2 February 2013 (Day 33) – Derek, Eric Clapton and Me

It was a fine morning.  I woke up, walked Lady and then had a coffee with “M” who reminded me that I have an appointment with my dentist.  Now anyone reading this might just think that the first sentence of this post is intended as an ironic comment or simply an avoidance of reality.  Fortunately my dentist is not an odontic monster such as Laurence Olivier’s character in Marathon Man but is one of my oldest and closest friends.

I met Derek at secondary school in the same class we shared with Mickey.  It didn’t take long before Derek and I realised we were kindred spirits.  With an ancestral heritage back to the same neck of the Mediterranean woods, we bonded over a fanatical determination to succeed academically and other interests.  In this instance these were soccer (Derek was an exceptional player), tennis (many a summer’s holiday spent at tournaments at either Kooyong or Melbourne Park) and music.   

Derek’s musical taste has never diversified one bit over the decades I’ve known him.  There has been no wearing of skinny new wave ties, no dabbling in electronica, not even a spandex wearing, head banging heavy metal phase.   Rather, Derek has devoted a lifetime to the most noble and dignified of genres, The Blues, or even more specifically, the Blues Guitar.  Within that sphere, Derek has moved with the times.  Whilst his love for the classic guitarists - Albert King, Albert Collins, B.B King,  Buddy Guy, etc has remained, I’ve seen it encompass the rise and death of the great  Stevie Ray Vaughn and onto a range of present day gunslingers, notably Derek Trucks and Joe Bonamassa.   Derek and his older brother caught a gig by Bonamassa recently.  In fact, one of the most predictable aspects of my musical life is that if I’m going to a gig by a visiting blues guitarist, Derek will be somewhere in the audience, usually with his brother.  When we catch up, I don’t need to ask if he saw, say, Eric Clapton recently.  All I have to do is ask “How was Eric?” and the response will come.

But perhaps that example is too obvious.  For Derek, Eric Clapton stands head and shoulders above all.  Do you know a football or sporting fanatic who waits for the release of the fixture for the next season before submitting applications for leave for the year?  Derek decides which weeks he’ll be available at his practice based on Clapton’s annual run of shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London.  He’s attended over a few years, each time taking in multiple gigs.  The same applies this year, should he decide to go. He already has tickets to three shows.  As he treats me, Derek fills me on the latest Clapton news.  There’s a new album coming, a world tour that he fears will probably miss Australia and the 2 disc Collector’s Edition of Slowhand has been released.  Naturally he’s already got it and is very enthusiastic about the live material on the second disc.  It also encouraged some experimentation on his part. He went through his Collection, found that with the Slowhand package, he now has nine versions of After Midnight and decided to play them all in succession.  When I seek permission to write about him and ask if he wants a psedonym for this post, the answer comes immediately.  “How about Derek?”  I don’t need to ask whether this is a reference to his favourite Clapton album.

But  one thing about Derek has always intrigued me.  How does someone fix on a musical path so early in life and then maintain it?  I finally asked him the question and the answer is one of the great rock clichés and one that has never applied to me.  It is the influence of an older brother – the one with whom he still gigs – and his record collection. As I journey home, I muse over this; how would my tastes have evolved if I had an older brother with a collection?  Would it have been dramatically different?  Would it have removed the initial basis for determining some of the closest friends I have?  I know I haven’t influenced any of my siblings, or “M” for that matter, very much so decide to let the question remain unanswered.  Life is a lot less complicated when you just accept your friends (and wife) for just being there rather than torture yourself about how you might never have met. 

On that vaguely blues note, today’s listening was limited to the album I played whilst writing this post.  Deciding against a Clapton album, I went for one by two of the very best blues guitarists;

(100) Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn – In Session

Derek has probably forgotten but he gave me my copy not so long after this album was originally released.  (Then again, I’ve forgotten what I gave in return.)  This is a recording of a TV performance these two giants made for a Canadian television program which provides the album title.  The set features King’s then band and Vaughn and contains some real blues classics. Call It Stormy Monday, Blues At Sunrise and Don’t Lie to Me are the highlights and a great interplay between them is apparent.  King apparently claimed not to know about  SRV  when the idea for this show was first pitched but he then remembered he was “this skinny little kid” he played with in Austin 20 years previously.  He mustn’t have been that familiar with his output up to that stage because only one SRV track is included.  The version of Pride And Joy here, which King confusingly refers to as that “rap thing”, is one of the better renditions of this I’ve heard.  If you don’t have a release by either act, this is as good a place to start as any other.