![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
All right. A lot to write about that will interest almost no one. I am now vaguely, pinkishly sunburned and can say that I've seen ZZ Top and Eric Clapton and... a lot of hardcore guitar fans. Yeah.
So guys, Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010. That's on our radar, right? Right. So, long story short my mom really wanted to go (having a crush on Jeff Beck, being obsessed with the last Crossroads in 2007, etc.), and I agreed to go because she couldn't find anyone else to go with her and, historically speaking, I never turn down a concert. (One day this won't be true, but it'd take a lot of effort to find something I wouldn't attend if someone else was paying for the tickets.)
I'll be honest. Every hardcore guitar song sounds the same to me. (Nearly) every guitar solo sounds the same to me. And, as I expected, there were only about three people at the festival who had a distinguishable style that went beyond their chosen genre (and now that I've said three, I think I might just mean... two. Or one? Two. I know I can safely say Buddy Guy has his own style. As does BB King.) I'm going to write this off as having an untrained ear, however, because apparently every folk-ish sounding band/singer is the same thing, to say nothing of all the indie stuff out there (and even to me, a lot of that has gotten same-ish). I suspect if I dragged my mom to Pitchfork she'd have many of the same complaints (only instead of me complaining about sweaty guitar nerds she'd have to complain about sweaty hipsters). Lucky for her, I'm not going to Pitchfork this year out of protest over them being shills for MIA and The Rolling Stones (I mean, what?) this year. Also I missed the window for weekend passes and the lineup just really isn't that exciting this year anyway. And there's going to be a comedy tent. Pah.
Anyway! In great festival tradition, let's see how much of the show I remember:
11:50 AM – 12:15 PM: Sonny Landreth: So okay, I liked Sonny Landreth. Not a lot, but he was good, and he was happy. Like, not smile because you're on stage happy, happy to be playing happy. That wins a lot of points with me. Unfortunately all I really remember about his music is that he played the guitar with a slide. Most of the rest of what I remember is quietly laughing because it looked exactly like Dr. Rush had picked up a guitar and decided to stop being a cranky git.
12:20 – 12:55 PM: Robert Randolph joined by Joe Bonamassa & Pino Daniele: Unlike Sonny Landreth, Robert Randolph played the slide guitar (technically a pedal steel), which is different than playing the guitar with a slide (this is annoying and imprecise use of language, guitar fandom!). I don't remember much of this set. He was all right, though.
1:00 – 1:40 PM: Robert Cray with Jimmie Vaughan & Hubert Sumlin: I think, I think it was in the interim before this set that we were introduced, inexplicably, to bits of the US/Ghana World Cup game. This was particularly beautiful because I was in the line for water (a common theme for the day), not paying attention to anything going on stage- and jumbotron-wise, and suddenly the stadium filled with the sound of vuvuzelas. I started laughing, but I don't think anyone else understood. Also, I don't really remember much of this set.
1:45 – 2 PM Bert Jansch: According to my mom this guy was an acoustic player. I think this is when the sun was really getting to me (there was no shade whatsoever), so I... don't remember much of this set specifically, but it seemed to go on forever. Normally I don't mind acoustic music but it was just so... it's like someone took just the idea of acoustic guitar music and didn't do anything else with it.
2:05 – 2:20 PM Stefan Grossman: I've consulted with my mom, who is much better which these people than I am, and even she isn't sure if this set actually happened. (According to wikipedia he is another acoustic guitar player, and it has now occurred to me that this is the reason I thought the previous acoustic set went on forever. The other guy left, and this guy came out. His mic wasn't working, and I assumed the other guy had come out with an unscheduled encore and they were trying to cut him off. It was apparently two back-to-back acoustic sets that sounded much the same. In fact, from across a football field, they even almost looked the same. Deja-set! (No wonder all the fans were restless. I think these two sets were secretly meant to be everyone's lunch break.)
2:25 – 2:50 PM ZZ Top: It's a testament to ZZ Top that, despite the fact that I was having trouble keeping conscious through the relentless sun, I actually do remember their set. Possibly because it was exactly what you'd expect ZZ Top to look and sound like, so I could just as easily have hallucinated it due to sun stroke. (I am not ruling out this possibility.)
