“ Eric Clapton, please, on vocals.” So ends the definitive live recording of Crossroads, signed off with a terse acknowledgement by Jack Bruce, bass player and primary singer with Cream, to a rising tide of applause. To the band it may well have been just another rendition of a song that had been in their live repertoire since their very first gig. But today that live version is recognised as one of the most magnificent live performances in the history of rock, an astonishing piece of collective, semi-improvised genius by Clapton, Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, captured for posterity like the proverbial lightning in a bottle.
More than that, it was a moment of symbolic significance, a grandstanding performance of a song that linked the Young Turks of the rock revolution to the deepest elements of the blues storytelling tradition upon which the edifice of modern popular music was then being built.
Written and recorded as by Robert Johnson in 1937, the song springs from the essence of the Mississippi Delta blues tradition – a despairing,/ has now achieved a longevity in the popular imagination that few songs in any genre can claim.
