Eric Clapton has announced the seventh Crossroads Guitar Festival, which will play over two nights — September 23rd and 24th — at L.A.'s Crypto.com Arena. Clapton will perform both nights with a different lineup and among the many notables set to play over the two shows are Santana, Stephen Stills, Robbie Robertson, ZZ Top, Jimmie Vaughan, Roger McGuinn, Albert Lee, Los Lobos, Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, John Mayer Trio, Jakob Dylan, Keb' Mo', Buddy Guy, H.E.R., Marcus King, and many more.
All proceeds will benefit the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, the chemical dependency treatment and education facility that Eric Clapton founded in 1998. Tickets to the festival will go on sale this Friday, April 21st at 10:00 a.m. local via Ticketmaster. Each day will be sold as its own ticket and there will no two-day passes available.
Eric Clapton said that he'll always be happy to raise money for the Crossroads Centre, but he'd like to remove himself a bit from the operation, as least as far as its public face is concerned: ["They still need money. I think that's something that I'll probably always be fairly happy to plug into, and it is intriguing to think of different ways to raise the capital. But where I really want to be detached is in terms of my identity, or the fact that the place belongs to me, or anything like (that). I want, for its own sake, for it to have its own whole identity, without my connection. And it's got there — it actually has reached that."] SOUNDCUE (:21 OC: . . . has reached that.)
Clapton told us he planned the festival so that a wide variety of musical styles would always be represented: ["In very diverse ways, it started out with Pat Metheny, and B.B. King, and Dan Tyminski, and John McLaughlin, and people like that. But I think it needs to be incredibly eclectic, 'cause that's the way I, I look at music. The guitar has so many different faces, so it shouldn't just be a blues festival or anything — I mean, it should, it needs to be every aspect of the guitar."] SOUNDCUE (:20 OC: . . . of the guitar)
Eric Clapton performs tonight (April 18th) at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan.