Archive for the ‘Eric Clapton’ Category

Chillaxing guitar with Clapton and David Gilmour

Thursday, April 23rd, 2020

Liona Boyd
L’Enfant
Sorceress
Labyrinth
Persona

Liona Boyd’s wikipedia page says that she is “often called the first lady of the guitar” with a big fat [citation needed] next to it because it’s probably not true. She has an album called First Lady of the Guitar, but using an album title to designate yourself a grandiose moniker is like trying to give yourself your own nickname the first day of junior high; it’s just kind of sad. If I was forced to designate someone as “first lady of the guitar” I guess I would probably choose Bonnie Raitt? I don’t know, the title itself is kind of demeaning, doesn’t it mean that the woman is married to her guitar? Am I overthinking this? Probably, I got a lot of free time, after all.

So who the hell is Liona Boyd and why the hell am I sharing her music? These are valid questions. Liona Boyd is a guitarist (duh) with a lengthy career that goes back to the 1970s with over 20 albums. She’s not a shredder or anything like that, she’s a classically trained guitarist who specializes in acoustic music. She primarily performs classical music, with some excursions into other, equally mellow genres. She has a lot of Christmas albums, which makes sense.

I don’t know anything about her career. I’m very sorry for all of the die-hard Liona Boyd fans out there. The songs I’m featuring by her tonight are from her 1986 album Persona. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not featuring said songs because of Boyd herself, but because of who joins her on said songs.

The tracks “L’Enfant,” “Sorceress” and “Persona” all feature guitar by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, while “Labyrinth” includes electric guitar by one Eric Clapton. The entire album is full of guest appearances, actually. Yo-Yo Ma pops up at one point, and nearly all of the album features work by composer Michael Kamen (Lethal Weapon, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Dead Zone), performing various other instruments. He also arranged the entire album. I have to imagine that the guest spots by the two superstar guitarists were the work of Michael Kamen as well. He had worked with Clapton on the Lethal Weapon movies, and he’s worked with Gilmour quite often.

I typically can’t pick out instrumentalists just by hearing them, but I was able to guess pretty well which tracks Clapton and Gilmour played on this album without even seeing the liner notes beforehand. Sure, it helped that they’re both playing electric guitar on an album that is largely dominated by acoustic guitar, but I think that nearly everyone with even just a passing interest or knowledge in Clapton would be able to instantly recognize his style on “Labyrinth.” The obvious blues influence, the sustain, even the pacing of the notes, it all screams Clapton.

Gilmour is a bit harder to spot on a few of his tracks. I hear hints of him on “L’Enfant,” but the only reason I think he’s playing anything on “Sorceress” is because the liner notes tell me so. However, about two minutes and twenty seconds into “Persona,” an electric guitar solo kicks in that sounds like it was taken from outtakes of the “Comfortably Numb” sessions, it’s that recognizable at Gilmour’s work. It’s always hard for me to define what makes a Gilmour solo sound like David Gilmour, I guess I just know it when I hear it, like on the absolutely stellar “Pink and Velvet” by Berlin, which features one of Gilmour’s best solos of all-time. Listening to that track for the first time, I could tell instantaneously that it was Gilmour kicking out that solo. That album also features a shockingly good guest solo by Ted Nugent too. Weird record.

Again, hope everyone out there is staying as safe and as sane as humanely possible. Do whatever it takes not to go crazy. I’m trying my best and losing, so if you got any pro-tips in that area why don’t you pass them along.

 

Forgotten Techno Clapton

Sunday, February 2nd, 2020

TDF
Rip Stop (DJ Pulse 12″Mix)
Rip Stop (DJ Pulse Beatz Mix)
Rip Stop (Shed Science ‘Angelic Uplift’ Remix)
Rip Stop (Shed Science ‘Hard Left’ Remix)
Rip Stop (Rabbit in the Moon’s Creamy, Funkshunal Mix)

I’m not a Clapton guy. I’ve never been. Sure, I dig me “Layla” (the real version, not that acoustic slog) and I can respect “Tears In Heaven” for its intent and meaning even if the song itself is kind of wallpaper to me. And, of course, Cream was a juggernaut of a band. But the whole “Clapton is God” thing? I just never got that.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a world that already had Jimi Hendrix so I knew what god on guitar actually sounded like. Or maybe it’s just because the Clapton that existed in my formative years was the Clapton that put out adult-contemporary snoozefests like the aforementioned acoustic version of “Layla” or the absolutely hideous “My Father’s Eyes.”

“My Father’s Eyes” is off the album Pilgrim, which was produced by Clapton and Simon Climie, who was best known in the UK for his group Climie Fisher as well as his production and songwriting work for artists like George Michael and Westlife. But Pilgrim was not the first project that Clapton and Climie worked on, but the other kind of flew under the radar at the time unless you were on the look out for it.

In 1997, Clapton teamed up with Climie to form the group T.D.F. and release the album Retail Therapy, a collection of electronic/ambient tunes based around jam sessions by the two.

Strangely, Clapton is entirely uncredited in the album’s liner notes. Instead he goes by the name “X-Sample.” Furthermore, all photos of the group in the liner notes featured them hidden behind motorcycle helmets.

Clapton wasn’t the only 60s rock icon to try and re-invent himself in a somewhat anonymous way in the 1990s to earn hipster points. Before this, Paul McCartney collaborated with Youth on the Fireman project, which was also more electronic and experimental in nature than his previous work. Bowie also briefly toyed with the idea of adopting a pseudonym for his electronic music, releasing one single and performing a secret show as the Tao Jones Index (which is a great name).

But while Bowie and McCartney at least went through the motions of pretending they weren’t involved with their pseudonymous releases, Clapton apparently made no such effort. Every contemporaneous review and news item of the album I can dig up clearly know that X-Sample is Clapton. Here’s an MTV News item announcing the album’s release as Clapton’s “techno album.”

With Clapton’s involvement well-known by the time of the album’s release, reviewers perhaps were a bit pre-judgemental in their assessment, hoping for something a bit more guitar driven and rock in nature, and instead getting a collection of ambient electronic pieces with an occasional drum and bass bent. Retail Therapy was not a well-received record, although most of the reviews tended to fall along the lines of ambivalence than outright disgust,  One article I read referred the album as “not uninteresting,” which is praise that’s so faint it’s transparent. AllMusic retroactively gave the album a sad one-and-a-half star review, but the review itself treats the album more as something that’s forgettable rather than outright terrible, dishing out adjectives like “meandering” and “misguiding.” A review from the Hartford Courant is probably the most negative of the bunch, calling it “middling techno ambient stuff that takes a turn toward sleepy time New Age” but it still seems to lean more on the side of boring than awful.

I think I enjoy T.D.F. more than most of the critics, but even I have to admit that their album is, at best, an uneven piece that’s hard to entirely recommend. The first half of the record is actually pretty good, if you’re like me and dig instrumental rock and/or light electronic music. And there’s the fantastic track “Seven” which mixes drum and bass beats and a B.B. King sample with some honest-to-goodness great guitar playing by Clapton.

But on the second half of the record things really take a dive, with much more meandering, bland guitar work by Clapton. There’s also the absolutely horrendous “What She Wants,” an ear-splittingly atrocious piece mid-90s adult contemporary elephant dung that sounds like something that Savage Garden would’ve tossed int the trash for being too bland. This was the track from the album that was released as a single with a radio edit, so they probably had some degree of hope that it might’ve broken through. It’s a garbage track, for sure, but it’s garbage in the same way that a lot of Top 40 radio was in the mid-to-late 90s music was, so I’m actually surprised it wasn’t a hit.