3:00 – 3:40 PM Doyle Bramhall II joined by Gary Clark & Sheryl Crow: I think I'll just say that I don't like Sheryl Crow and leave it at that. This wasn't the beginning of the "everyone inviting everyone else on stage" thing, nor was it the end, but this marked the beginning of like, three sets in a row with Sheryl Crow in them and that was just unnecessary. Also I was really miserably hot and wishing for a rain storm.
3:50 – 4:35 PM Vince Gill joined by Albert Lee, James Burton, & Keb' Mo': Until Sheryl Crow came on, this was actually good. I even remembered the first song he played from way back when I used to listen to country music (something like... something more than ten years ago, let's just say that). Also the first set that covered a couple of genres (not just Vince-Gill-country. (Yes, I'm just sitting here proving my own point about how indistinguishable most of these sets were from each other... I'll give it this much: these were all short sets, so it's hard to put something together in that amount of time that is recognizable and yet not generic.)
4:45 – 5:00 PM Citizen Cope: Kind of protest singer-sounding. Pretty okay. I was still wishing for rain, but marginally more conscious because at some point previously my mom had found food.
5:05 – 5:20 PM Earl Klugh: This is another set neither of us remember. Kids, if you are going to a show in a large stadium that is 12 hours long and it's almost 90 degrees, seek shade. I don't know why I sat in the bleachers the entire time. A bit of research shows that this guy was a jazz guitar player, which explains the set I vaguely remember that sounded like elevator music. I just couldn't pin it to an exact time of day. (I am a terrible consumer of music, I'm sorry!)
5:25 – 5:50 PM John Mayer: In which things get recognizable! Except John Mayer is trying to be a bad boy (but only succeeding in being a jerk) and also was making an effort to fit in with what the crowd expected, so he couldn't play anything anyone actually knew. Instead he played Jimi Hendrix songs (which would be good except it was John Mayer playing them). Also, just as I wrote in 2003, his lyrics are completely gibberish. At least he didn't change that in his effort to be a bad-boy.
6:00 – 6:35 PM Buddy Guy with Jonny Lang: This made up for the discomfort of most of the previous sets. Out of everyone there, I'm probably closest to being an actual fan of Buddy Guy. He's got proper charisma, and his own style. Plus this set had the most adorable moment of the entire day: at least until it gets taken down, since much like Pitchfork, images/recordings of the entire show are copyrighted. (For those that aren't going to watch, Buddy breaks a string, Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones very theatrically offers him his guitar, Buddy instead makes an adorable face and sings about breaking his string while the roadies bring out his trademark polka-dot guitar. Also, guys, any man that can pull off polka-dots on a regular basis must be cool, right?)
6:45 – 7:35 PM Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi Band joined by Warren Haynes, Sheryl Crow, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rojas, & Johnny Winter: Sheryl Crow. Again. The rest was all right, I guess.
7:45 – 8:20 PM Jeff Beck: So, Jeff Beck is my mom's big guitar god crush, so naturally I had to mock the heck out of this set. It was all right, but here's the thing: It was also very, very confused. It went from normal guitar solo stuff to... a cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Then there was a frakawesome bass solo. And then it kind of turned into this kind of neo-futuristic guitar solo stuff, with the occasionally-vocoded keyboardist making robot singing noises (bonus points for re-watching with the vuvuzela button). He could not have made it easier for me to tease my mom for liking him. (However, if not for my mom, I probably would've enjoyed his set, because, as off-base as he was on... sense, at least he was doing something different. Though my impression is that "different" is not his usual schtick. Also, we saw him at Buddy Guy's club on Thursday night, and he actually ran away rather than play his guitar with Jimmie Vaughn, so I'm beginning to suspect that he's actually a brilliantly-programmed android Jeff Beck and the real one is holed up back in England with his cars.) Either that, or for a moment, on the stage at Crossroads in front of 30,000 people, his keyboardist mistakenly thought he'd joined Daft Punk.
8:35 – 10:05 PM Eric Clapton with Steve Winwood: Okay, they were solidly good. The bits with just Clapton weren't my favourite, but once Steve Winwood came out he made things a little more interesting (he appears to be a keyboardist more than a guitarist, which is probably why I like him over of the guitar people). They covered Hendix rather epically, though, and I enjoyed that.
