Eric Clapton - Nothing But The Blues

I mentioned Eric Clapton on an earlier post, about how he battled alcohol and drugs for years. He managed to overcome both and had been living a sober life for many years. It was in 1993 when he began work to found the Crossroads Centre in Antigua. The facility is dedicated toward teaching ways to be abstinent towards drugs and alcohol and other addictive tendencies and changing the lifestyle that leads to that kind of behavior. Clapton's auctioned off his collection of guitars and has mounted a series of benefit concerts call the Crossroads Guitar Festival. He further augments funding through the sale of DVDs and other merchandise.

Clapton always manages to select and have perform some of the greatest guitarists alive. He said that his criteria for selecting the artists are simply to pick the performers he himself really wants to see. Being asked by one of the world's best received guitarists is too much for most people to say no to.

One year after beginning work on the Crossroads Centre, Martin Scorsese shot an Eric Clapton concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. The music consisted of nothing but blues music, because that's what Clapton always felt most comfortable playing. Scorsese grew up loving blues as well, so he felt it was a natural collaboration. The documentary was made for PBS and was never released elsewhere. There were two nights of music, and Scorsese used the first to make sure everything was mic'd and mixed perfectly. He never used that first night's recording in the finished documentary. This is that first night with a couple of additional rehearsal tracks as well: