Eric Clapton – Nothing But the Blues – Double Vinyl Records

Description

Eric Clapton – Nothing But the Blues – Double Vinyl Records

Nothing But the Blues returns to Eric Clapton’s November 1994 performances at the Fillmore in San Francisco, when he was touring behind From the Cradle. That studio album had put blues repertoire at the center of his work, and these concerts carried the same commitment onto the stage. Released as an audio album in 2022, this double-LP edition contains eighteen performances drawn from two nights, November 8 and 9. It offers a sustained blues set with room for both familiar songs and material outside the studio album’s selection.

The opening run sets out the record’s range through ‘Blues All Day Long,’ ‘Standing ’Round Crying,’ ‘Forty-Four’ and ‘It Hurts Me Too.’ Jimmy Rogers’s ‘Blues All Day Long’ and the traditional blues standard ‘Forty-Four’ are among the songs that extend the program beyond From the Cradle. Clapton approaches this repertoire as a performing guitarist and singer, allowing the phrasing and the band’s responses to carry the music. The live setting gives the songs a different character from the studio recordings, even where the titles are shared.

‘Crossroads’ and Robert Johnson’s ‘Malted Milk’ bring two important strands of Clapton’s relationship with the blues into the same sequence. They sit alongside ‘Motherless Child,’ ‘How Long,’ ‘Reconsider Baby’ and ‘Sinners Prayer,’ keeping the album focused on the breadth of the repertoire rather than a parade of his pop hits. The changes in pace and delivery matter as much as the individual solos. Over the course of the set, the guitar can answer a vocal phrase, take the foreground or settle back into the arrangement without disrupting the song’s shape.

‘Every Day I Have the Blues,’ ‘Someday After a While (You’ll Be Sorry)’ and Freddie King’s ‘Have You Ever Loved a Woman’ lead into the closing stretch. The latter gives Clapton a setting for the sustained, vocal-like lead playing closely associated with his blues performances. ‘I’m Tore Down’ and ‘Groaning Blues’ follow, and the vinyl program finishes with ‘County Jail Blues,’ the extra track on the two-record audio edition. That addition makes the LP configuration distinct from the seventeen-track standard CD while keeping it within the same Fillmore recordings.

Simon Climie remixed the performances from the original multitrack recordings for the 2022 release. The concerts were also central to the Nothing But the Blues documentary, produced by Scooter Weintraub and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, which first aired in 1995. This release presents the music as a standalone live album, with the complete eighteen-track vinyl sequence on Reprise. For listeners interested in the From the Cradle period, it supplies the stage counterpart to that studio project and a generous account of Clapton concentrating on the blues repertoire that shaped his playing.

Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic

Release Details

Artist

Eric Clapton

Album

Nothing But the Blues

Format

Double Vinyl Records

Media configuration

2 LPs

Original album release

2022 (performances recorded 1994)

Label

Reprise

Track Listing

Blues All Day Long

Standing ’Round Crying

Forty-Four

It Hurts Me Too

Early in the Morning

Five Long Years

Crossroads

Malted Milk

Motherless Child

How Long

Reconsider Baby

Sinners Prayer

Every Day I Have the Blues

Someday After a While (You’ll Be Sorry)

Have You Ever Loved a Woman

I’m Tore Down

Groaning Blues

County Jail Blues