Rock Mega-Concerts

By David Ross. Two rock mega-concerts are now streaming on Netflix: the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th Anniversary Concert (2009) and the third installment of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival (2010), each weighing in at something like five hours. I have nothing very nice to say about the Hall of Fame concert. Like rock itself in its thirty-five-year phase of senescence, the concert has a smarmy self-congratulatory masturbatory quality that quickly becomes nauseating. A fair representation of the rock aristocracy is present – Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Mick Jagger, Billy Joel, Metallica, Prince, Lou Reed, Simon & Garfunkel, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Sting, U2, Stevie Wonder, etc. – but the music has a mere pretense of energy and inspiration. It’s a slick simulacrum of an inspiration that fled in the seventies. For the most part, this concert is no better than a Vegas floor show.

Little Anthony, Buddy Guy, Dion, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Darlene Love are duly wheeled out, but their participation is gestural and patronizing. The baby boom billionaires can thereby flatter themselves as reverent keepers of a tradition that they have of course utterly sold out.

U2 particularly irks me, not because they’re not good – they are very good – but because they’re good in the wrong way. Theirs is a triumph of will – of sheer determination and professional organization and marshaled nerve; not for them the more equivocal experiments in interrogation, introspection, or poetry, the anxious plum-line dropped deep. Their real genius is steering their own ascension as icons and negotiating the cultural politics of their own global gigantism. Though they’ve made a lot of good music, they turn out to be oddly cognate with postmodern media manipulators like Madonna and Lady Gaga.

The only performance worth mentioning is the Springsteen/Tom Morello version of Springsteen’s dustbowl anthem “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” As much as he seems like he could use a good knock on the head from a cop during one of those IMF or World Bank melees, Morello, I have to admit, kills it. He may be the single-most annoying guy ever to play the guitar really well. For his part, Springsteen begins by issuing platitudes about “high times on Wall Street, hard times on Main Street,” which is a little rich coming from a guy who’s worth maybe $500 million, most of which, I hazard to guess, is invested by these very same Wall Street vampires. Springsteen has lost a good deal of his voice and looks increasingly like an aging tough guy from The Sopranos, but he’s still a rock’n’roll true believer, the last of them perhaps, along with Patti Smith. You won’t see him cavorting with Jay-Z and Beyonce at Cannes or hobnobbing with Sir Mick at the Monaco Grand Prix.

The 2010 installment of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival could not be more different. The talent meter consistently drifts into the red, and the Jurassic element represented by Clapton, Ron Wood, Steve Winwood, and Jeff Beck (not to mention a wheelchair-bound B.B. King) is balanced by a raft of talented youngsters, including the Robert Randolph & the Family Band (here), Keb Mo, Johnny Lang, and the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Derek Trucks is an appealing musician: modest, reciprocal, subtle, and reverential, very much in the mold of his spiritual godfather Duane Allman (Derek’s uncle, Butch Trucks, has been drumming with the Allmans for more than forty years). His vocalist wife Susan Tedeschi is no Eva Cassidy or Sandy Denny (see here and here), but she’s plucky enough to work her Strat while sharing the stage with her hubby and Warren Haynes, the souped-up Gibson-powered engines of the late-version Allman Brothers. Their jolly whack at “Space Captain” (here) is a highlight of the festival. Though it does not – could never! – equal the saturnalia of the famed version by Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishman (here), its festive and familial essence is right.

John Mayer gets a cool reception from the film and from his fellow players, but, as usual, the impulse to dismiss him as mindless poster fodder for teenage girls is complicated by the string-pounding he delivers every time he decides to the play the blues. He may be a shrewd careerist, an instinctive compromiser, and a Lothario with painfully bland taste, but undeniably he can write, arrange, sing, and play – this despite hailing from Fairfield, Connecticut, where the occasional emanation of Robert Cray from behind the closed windows of a Beemer is about as soulful as it gets. His version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t no Sunshine” (here) is a fair epitome of his strengths and weaknesses. It’s full of subtle improvisational flourishes, but it’s also a bit preening and self-conscious (compare Trucks’ almost shy demeanor). On the other hand, Mayer holds his own in this duel with Clapton (here), circa 2007. No preening in this case.

Finally, give some credit to Clapton himself, who has the brass ones late in life to take on thirteen minutes of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” with Winwood – who played on the 1968 original – tagging along on organ. The performance makes clear why Clapton is Clapton and equally why he’s not Hendrix. His guitar wails and splinters, but at no point does it seem to emanate from “from far away as Jupiter sulfur mines.” That’s the difference.

One thing is certain: the guitar culture remains intelligent, vibrant, and historically conscious in a way that the larger rock culture does not. The instrument itself weeds out the mere rock stars and would-be movie stars. You don’t wind up on stage at Crossroads unless you’re willing to play scales for ten hours a day in a locked bedroom. That bedrock of personality and commitment sees you through.

Posted on July 11th, 2011 at 11:15am.