Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [140]
With the completion and delivery of the Robert Johnson record, the other compositional album was put on hold, to give me time to come up with more songs and try to make a decent record of what was going on in my life, without rushing it. I asked Hiroshi Fujiwara if he would be interested in directing a video for the Robert Johnson project, more for fun than to promote it. He liked the idea, but asked to bring in a friend of his who had more experience with this kind of thing: Stephen Schible, coproducer of Lost in Translation, a film I really loved. As soon as these two came on board, the whole project quickly transformed into something else, and what started out as a simple video quickly became a fully fledged documentary.
Stephen and Hiroshi thought we ought to examine my preoccupation with Robert Johnson and explain if possible what it was that had kept his music fresh for me and brought it back into the forefront of my life time after time, while I saw it as an opportunity to finally express my gratitude to this great musician. It was also pretty interesting to watch these two guys, who on the face of it were quite modern men, quickly fall under the spell of Johnson’s music and also be equally captivated by the mystery surrounding his life and death, just as I had been all those years ago. It helped confirm what I and many others had always believed about Robert Johnson. He really was the one. Sessions for Robert J became a DVD and included interviews and decent live versions of some of the songs from the album, plus solo performances of me playing “Crossroads” and “Love in Vain.” All in all a very worthy effort, I think, and I finally felt like my debt to Robert was paid.
The album was released in March 2004, and at the end of the year I finally went into the studio to finish the “family” album. I had written four songs that talked directly about my new role as a family man, “So Tired,” “Run Home,” “One Tracked Mind,” and “Back Home,” and I was very proud of them. I also wanted to pay tribute to Syreeta Wright, who had passed away in July, with “Going Left,” and to George with “Love Comes to Everyone,” which I had originally played on. I recorded a couple of Doyle Bramhall’s songs, too, “Lost and Found” and “Piece of My Heart,” and did a cover of a Detroit Spinners song I had always loved called “Love Don’t Love Nobody.” I called the album Back Home, and the title song summed up exactly how I felt about my new life. It felt like a good album, and I couldn’t wait to play it on the road.
Another thing I’d always wanted to do was put on a music festival. Maybe it was to make up for the fact that through being drunk, I had missed the first one I ever attended, at the ripe old age of fourteen. That summer of 2004, I put this to rights by staging the Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas. With the help of Michael Eaton, Peter Jackson, and Scooter Weintraub, plus the rest of my domestic and road crew, we put together a two-day event and invited a fantastic array of musicians to play, including B. B. King, Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Jimmie Vaughan, and J. J. Cale, all of whom graciously donated their instruments for a second auction that Christie’s was to hold in New York.
In order to try and reduce logistical problems, we combined the festival with the beginning of an American tour. I thought the family would enjoy being there, so we all flew into Dallas at the beginning of June for rehearsals, only to find that we had landed smack in the middle of a series of electrical storms. For the next week, while we struggled to assemble the festival, storms raged all around, sending down sheet lightning and rain like I had never seen before. Strangely enough, my sweet little girls slept soundly each night through the most savage conditions while I was quaking with fear, on my knees, praying for the weather to move on and spare our festival.
The day before the first show, the rain