Look who was in Bangkok the other day and the bastard didn’t even call me — Jimmy Page. I don’t know the bastard, of course, but still! Maybe he was fuming over the glowing review I’d given Eric Clapton’s biography.

The Nation’s Kitchana Lersakvanitchakul managed to round up a few pertinent facts for a story, but naturally the British rock god was press-shy, so it was all after-the-fact stuff. Evidently Page was in Thailand “resting” after all the work involved in Zeppelin’s triumphant “reunion” concert for Ahmet Ertegun’s charity in London in December and then turning 64 in January.

The local Warner Records managing director, Nadda Buranasiri, was in charge of ushering, and the next thing anyone knew, The Great Jimmy Page was standing inside rockers’ pub O-Leng down on Royal City Avenue, where all the cool people hand out. Rock historians will want to know that this was on February 3.

Eyewitness Ae Wizard, who also plays guitar, as his name might suggest, explained that Page gave pub owner and Season magazine editor Tiva Sarachudha the green light to muster some talent for a jam. Tiva and Nol “Or Inca” Singholka hit the phones and within 30 minutes had half of the Kingdom’s best headbangers clinking glasses with Jimmy (who apparently stuck to Coke).

They, at least, knew who he was. Most Thais will vaguely know “Stairway to Heaven”. Led Zeppelin per se, however, isn’t even in the rock pantheon for the majority here, who tend to favour the Scorpions, if not Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, as Ae Wizard noted, Zep songs are pretty intricate, so this got in the way of Page’s new band actually playing any.

But I don’t think there’s a serious rock fan out there who wouldn’t have donated one and a half kidneys for the chance to see and hear Page and his new pals play “House of the Rising Sun”, “Crossroads”, “Purple Haze” and “Little Wing” — which is what they did play.

Ae Wizard listed himself, Pop the Sun, Moo Kaleidoscope, Olarn Phromjai and Or Inca among the sidemen in the jam session. Page took a break, Ae said, and the guys treated him to a medley of Carabao songs, including “Refugee”.

Kitchana, who’s a headbanger himself, came up with these photos. I have no idea who took them, so anyone swiping them from here really ought to credit The Nation or Dorseyland and we’ll take the court proceedings from there.

The amiable ritual of hand-shaking and snapshot-posing swept up musicians Ae, Moo, Olarn, Asanee Chotikul, Surasee Itthikul, Somchai Kamlertkul and Manote Puttan, plus Grammy Records’ Kris Thomas and DJs Pong and Wasana Weerachatplee.

There are, however, several questions that seem doomed to go tragically unanswered:

* Why are there no photos of the band playing?
* Whose guitar did Page use?
* How much does he want for it?
* Did anyone, anyone at all, bother recording the jam on audiotape or video, for God’s sake?

As a journalist I have to admit that Page was right to avoid alerting the Bangkok news media. I would have followed him around for the entire duration of his stay in Thailand, using a night-vision camera if necessary.

On February 8 Page and a pair of unidentified Western pals made their own way to Overtone, another music club on Royal City Avenue. They merely sat with the regulars listening to Chatree “Ohm” Kongsuwan playing tunes from his new album. No jam session, then.

Eric Clapton – The Autobiography
By Eric Clapton with Christopher Simon Sykes
Published by Century (Random House), 2007

Turning 63 next month, Eric Clapton surveys his sober domestic bliss and recalls, amid poignancy and pain, the wild ride that got him there. My review for The Nation, published on January 27.

Somewhere out there, hopefully, is another ageing music star who will deliver his story with a combination of Eric Clapton’s plain speaking and the artfulness of Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles”. Clapton’s book isn’t devoid of art, but it was his stated ambition to tell his tale in his own words and without any razzmatazz, and unfortunately his matter-of-fact monologue on recovery and survival can be a little wearying.

I often wondered just what Christopher Simon Sykes did as ghost writer, particularly when Eric unwittingly wears his male chauvinism on his sleeve as he drones on about the many women in his life. He admits he’s never been any good with women and acutely explains the psychological reasons why, but as much as readers will sympathise over his abandonment by his mother, couldn’t Sykes have helped him sound less like an idiot when he was constantly referring to one female conquest after another as pretty or ravishing or voluptuous?

At one point he mentions to a pal that he’s “never dated an Italian woman”. A specimen is duly brought to his laboratory.

This, however, was Lori del Santo, with whom Clapton had Conor, whose horrible death at age two inspired “Tears in Heaven”. There is a line about Conor that stops you cold. Clapton points out that “Unplugged”, the biggest-selling album of his career, was the cheapest to make. “But if you really want to know what it actually cost me, go to Ripley, and visit the grave of my son.”

This is how poignant the book can be. Stunning lines like that make it easy to forget Eric’s general lug-headedness, and certainly everything is forgiven when he talks about his music. He’s got a career and a half to cover in among all the personal drama, and he’s met everybody in the business, of course. The names, bless him, never stop dropping. His stints with the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and Cream each rate a chapter, and they’re liberally sprinkled with Beatles and Stones, as well as his good mates Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix.

