Matt Van Stone

A dream of mine has come true. I got to see Eric Clapton live at the Saddledome on March 26th. It was awesome.

The concert was really good. I enjoyed it thoroughly. We weren’t as close as I originally thought. I thought we were in section 3, row 6, seat 7-10, but they had the stadium setup differently then the diagram showed on ticket master when we got the tickets, so we were actually in row 36. It would have been nicer to be in the lowest tier instead of floor because you wouldn’t have to try to look over the people in front of you, but still, they were really good seats.

The show was probably the best concert I have ever been to. The opening act, Robert Cray was really good. He is some old blues guy. It was awesome though because he didn’t play for very long, just 30 minutes or so. Then they setup for Clapton and he came right out. Clapton played until 10, then walked off. The crowd cheered for 5 minutes solid and they came back out and did 3 more songs. The sound was amazing. It was like watching a concert DVD in person. You always assume that they do all this post processing on the sound on those music DVDs, but really they wouldn’t need to if they regularly play as good as they did last night. Everything was in tune and the sound setup was great. You could hear all of the instruments and everything. Not like some of the metal shows I have been to where all you can hear is the vocals and the drums and then a barrage of guitar and bass noise. It was crystal clear.

The only thing I would change was I would have liked it if Clapton talked a bit more. He basically just came out, played, and left. He said a few words in between a few songs and introduced his band but that was it. It would have been nice to hear him talk for a minute or two.