonight @ Molson Amph.


Kanada Kev

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Great show! Had a great time. Yeah it was chilly but I was a little more prepared than the people who showed up in t-shirts shorts and flip flops so it wasn't really a big deal. My only complaint is the side effects from drinking 6 or 7 of those ROCKSTAR w/ Vodka tall boys.

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Eric Clapton - Molson Amphitheatre, Toronto Canada - Tuesday 27 May 2008

01. Motherless Children

02. Key To The Highway

03. Hoochie Coochie Man

04. Little Wing

05. Outside Woman Blues

06. Double Trouble

07. Don't Knock My Love

08. Drifting

09. Rockin' Chair

10. Motherless Child

11. Travelling Riverside Blues

12. Running On Faith

13. Tell The Truth

14. Little Queen of Spades

15. Before You Accuse Me

16. Wonderful Tonight

17. Layla

18. Cocaine

Encore:

19. I've Got My Mojo Working (with Robert Randolph)

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Good times. Thankfully I was prepared for the weather, otherwise I would have been miserable. Nice to hang with Mr. and Mrs. StnMtn, velvet and phorbesie up on the lawn.

We scored our lawn tickets for $35 each off a scalper, so we definitely got our money's worth.

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Great show last night. I'm trying to remember the last show there that I had been at that was that full ... maybe Roger Waters.

It was damn cold. I could have used a pair of gloves, but other than that it wasn't too bad. Mainly the wind that would get ya :)

Tried meeting up with you guys, but once the show started and we had walked all over and couldn't hear very well on the phone we just had to find a spot and start soaking up the tunes. Bummer. Next time for sure.

I thought that Clapton's playing was superb. Definitely didn't seem to be "just going through the motions."

I was happy to hear Before You Acuse Me from the Journeyman album. Have always loved that one (DSO note: Rob Eaton (DSO's Bobby) was an engineer on that album (also did a lot with Jimmy Buffet). Clapton did incredible work on the solo sections during Layla, Cocaine and Mojo. I was really impressed hearing Randolph and EC trade off during Mojo ... Randolph was a perfect fit in there. Makes me want to see him again when he comes through playing a small club.

Overall it was worth every penny. However, here's an observation from last night ... did anyone else notice the absolutlely RIDICULOUS number of security guards? Holy Fuck it was stupid. I felt like i was seeing a show in a prison yard and that we were being monitored. At one point we had a security guy stand beside us for a good 10 minutes. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was waiting to see lighters. As soon as they saw one flick they'd be all over the person to be sure they weren't smoking pot. If they weren't doing that they were moving people around and telling people to sit down in some areas! Go to the bathroom and they had 2 guards INSIDE watching and making sure nobody was smoking in there too. Two fucking guards watching me piss and they can't afford to have somebody stock the damn paper towel!!!???!!! In my hundreds of concerts attended, i've never seen a security presence like that before. Hopefully this isn't the new trend down there.

Now, if we could just get Clapton to come back and do a gig with Steve Winwood ......

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A couple of observations gleaned from last night's Eric Clapton show at the Molson Amphitheatre.

One: I'm no nationalist, but every year our defiant Canadian insistence upon pretending spring has arrived when, clearly, Mother Nature has other ideas makes me wanna bray "O, Canada" from the nearest treetop.

There are sellouts and there are sellouts at the amphitheatre, and this was an indisputable sellout, with 16,000-odd fans cramming the venue right to the fences at the back of the lawn despite constant buffeting by a wind that seemed to emanate from the very maw of the Arctic. Toques and mittens were everywhere, blankets and sleeping bags clutched to the shoulders of blue-lipped concertgoers, and security forces were goodhearted enough throughout the evening to accommodate the phalanxes of shivering Clapton disciples who kept descending into the aisles on the lower levels to seek some relief from the elements. And yet still, all involved hardily clutched their $9 tallboys as long as they could in observance of a level of mass intoxication rarely witnessed in this tightly bound city. Kudos. Kudos to the lot.

Which brings us to Point 2: It dawns that, perhaps, it isn't so much the professorial nature of Eric Clapton's tastefully "white" blues-guitar playing that has left me cold lo my 33 years, but the response it commands from stereotypically white blues fans: the sort of meatheads who air-guitared to "Roadhouse Blues" at every dreadful high-school party I ever attended, who thrilled to the "authentic blues" stylings of Blues Hammer in the film Ghost World, and who made "doo-doo-doo-dooo" noises while they bent notes out of the air when Clapton and his band finally dropped "Layla" towards the end of last night's performance.

Clapton's an ace Strat-abuser, no argument there, and he compensates these days for the general weightlessness of everything he's written since ... well, 1970's Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs – c'mon, name a tune from Pilgrim – by larding a ton of blues classics ("Crossroads," "Hoochie Coochie Man" et al.) into the set list. All it took was a trip to the back of the amphitheatre lawn, where his pristinely overdriven fretwork and LED-closeups of his hands at work dominated the multimedia presentation thrown at the audience, to process just what it is that's kept the dude in business all these years. At 63, Slowhand still plays like a man possessed by his love of the guitar.

Most of it sounds exactly the same these days. But "Wonderful Tonight" still singlehandedly explains Clapton's legendary ladykilling and a wickedly grooving pre-encore attack on "Cocaine" crackled with a fire that could only be mustered by a survivor who knows he can't allow himself within 100 yards of such chemical passions ever again. Blues is where you find it, I guess.

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