London Calling

It’s remarkable how fast things can happen on a whim.   I get a regular nudge on my e-mail from BestClassicBands.com.  Always entertaining stuff immersing me in the music of my boomer past.   A recent offering of forgotten hits of the British Invasion included a hit by one young Jonathon King “Everyone’s gone to the moon” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ks2TPPyho. A melodic but melancholy offering, it was included in the songs carried on Apollo 11.  So it made it to the moon. I never knew he was a dead ringer for the high-school version of me.

Mr King was wildly successful in pop music, writing “Hooked on a feeling” but spent a few years in the slammer for some time he spent with adolescent boys.  Too bad.

But back to the whim, came on today a clip of Eric Clapton with Derek and the Dominos in Johnny Cash’s TV show in 1970.  https://bestclassicbands.com/derek-dominos-johnny-cash-6-18-16666/.  After Eric got off a soulful “She’s gone”, Johnny joins Eric and brings on Carl Perkins himself – bad toupée and all – to front the trio.  Wow, just wow.  Then as an aside, BestClassicBands mentions Eric’s 2021 tour, postponed from 2020.  Eric is one of those boomer rockers always alluding to his “last tour”, but he’s an ernst mensch, so maybe he means it.  An eager click finds no dates planned near Detroit.  In fact, the “tour” seems to be almost entirely in London, with 5 nights at the Royal Albert Hall (“how many holes it takes to fill?”), and dates in Prague and Amsterdam. Maybe more are forthcoming.  But Kathy and I couldn’t wait.  We scored VIP tickets, not far from the stage, for May 15^th.   Don’t ask. Kathy will have wrapped up her teaching, maybe for good, and will deserve a little excursion.  From there, Mr. trip planner sprung into action.  We have an AirBnB in Kensington SW7, short walk to Royal Albert Hall and smack in the neighborhood where I whiled away 2 months of medical school in the winter of ’79 at the Brompton Hospital nearby and St. George’s Hospital, then at Hyde Park Corner, priciest piece of real estate in London and now site of a luxury hotel (the medical school is in now in Tooting SW 17, one district away from Wimbledon).  Last touch was airline tickets, for which Capital One was happy to discharge all my accumulated points to offset the there and back.

Of course, this is another COVID gamble.  Gotta figure things will be a little better by then.  I know for sure that Eric will want to go forth.  They used to write “Clapton is God” on the walls of his London performance venues.  If he has any of those powers remaining, I’ll know he’ll be pulling for us to be sitting in section M of Royal Albert Hall on May 15^th to hear him play. “Lay down Sally”