[Slowhand] Clapton "Rethinks" Playing "Cocaine"

[RMS1]

This is news?  Hasn't he BEEN playing this song again for at least two
years that I know of, if not longer.  I know he played it in Dallas in
June 2004, and later on his regular tour when I saw him near Miami.
Where have they been sleeping? 

 

Debby J.

 

 

Eric Clapton Rethinks Playing 'Cocaine'
Oct 2, 1:20 PM EST

The Associated Press

Eric Clapton <http://music.msn.com/artist/?artist=16119814>  is playing
"Cocaine" in concert again. The recovering drug addict and alcoholic,
who founded the Crossroads Centre addiction recovery center on the
Caribbean island of Antigua, stopped performing the song written by J.J.
Cale <http://music.msn.com/artist/?artist=16073380>  when he first got
sober.

"I thought that it might be giving the wrong message to people who were
in the same boat as me," Clapton recently told The Associated Press.

"But further investigation proved ... the song, if anything, if it's not
even ambivalent, it's an anti-drug song. And so I thought that might be
a better way to do it, to approach it from a more positive point of
view. And carry on performing it as not a pro-drug song, but just as a
reality check about what it does."

Clapton's band shouts out "dirty cocaine" during the song.

"It's one of those songs that you can take it any way you like," Clapton
told the AP. "But it very clearly says in the opening verse, `If you
wanna get down, down on the ground,' I mean, that's, I think, the focal
point of the song. That's what the song's about, is that, you know,
there's a price."

Clapton also said he missed playing "Cocaine," with its signature guitar
riff, "just purely from a musical point of view."

Clapton, 61, is on the North American leg of his world tour. His duet CD
with Cale, "The Road to Escondido," is scheduled for release Nov. 7.

 

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