10:10 – 10:30 PM BB King with Robert Cray Band: I suspect this was supposed to be BB's own set, but Clapton, Jimmie Vaughn, and Robert Cray came out first. BB was... annoyed, I think, and teased them for a while, to Eric Clapton's increasing chagrin. He spent probably 70% of the set talking, which would be unsurprising to anyone who had ever seen BB King at all before (at least, recently). I can't imagine that Eric Clapton didn't expect this, and yet he and the other two guys playing with him kept looking more and more uncomfortable, and the camera would keep catching one or the others mouthing something like "Play something!" It was pretty hilariously uncomfortable (though I did feel bad for Clapton).
10:30 – 10:50 PM FINALE: Due in part to the verboseness of BB's set, this didn't actually start until after 11, which is when the entire show was supposed to be over. It was, as expected, a giant mass of guitarists playing the great obligatory blues shout-along: Sweet Home Chicago. It was the end to every rock-out movie ever. It was pretty good. Not my choice of a Saturday, but definitely a... Cultural Experience. (A very... middle class white American Cultural Experience. Though there were three Japanese tourists I saw throughout the day (they were very obvious), who then sat across from me on the bus ride back to the CTA station. There was a family of guys standing in the aisle between us, and they could not have been more stereotypical. The accents were terrible, they were shouting their pointless "Haha yeah woooo!" conversation, and completely failing at riding the bus properly (they kept stepping on everyone's feet). I wanted to put my face in my hands and pretend that I wasn't there. From what I remember of Japanese, the three of them actually managed not to talk about how obnoxious they were, but I really wish people wouldn't go around proving stereotypes exactly correct. (The Japanese tourists, for their part, looked... actually, like stereotypical Japanese rockers. But at least that's a subset stereotype, and not the typical "Oh, these guys must be Japanese" stereotype.)
I also spent a good part of the day feeling vaguely guilty because there were probably several thousand people in the world who would've appreciated tickets to this much more than I did. Which isn't to say I didn't find it entertaining. I'm just... an unappreciative and snarky hipster about it.
So guys, Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010. That's on our radar, right? Right. So, long story short my mom really wanted to go (having a crush on Jeff Beck, being obsessed with the last Crossroads in 2007, etc.), and I agreed to go because she couldn't find anyone else to go with her and, historically speaking, I never turn down a concert. (One day this won't be true, but it'd take a lot of effort to find something I wouldn't attend if someone else was paying for the tickets.)
I'll be honest. Every hardcore guitar song sounds the same to me. (Nearly) every guitar solo sounds the same to me. And, as I expected, there were only about three people at the festival who had a distinguishable style that went beyond their chosen genre (and now that I've said three, I think I might just mean... two. Or one? Two. I know I can safely say Buddy Guy has his own style. As does BB King.) I'm going to write this off as having an untrained ear, however, because apparently every folk-ish sounding band/singer is the same thing, to say nothing of all the indie stuff out there (and even to me, a lot of that has gotten same-ish). I suspect if I dragged my mom to Pitchfork she'd have many of the same complaints (only instead of me complaining about sweaty guitar nerds she'd have to complain about sweaty hipsters). Lucky for her, I'm not going to Pitchfork this year out of protest over them being shills for MIA and The Rolling Stones (I mean, what?) this year. Also I missed the window for weekend passes and the lineup just really isn't that exciting this year anyway. And there's going to be a comedy tent. Pah.
Anyway! In great festival tradition, let's see how much of the show I remember:
11:50 AM – 12:15 PM: Sonny Landreth: So okay, I liked Sonny Landreth. Not a lot, but he was good, and he was happy. Like, not smile because you're on stage happy, happy to be playing happy. That wins a lot of points with me. Unfortunately all I really remember about his music is that he played the guitar with a slide. Most of the rest of what I remember is quietly laughing because it looked exactly like Dr. Rush had picked up a guitar and decided to stop being a cranky git.
12:20 – 12:55 PM: Robert Randolph joined by Joe Bonamassa & Pino Daniele: Unlike Sonny Landreth, Robert Randolph played the slide guitar (technically a pedal steel), which is different than playing the guitar with a slide (this is annoying and imprecise use of language, guitar fandom!). I don't remember much of this set. He was all right, though.
