Eric Clapton reveals this week of his declining health

irish_tim - Lol.. Love Ian Anderson. Saw him twice. Gotta tell you this. The funniest moment I ever experienced at a concert to date was during the second time I saw Jethro Tull at the Seattle Center Coliseum. Ian just started into a magnificent flute solo, I was standing in front of the stage and about five rows behind me was this goof ball banging on his tambourine. Ian was really pissed. He stops playing and yells in the microphone.." If you don't stop playing that fu&king tambourine I'm going to jump off this stage and rip your fu&king head off ! ". At that moment a guy standing behind Mr. Tambourine man, grabbed it out of his hands and threw it across the Coliseum. The audience applauded and Ian continued his solo. Your probably aware of Ian's' Smoked Salmon business in Ireland that has become a global success.

A wise investment....Last fall I purchased Cream's "Wheels of Fire" album on a SHM-SACD from Acoustic Sounds. Paid $60.00. A year ago I went to a friends home who purchased the disc for a listen and was absolutely floored. Since SHM is the current standard for the SACD format, the quality of the album is stunning. Richer, fuller, very smooth, and very analog sounding with no digital artifacts whatsoever. Far better than the Mo-FI gold or re-master disc's from the past. The one tragedy I'll never get over when the album was cut by Atlantic in 1968 was how they butchered the track "Crossroads". When Clapton performed that song on stage, it was a very long piece, it was edited down and shortened so they could fit it in on side three due to the length of "Spoonful". We can only imagine what ingenious guitar work we will never hear from the full length version.

The quality would be determined by which master tapes were used from the Zeppelin albums. Physical Graffiti is a terribly engineered album. The song Kashmir has always sounded harsh and cold. Their second album was much better engineered. "Whole Lotta Love" sounds warmer, richer, and more analog sounding. My SHM-SACD of "Wheels of Fire" sounds spectacular. If third generation master tapes were used would probably account for poor sound quality.

Mark Levinson did ongoing testing between standard SACD and single layered SHM-SACD disc and concluded that the SHM-SACD format is superior in sound quality and resolution.

I've always been convinced that Eric Clapton would not be alive today if it wasn't for his son, Conor, falling from the 49th floor window of Claptons condo in March, 1991. What a tragedy. Up to that point Eric was battling ongoing drug problems, and Conor's death hit him as a wake up call resulting in a change of life style and cleaning up his act, causing him to build his drug rehab center in Antigua.

pops..at the time the accident happened with Conor, there was a small party going on in the condo with about a dozen people present. Talk about reckless responsibility. Eric was just several blocks away at a recording studio, and when he got the news, he darted out of the studio and ran like hell until he got to the condo tower.

What has always amazed me about Clapton, is when he was 15 sneaking into the blues clubs around London, and his obsession with American blues at that age. Also, when he got his first electric guitar at the age of 17, and within 24 months he's rated the number preeminent blues guitarist in England. The fastest rise out of any rock/blues guitarist in history that I'm aware of. What a prodigy. Like Mozart. A natural gift.