Eric Clapton: uncanceled

No sooner had Donald Trump won his second presidential election than pundits began to identify pre-election signs that the result should not have come as a surprise.

One such indicator that went unnoticed altogether took place at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sept. 23 and 24, 2023: the seventh Crossroads Guitar Festival. Like its six predecessors, the weekend-long charity event featured performances by dozens of stars from the worlds of rock, blues, R&B, country, folk, bluegrass, and jazz.

Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2023 Eric Clapton

Rhino Entertainment has recently released highlights of the event under the title Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2023. And by making it available in multiple formats (four CDs and two Blu-rays, six vinyl LPs, two DVDs, digital), Rhino is treating it like the big deal, both in terms of quality and quantity, that it is.

But the fest was something more: It was a signal that “cancel culture,” the left’s ace in the hole since Trump’s first term, had been played out.

There’s nothing political about the music itself, unless burnishing up, and thus “conserving,” classics such as “Today I Started Loving You Again” (Bradley Walker), “Always on My Mind” (Walker and Eric Clapton), “Sweet Home Chicago” (Jimmie Vaughan), “A Love Supreme” (Santana and John McLaughlin), and, incredibly, “Für Elise/Foxy Lady” (Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Eric Gales, Joe Bonamassa) counts as “conservative.” There’s nothing woke or progressive either.

But it’s not the absence of agitprop that in hindsight qualifies the festival as a bellwether. It’s that Crossroads, as the title of the new Rhino packages indicates, was founded by Eric Clapton, a musician who only recently was being mocked as a conspiracy theorist and all but “canceled” because he challenged the effectiveness of COVID vaccines and opposed lockdowns. An October 2021 piece in Rolling Stone even predicted, with undisguised optimism, that such stances might prove to be “among the final acts of [Clapton’s] career” and implied that many of his peers now considered him beyond the pale.

If such was the case in 2021, the case had changed by the fall of 2023. Clapton, after all, isn’t just Crossroads’ founder. He’s also a headlining performer with a killer band. Add the Crossroads participants themselves—many of whom epitomize cool and none of whom seemed to consider Clapton toxic—and you have not only a show of support for the festival’s cause (recovery from addiction) but also a testament to the erosion of the hill upon which, not that long ago, so many in the entertainment community seemed eager to die.