1:00 – 1:40 PM: Robert Cray with Jimmie Vaughan & Hubert Sumlin: I think, I think it was in the interim before this set that we were introduced, inexplicably, to bits of the US/Ghana World Cup game. This was particularly beautiful because I was in the line for water (a common theme for the day), not paying attention to anything going on stage- and jumbotron-wise, and suddenly the stadium filled with the sound of vuvuzelas. I started laughing, but I don't think anyone else understood. Also, I don't really remember much of this set.
1:45 – 2 PM Bert Jansch: According to my mom this guy was an acoustic player. I think this is when the sun was really getting to me (there was no shade whatsoever), so I... don't remember much of this set specifically, but it seemed to go on forever. Normally I don't mind acoustic music but it was just so... it's like someone took just the idea of acoustic guitar music and didn't do anything else with it.
2:05 – 2:20 PM Stefan Grossman: I've consulted with my mom, who is much better which these people than I am, and even she isn't sure if this set actually happened. (According to wikipedia he is another acoustic guitar player, and it has now occurred to me that this is the reason I thought the previous acoustic set went on forever. The other guy left, and this guy came out. His mic wasn't working, and I assumed the other guy had come out with an unscheduled encore and they were trying to cut him off. It was apparently two back-to-back acoustic sets that sounded much the same. In fact, from across a football field, they even almost looked the same. Deja-set! (No wonder all the fans were restless. I think these two sets were secretly meant to be everyone's lunch break.)
2:25 – 2:50 PM ZZ Top: It's a testament to ZZ Top that, despite the fact that I was having trouble keeping conscious through the relentless sun, I actually do remember their set. Possibly because it was exactly what you'd expect ZZ Top to look and sound like, so I could just as easily have hallucinated it due to sun stroke. (I am not ruling out this possibility.)
3:00 – 3:40 PM Doyle Bramhall II joined by Gary Clark & Sheryl Crow: I think I'll just say that I don't like Sheryl Crow and leave it at that. This wasn't the beginning of the "everyone inviting everyone else on stage" thing, nor was it the end, but this marked the beginning of like, three sets in a row with Sheryl Crow in them and that was just unnecessary. Also I was really miserably hot and wishing for a rain storm.
3:50 – 4:35 PM Vince Gill joined by Albert Lee, James Burton, & Keb' Mo': Until Sheryl Crow came on, this was actually good. I even remembered the first song he played from way back when I used to listen to country music (something like... something more than ten years ago, let's just say that). Also the first set that covered a couple of genres (not just Vince-Gill-country. (Yes, I'm just sitting here proving my own point about how indistinguishable most of these sets were from each other... I'll give it this much: these were all short sets, so it's hard to put something together in that amount of time that is recognizable and yet not generic.)
4:45 – 5:00 PM Citizen Cope: Kind of protest singer-sounding. Pretty okay. I was still wishing for rain, but marginally more conscious because at some point previously my mom had found food.
5:05 – 5:20 PM Earl Klugh: This is another set neither of us remember. Kids, if you are going to a show in a large stadium that is 12 hours long and it's almost 90 degrees, seek shade. I don't know why I sat in the bleachers the entire time. A bit of research shows that this guy was a jazz guitar player, which explains the set I vaguely remember that sounded like elevator music. I just couldn't pin it to an exact time of day. (I am a terrible consumer of music, I'm sorry!)
5:25 – 5:50 PM John Mayer: In which things get recognizable! Except John Mayer is trying to be a bad boy (but only succeeding in being a jerk) and also was making an effort to fit in with what the crowd expected, so he couldn't play anything anyone actually knew. Instead he played Jimi Hendrix songs (which would be good except it was John Mayer playing them). Also, just as I wrote in 2003, his lyrics are completely gibberish. At least he didn't change that in his effort to be a bad-boy.
6:00 – 6:35 PM Buddy Guy with Jonny Lang: This made up for the discomfort of most of the previous sets. Out of everyone there, I'm probably closest to being an actual fan of Buddy Guy. He's got proper charisma, and his own style. Plus this set had the most adorable moment of the entire day: at least until it gets taken down, since much like Pitchfork, images/recordings of the entire show are copyrighted. (For those that aren't going to watch, Buddy breaks a string, Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones very theatrically offers him his guitar, Buddy instead makes an adorable face and sings about breaking his string while the roadies bring out his trademark polka-dot guitar. Also, guys, any man that can pull off polka-dots on a regular basis must be cool, right?)