However, one album highlight does manage to sneak in near the end, the stand-out track “Rip Stop,” which mixes drum and bass beats, vocal samples, and light guitar playing by Clapton. While “What She Wants” was a single for radio play, “Rip Stop” was picked as a single for the clubs, with various 12″ releases seeing the light of day with various remixes. I suspect not a single club DJ even bothered with it, however.

The tracks I’m sharing tonight are from the Japanese CD Single for “Rip Stop.” As you can see from the remix titles, they were able to finagle some relatively big names into remixing the tracks, with two mixes by early drum and bass producer DJ Pulse as well as a one by remix giants Rabbit In The Moon (I have no idea who Shed Science is though).

As a whole, the remixes are good and work to the song’s strengths, mainly the dope beats and overall vibe. Some downplay Clapton’s guitar work to an almost comical effect, with others bring it to the forefront. Of the bunch, I enjoy Rabbit In The Moon’s take on the track the most. It’s hella long, and incorporates a lot of interesting new elements. It also is slow to bring in Clapton’s guitar. The riff doesn’t even make a prominent appearance until about halfway through the song’s 12-minute run time. It’s a good build.

And it’s certainly better than anything else Clapton put out since that song for that pool movie with Tom Cruise.

 

The 80s Were Kind of Fucked Up

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

The next time I promise to do five posts in one week I’m going to stick to stupid dance music that I can talk about in 100 words or less.

The Bunburys
Fight (No Matter How Long)
This is the kind of weird, stupid shit I can only find at Jerry’s Records. I got this track off of a 12″ promo single. The single had no art, just a label that read the following:

“In the tradition of famous pseudonyms like Dr. Winston O’Boogie, George Harrysong, Klark Kent, The Glimmer Twins, Suzy and The Red Stripes, Lord Chocice, and The Barbusters comes The Bunburys. The lead vocalist and guitarist on this track is a core artist on rock radio, who is currently at a crossroads at his career. One listen and the mystery will be solved.”

Oooh! So mysterious! That label is right though, as soon as you start playing this record it’s more than obvious that the singer/guitarist in question is none other than Eric Clapton (as if the whole “Crossroads” reference on the label wasn’t hint enough).

What’s weird about this is that the label makes no mention of the other artists who make up The Bunburys. This was actually not a side-project or pseudonym for Clapton, he’s just a guest on the track. Actually, The Bunburys was a pseudonym for The Bee Gees.

Details on how and why the Bee Gees decided to record as The Bunburys are a little hard to come by, although this site fills in the details good enough. Apparently it was their manager David English’s idea. He was working on a children’s cartoon that taught the importance of teamwork and…um…cricket to impressionable young Britons and he had The Bee Gees created a theme song for the show. That track, “We Are The Bunburys,” was was released as a single in 1986.

Now, what I can’t find out is how/why they decided to re-release the single in 1988, with this decidedly non-children’s song as the B-side. I also cannot find out how the hell Eric Clapton got involved, and I certainly can’t decipher exactly how or why this track ended up on the soundtrack to the 1988 Olympics.

I’m just going to chalk it all up to “wtf 80s” and be done with it. I can’t think about this stuff too much, it makes my brain hurt.

Wall Of Voodoo
Do It Again (Extended Mix)
Do It Again (Bonus Beats)
Do It Again (Single Version)
Do It Again (Dub Mix)
Further proof of my “wtf 80s” hypothesis.

This is a cover of a Beach Boys song by Wall Of Voodoo, or at least the band that was calling themselves Wall of Voodoo in the late 80s (lead singer Stan Ridgway and two other members of the classic line-up had left the band by this point). I was a child in the 80s, and while I do recall a prevailing theme of 1950s nostalgia throughout the entire decade, even that can’t explain how something as batshit crazy as this manages to will itself into existence.

Even more out there, Brian fucking Wilson from the Beach Boys appeared in the video, which is so freaky and trippy that I’m surprised it didn’t make the poor bastard relapse into another psychotic episode.