Gemini unlocks my inner Eric Clapton

---

Here is the prompt:

"Can you produce a short video in which I am playing my Sire S3 strat in an Eric Clapton style, with an audio track which resembles Clapton's solo on Sunshine of Your Love?"

The supplied image was this.

It's amusing. I think I can produce that kind of guitar lick: no doubt I will upload something in a month or so. But the movements and facial expressions? It's not very me.

I think Gemini noticed my slight physical resemblance to the mature Eric Clapton and simply melded his stage performance onto my phenotype. It's a lesson as to how much stagecraft there is in performance, how much theatricality. That staged euphoria is also there for classical performers.

Eric Clapton learned this as he went along: in the Yardbirds and Cream he mostly stood around looking at the microphone, or vaguely at the audience, or his guitar. It was only later that he learned how to project the mystique of emotional engagement, orchestrating and amplifying the empathy of his audience.

Also, the guitar has mysteriously changed colour a little, and you may notice that the guitar is not actually plugged into an amp. Still, I take it to be aspirational.

---

Real Gone - talking the Blues

Real Gone - talking the Blues

She’s cute, she can play guitar, she’s got a voice like Sheryl Crow, and she channels Stevie Ray Vaughan. What’s not to like? So this is the Ally Venable Band with the title track of her 2023 album, Real Gone.

I’ve always been in the Blues/Rock camp, ever since I was a young teen (c. 1965). It drove me to save up for my first guitar: £15 with a generous subsidy from my father.

In the sixties, Blues for me was not scratchy acoustic songs from the impoverished black balladeers of the Delta; it was the reinvention of the genre in the hands of Clapton, Page and Hendrix; the power of the sixties counterculture.

Today, fifty years later, Joe Bonamassa may be every bit as technically fluent as the old masters, but Blues in the 2020s is adrift. Rooted neither in hardship nor in rebellion, the modern blues has turned inward: angst about 'preserving the tradition' and 'purity'.

I sometimes listen to new bands like the Zac Schulze Gang.

I’m super-impressed by the energy, the technical and performing skill. But apart from the classic covers (video) most of the new songs are not up to much - they feel disconnected from the zeitgeist.

What would it look like, a Blues which authentically expressed the angst and aspirations of today? Beth Hart, a woman of the demi-monde, comes to mind, and the blue-collar desperation of Walter Trout; the authentic, personal expression of long, hard lives lived at the sharp end.

But as a channel for the disaffected youth?

Not yet.