Eric Clapton‘s Crossroads Guitar Festival will be simulcast live on Pay-Per-View across North America on Saturday and Sunday — September 21st and 22nd. The Festival, which has become legendary in its own right for hosting performances and impromptu collaborations from the world’s most legendary guitar players, will play in the city that hosted the first-ever Festival — Dallas, Texas at American Airlines Arena.
The Crossroads Guitar Festival has been held every three years since 2004 to raise funds for the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a treatment and education facility that Clapton founded in 1998 to help people suffering from chemical dependency. In addition to Clapton, the musicians appearing at the 2019 event include Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton, Joe Walsh, Jonny Lang, Bonnie Raitt, Derek Trucks, Doyle Bramhall II, Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill, Buddy Guy, Sheryl Crow, Jimmie Vaughan, Keb Mo, Albert Lee, John Mayer, Andy Fairweather Low, Billy Gibbons, Jerry Douglas, Gary Clark Jr., Robert Cray, and Los Lobos, among others.
Clapton told us he planned the festival so that a wide variety of musical styles would be represented: [“In very diverse ways, it started out with Pat Metheny, and B.B. King, and Dan Tyminski, and John McLaughlin, and people like that. But I think it needs to be incredibly eclectic, ’cause that’s the way I, I look at music. The guitar has so many different faces, so it shouldn’t just be a blues festival or anything — I mean, it should, it needs to be every aspect of the guitar.”] SOUNDCUE (:20 OC: . . . of the guitar)
Today, Eric Clapton’s life is a world away from where he was in the 1980’s. Although clean from heroin since the mid-1970’s — it took over a decade later for Clapton to finally get straight. Now a sober family man, he recently talked about how low his two bottles of vodka a day habit had laid him: [“I would wake up and look out the window and I wouldn’t know if it was morning, or late afternoon, or if it was dark, whether it was night — evening or early — y’know, I didn’t know in the end. And sometimes I didn’t even know where I was. Even though I woke up at home, I wouldn’t know where I was. And then sometimes I would go out, or if someone managed to get me into a social situation — I’d drink on top of that.”] SOUNDCUE (:21 OC: . . . top of that)
For a full list of this weekend’s performers, log on to: http://bit.ly/2mqZjEU
TL; DR
- Eric Clapton‘s Crossroads Guitar Festival will be simulcast live on Pay-Per-View across North America on September 21st and 22nd.
- The Festival, which has become legendary in its own right for hosting performances and impromptu collaborations from the world’s most legendary guitar players, will play in the city that hosted the first-ever Festival — Dallas, Texas at American Airlines Arena.
- High profile guests appearing this weekend will be Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton, Joe Walsh, Jonny Lang, Bonnie Raitt, Derek Trucks, Vince Gill, Buddy Guy, Sheryl Crow, Jimmie Vaughan, Billy Gibbons, among many others.
SIDE NOTES
- Out now is Eric Clapton And Guests Crossroads Revisited. The three-disc collection features live performances from 2004, 2007, and 2010 by Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow, Vince Gill, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, John Mayer, Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana, James Taylor, Joe Walsh, Steve Winwood, Ron Wood, ZZ Top, and more.
- The new set features nearly four hours of music, some of which has only been available via the Crossroads DVD/Blu-ray sets.