6:45 – 7:35 PM Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi Band joined by Warren Haynes, Sheryl Crow, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rojas, & Johnny Winter: Sheryl Crow. Again. The rest was all right, I guess.
7:45 – 8:20 PM Jeff Beck: So, Jeff Beck is my mom's big guitar god crush, so naturally I had to mock the heck out of this set. It was all right, but here's the thing: It was also very, very confused. It went from normal guitar solo stuff to... a cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Then there was a frakawesome bass solo. And then it kind of turned into this kind of neo-futuristic guitar solo stuff, with the occasionally-vocoded keyboardist making robot singing noises (bonus points for re-watching with the vuvuzela button). He could not have made it easier for me to tease my mom for liking him. (However, if not for my mom, I probably would've enjoyed his set, because, as off-base as he was on... sense, at least he was doing something different. Though my impression is that "different" is not his usual schtick. Also, we saw him at Buddy Guy's club on Thursday night, and he actually ran away rather than play his guitar with Jimmie Vaughn, so I'm beginning to suspect that he's actually a brilliantly-programmed android Jeff Beck and the real one is holed up back in England with his cars.) Either that, or for a moment, on the stage at Crossroads in front of 30,000 people, his keyboardist mistakenly thought he'd joined Daft Punk.
8:35 – 10:05 PM Eric Clapton with Steve Winwood: Okay, they were solidly good. The bits with just Clapton weren't my favourite, but once Steve Winwood came out he made things a little more interesting (he appears to be a keyboardist more than a guitarist, which is probably why I like him over of the guitar people). They covered Hendix rather epically, though, and I enjoyed that.
10:10 – 10:30 PM BB King with Robert Cray Band: I suspect this was supposed to be BB's own set, but Clapton, Jimmie Vaughn, and Robert Cray came out first. BB was... annoyed, I think, and teased them for a while, to Eric Clapton's increasing chagrin. He spent probably 70% of the set talking, which would be unsurprising to anyone who had ever seen BB King at all before (at least, recently). I can't imagine that Eric Clapton didn't expect this, and yet he and the other two guys playing with him kept looking more and more uncomfortable, and the camera would keep catching one or the others mouthing something like "Play something!" It was pretty hilariously uncomfortable (though I did feel bad for Clapton).
10:30 – 10:50 PM FINALE: Due in part to the verboseness of BB's set, this didn't actually start until after 11, which is when the entire show was supposed to be over. It was, as expected, a giant mass of guitarists playing the great obligatory blues shout-along: Sweet Home Chicago. It was the end to every rock-out movie ever. It was pretty good. Not my choice of a Saturday, but definitely a... Cultural Experience. (A very... middle class white American Cultural Experience. Though there were three Japanese tourists I saw throughout the day (they were very obvious), who then sat across from me on the bus ride back to the CTA station. There was a family of guys standing in the aisle between us, and they could not have been more stereotypical. The accents were terrible, they were shouting their pointless "Haha yeah woooo!" conversation, and completely failing at riding the bus properly (they kept stepping on everyone's feet). I wanted to put my face in my hands and pretend that I wasn't there. From what I remember of Japanese, the three of them actually managed not to talk about how obnoxious they were, but I really wish people wouldn't go around proving stereotypes exactly correct. (The Japanese tourists, for their part, looked... actually, like stereotypical Japanese rockers. But at least that's a subset stereotype, and not the typical "Oh, these guys must be Japanese" stereotype.)
I also spent a good part of the day feeling vaguely guilty because there were probably several thousand people in the world who would've appreciated tickets to this much more than I did. Which isn't to say I didn't find it entertaining. I'm just... an unappreciative and snarky hipster about it.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
I ask the important questions
From:
Re: I ask the important questions
It wasn't as full of sweaty, shirtless middle-aged men as I thought it would be. There certainly were a good number, but there was an almost-equal number of young(er) shirtless men, and even a few women (only one of whom was shirtless, and none were topless).