Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival

Carlos Ortiz for The New York Times
Published: June 27, 2010
NYT

BRIDGEVIEW, Ill. — Close-ups of strings, fretboards and guitarists’ callused fingers filled the video screens on Saturday at Toyota Park here, a stadium just outside Chicago, where Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival presented some two-dozen guitar-slingers during a sold-out, 11-hour concert.

Joining Mr. Clapton among the headliners were B. B. King, Jeff Beck, John Mayer, Buddy Guy and Vince Gill. Mr. Clapton attended the whole show before leading his own band, with Mr. Beck and Steve Winwood as guests. He sat in during the concert’s noontime opening, set by the rip-roaring Louisiana slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, and later appeared with Sheryl Crow.

It was the third Crossroads guitar marathon Mr. Clapton has organized; the others were in 2004 in Dallas and in 2007 here. While the concerts are benefits for Crossroads Center, Antigua, a nonprofit addiction-treatment clinic that Mr. Clapton founded in the Caribbean, they are also rallies for what sometimes seems to be an endangered species: the guitar hero, the kind of player who can seize and hold an audience with chorus after chorus of an instrumental solo.

Punk set out to overthrow the guitar hero decades ago, seeing long solos as pointless indulgences. It damaged the concept, but the species survives. Over the course of the day the gathered musicians used their electric guitars for tickle and twang, for keening and roaring, for funk rhythm and airborne melody, for conversation and competition.

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