Word: pilgrimate
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...like taking a holiday. Not an easy vacation like, say, skiing in Vail, but more like an adventure tour, the musical equivalent of climbing a particularly high peak without bottled oxygen. Traditional rock can be a sad grind--for example, on Eric Clapton's wan new CD, Pilgrim, one of the few listenable songs, Sick and Tired, turns out to have disturbing lyrics about threatening to blow out a woman's brains...
When we meet the grown Harlan on the Greyhound bus handing out brochures for her faith-healing business and discussing water tanks with as much fervor as a pilgrim at a reliquary, her mother's concern about Harlan's grasp on "reality" begins to seem justified. Starting from the Spirit of Scandinavia Sardines, Harlan's train of thought takes off and plows through an existence where there is no boundary between the real and the unreal, the true and the untrue. From sardines she jumps to the slave-ships of the Middle Passage, to the fake Moroccan leather...
...project fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force of his example still merit the extreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the defining image of Gandhi was "as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences." Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi later said, "More than his words, his life was his message." These days, that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of many...
...hard to keep someone as talented as Clapton down for an entire album, and there are a few songs on Pilgrim that work. One Chance has a potent, brooding soulfulness; another song, Sick and Tired, features grinding, growling guitar work by Clapton as well as some strong, swaggering vocals. Partway through the song, during a down-and-dirty guitar solo, when Clapton lets loose an "Ow!" you feel, palpably, his joyful sense of abandon in wallowing in blues sorrow. These two songs alone are almost worth the price of the whole album...
Almost, but not quite. Fans of genuine blues guitar would do well to avoid buying Pilgrim--hey, that's what listening stations in record stores are for--and instead pick up a copy of Clapton's superior 1994 album of blues standards, From the Cradle, or, if that's already in their CD collection, blues great Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers. Clapton, of course, is more than just a bluesman--from Sunshine of Your Love to Layla to Tears in Heaven, he has displayed a mastery of a variety of musical styles, including hard rock...