 4/12/2013 - New York, New York - Just back from our Hawaii vacation the followup to that was a trip to New York City for Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival 2013 at Madison Square Garden. The weekend trip started very early at 4:30AM today with a drive to the Amtrak train station in downtown Rochester to catch the train from Rochester to Penn Station in NYC. The train ride was nice and pretty much on time, with us arriving in New York at about 1PM. We walked from Penn Station to our hotel the new Holiday Inn Express at Herald Square on West 36th Street. The room was good and the hotel was in an excellent location within walking distance to everything. Although it was raining we headed down to Times Square and had an early dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. We hung around Times Square for a while did some site seeing and then headed back to the hotel to get ready for night one of the Crossroads Guitar Festival. We arrived at MSG just after six purchased some shirts and waited for the doors to open at six thirty. The seats were excellent and the concert started promptly at seven thirty with Dan Akroyd emceeing the event. Clapton came out and played an acoustic set opening with Driftin Blues solo then being joined by various artists for Tears In Heaven and Wonderful Tonight to name a few. This started the night of five solid hours of music. The revolving stage made for a non stop evening of awesome guitar. The night just got better and better with great performances by the likes of Robert Cray, BB King, Buddy Guy, John Mayer, Booker T and the MGs, Keith Urban, Gary Clark Jr, Jimmie Vaughan, Clapton and many more. They mixed and matched with each other playing a variety of blues and rock guitar jams. The night concluded with the Allman Brothers coming out for the final set and Clapton joining them for a cover of Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad? The Allman Brothers completed the evening closing with an awesome jam on their classic Whipping Post. This was an ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE NON STOP EVENING OF MUSIC!!!!! All I can say after this show was WOW, can not wait for night two! Day TwoSlideshow |