I’d always believed Eric was already with Cream by the time the “Clapton is God” graffiti popped up around London, but he tells me that was during the Blues Breakers period, in 1965. He does admit to having felt pressured by it, but doesn’t seem as perturbed as other biographers have suggested. Three decades later he was actually collecting “graffiti art”, though he doesn’t appear to see a link. There’s more!

Photos here by Jessica Davis

No story posted on this blog has generated the level of interest that “Hank Williams’ Last Ride” has. Not only was there a comment right off the bat from Hank’s stepdaughter (and biographer) Lycrecia and her husband Dale, who keep Audrey Williams’ charitable wishes alive at Hank and Audrey’s Corral, and some good cheer from the fans, there is the very moving testimony of Blair Mays, who has offered some disturbing information about the circumstances of Hank’s death.

And then there’s Rhodes Davis, who just happens to run an annual getaway camp on Lake Martin in Alabama that utilises the cabin Hank and Audrey rented in the summer of 1952. Rhodes both came up with the exact map coordinates for the cottage so that I could correct my Google Earth geo-biography of Hank, he pointed out that I’d marked the wrong Mount Olive in Alabama as Hank’s birthplace. I was in the wrong part of the state altogether!

Once I found the right Mount Olive on Google Earth, a lot of other things about Hank’s boyhood fell into place. Rhodes also sent a link to a story about the cabin in the Montgomery Advertiser.

At the same time I found Mount Olive included on a guided tour of the “Hank Williams Trail”, on which you can trek up and down the “Lost Highway” and visit the site of Hank’s birthplace at the church where he started out singing in Mount Olive, the other towns where he grew up, like Georgiana and Greenville, the Lake Martin cottage and all the sites in Montgomery, including the Hank Williams Museum and the cemetery.

So that was a big blessing, and now Rhodes has sent me some photos of the cabin, taken by his daughter Jessica, where Hank wrote “Kaw-Liga!” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart”. It’s been spruced up in recent years, and it’s great to see that there’s a sign out front to let everyone know of its importance in music history. Looks like a wonderful spot, too.

Huge thanks to Rhodes, Jessica, Blair and everyone who still regularly thanks God there was a Hank Williams.

Here it is, the best musical show ever seen in the entire five-decade-plus history of Dorseyland: The mighty Genesis at the peak of their powers, having finally got some gumption in the guitars and their knees not yet buckling under the weight of fame’s ego. It wasn’t a concert, it was a revelation, and one that came straight out of the Bible. I have never had another experience like it since.

To begin at the beginning, though, my weathered old typewritten concert list seemed a bit muddled when I dusted it off recently to check the concert details. It insisted that I saw two Genesis shows at Massey Hall within a few months of each other. How could that be? I distinctly remember the triumph at Massey Hall, with the tunes from what was then the new album, “Selling England by the Pound”, sailing through the air along with the older stuff; and then there was the show that followed at Maple Leaf Gardens when “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” came out.

Uh-oh, there was a ghost show in between. A May 2, 1974, show at Massey hadn’t registered in my memory. I’m going to have to blame it on concert-shear. I’d been keeping up a hectic schedule: I spent most of 1974 at concert halls, with three outings the month before Genesis, including the sonic maelstrom that was Hawkwind, and then Savoy Brown and Mott the Hoople almost immediately afterward.

We’d better focus on the Genesis concerts I do remember, beginning with the best show anyone has ever performed anywhere anytime — November 8, 1973.

Genesis had begun making Toronto a habit earlier that year. They first played there on April 9, 1973, at a venue that no one seems to have recorded. Then in October “Selling England” was released and they did a slew of UK dates before heading back across the Atlantic, starting out at the Capitole Theatre in Quebec City the night before Toronto.

So there it was: We were the second batch of North Americans to see England being sold by the pound. There’s more!

No one in music has a more appropriate nickname than Springsteen. Fans call him The Boss because that’s what the guys in his E Street Band started calling him way back when, but while Sinatra was really only the Chairman of the Board of the Rat Pack, Bruce really is the Boss of all he surveys in music, and not just in his own genre.

In terms of honesty, integrity and the level of intimacy that he somehow manages to maintain in vast arenas packed with people, no one can beat him. No one comes close. And the range and depth of his music is approached by only a few other artists, Neil Young being one.

And he’s out there onstage — fully aflame or at least hotly smouldering — every night, never flagging, never letting his grip on the audience loosen. I’ve seen him five times and was utterly flabbergasted on every occasion. Every concert was flawless in its staging, pacing and dynamics, song selection and positioning, audience interaction and … what do you call it — the feelgood factor? You really do come away feeling like a better person. No wonder some people think he’s God. Or a faith healer. Or a damn good priest. Or the funny, caring, endlessly entertaining older brother you wish you had.

Since Springsteen doesn’t tour the Far East, I haven’t seen him in a while, but I’ve checked out some DVDs of the more recent live shows and notice that the stages are a lot more elaborate than they used to be, and things seem quite a bit more choreographed than they once were. This is not necessarily a good thing, considering his early no-nonsense, bare-to-the-bone presentations. Back in the early days of “Empire Bru-u-u-uce”, it was all songs and nothing but, and that’s the way it was when “the future of rock and roll” first illuminated Toronto. There’s more!