Clapton, Santana has them rocking in the aisles at SPAC
by Bryan Jackson, The Saratogian
It was the recipe for a perfect rock concert. All of the right ingredients were there and in the proper amounts. One part performing arts center, one part good weather, two parts super rock groups, ten parts technical difficulties and 30,000 parts screaming, pushing, cheering and applauding people, comprised of 26,600 paid and 3,600 walking.
Mixed together, they formed last night’s concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which featured Eric Clapton and Santana.
Santana was first on the menu, and the group could have very well been the main course. Santana’s Latin-flavored rock and roll was no stranger to those assembled. The group has been well known ever since it broke the Top-40 charts with songs like “Evil Ways” and “Oye Como Va”.
Santana’s music is definitely not the kind that you sit back and listen to. The music reaches out and asks for a certain kind of emotional involvement for maxımum enjoyment, and without really knowing it, you suddenly find yourself with the rhythm inside you and your body urging you to participate.
Before the group got too far into its act, hundreds of young people had gotten that urge to participate, and they began to move down off the lawn at SPAC and into the aisles of the amphitheatre, as ushers fought in vain to try and hold them back.
During Santana’s performance, someone decided that this would be a good time to start an international “Frisbee” contest and suddenly dozens of the flying disks began to soar through the air. Apparently, the idea was to be the first to land a “Frisbee” on the stage. But before one finally landed on target, several hit unsuspecting members of the audience. Finally, one of the disks landed on the stage next to guitarist Carlos Santana, who leads the group. Without missing a beat, he picked the saucer up and flung it back into the audience. The crowd sent up a rousing cheer.
Santana finished its set, but returned for an encore after the crowd chanted — five minutes for more. Although the audience wanted more following that, it was soon apparent that the order had been given backstage for preparations to be made for Eric Clapton’s appearance.
No concert would be a success if it did not have some degree of technical difficulties with it. This one was no exception.
For nearly 30 minutes the audience was greeted with a series of buzzes, clicks, pops and voices calling out “Testing one, two, three”. Somewhere there seems to be an unwritten law that dictates that no concert shall begin without at least some technical problems so as to get the audience in a mood where they will be happy to hear almost anything.
With Eric Clapton there is no need to entice the audience, however. Clapton has been called the greatest guitarist ever to have lived. Whether that is true or not is mere speculation and up to individual taste. But no one can dispute the fact that Clapton has been involved with changing contemporary music on a firsthand basis. In the 1960s, he helped to shake the very foundations of rock music during his involvement with a group called the “Yardbirds”. Later, he became the driving force behind the “Cream,” which also changed the path of contemporary music and helped to give birth to the progressive music movement which the “Yardbirds” had already begun.
CLAPTON HAS NEVER BEEN A “status quo” musician. Every time he masters a new style, he moves on to something else in search of new areas of rock and roll that have not yet been tried. His performance last night was a culmination of all of those things that he has explored so far.
The set started off with the familiar strains of “Layla”, the title song of probably the best-known Clapton album. If he had performed nothing else, this song would likely have been the one those in the audience would have wanted to hear most. The song set the mood, and there was no doubt that Eric Clapton was on stage.
Clapton provided a wide variety: from straight, hard rock and roll music, he shifted down into a few blues numbers and changed again into a jam session with the musicians behind him. The crowd loved it all, and each of the thousands on hand knew that they were experiencing a piece of contemporary music history. What they were hearing tonight could be the last time that Clapton would play this way before discovering a new method of making music.
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