Photos from Bangkok promoter Bec-Tero

I have now seen Rod Stewart live in concert twice. The first time was in Toronto with the Faces in October 1975. The second time was this week, in Bangkok, on March 4, 2009. Thirty-four years. We’re both still doing alright.

Here’s my review of the latest show, published in much-abbreviated form in the incredibly shrinking Daily Xpress.

Trailing history and superlatives behind him, Rock’n'Roll Hall-of-Famer Rod Stewart gave a sold-out Impact Arena a snoot-full of both Rockin’ Rod and Karaoke Rod on Wednesday night, and the crowd would have loved to hear a whole lot more.

A couple of months ago the man who’s sold a quarter of a billion records joined the “When I’m 64″ club, but he showed little sag as he piled on the hits and served up a few surprises for Bangkok, including yielding the stage to his 21-year-old daughter Ruby for a couple of numbers.

In the end, though, Stewart left without a final goodbye, leaving the audience and his band to finish off the last choruses of “Sailing”. It seemed an abrupt ending to a thoroughly enjoyable but oddly uneven show.

Things got off to a magnificent start with Rod at his charming best on “Some Guys Have All the Luck”, “It’s a Heartache” and “You Wear It Well”.

He turned up the heat with Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party” and then sang “Rhythm of My Heart”, which ended in a stunning set piece with his three back-up singers taking cues from him one by one to unleash some serious vocal stretches.

Julie Delgado, Natasha Pearce and Esterlee Nicholson are the ladies he’s kiddingly called “the Lap Tops”, a pun on lap dancers and the Four Tops, but musically they carried a heavy load, muscling through Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” on their own later and, in this number, building expectations as high as they were going to get.

Then technology stepped in to wreck things. The giant central screen at the back of the stage, which had been adding much to the fun with a spoof Hollywood teaser and Motown video clips, went berserk. Half the imagery was obliterated in a pixel firestorm that ruined all of Stewart’s “Downtown Train” (with the help of an ill-advised double-drum solo).

The technicians struggled to douse the electronic fireworks as the band carried on with Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest” and a lacklustre “Reason to Believe”, but the screen continued to pulsate like an immense, menacing robot refusing to be ignored.

They finally just pulled the plug on it in time for Ruby Stewart, Rod’s daughter with former long-time girlfriend Kelly Emberg, to give the old man a rest and perform Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and “Rescue Me”, the soul hit by Fontella Bass.

Ruby’s a fine singer and drew cheers from the audience, but her participation only added to the concert’s gradual unhinging.

Interestingly, Ruby’s four-year-old step-brother Alastair wasn’t far away. Rod has brought along on this tour his wife Penny Lancaster-Stewart and their son, Rod’s seventh child.

Their dad came back onstage, gave his first of two assurances that the screen disaster wasn’t his fault, sang his stomping version of “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?”, a tune that was plaintive when John Fogerty wrote it, and then took a break.

He soon got things back on track, though, with “Forever Young”, “Twisting the Night Away” and especially a lovely rendition of “You’re in My Heart”. A massive crowd response greeted the Van Morrison classic “Have I Told You Lately”, and the evening headed deep into karaoke territory.

It was absolutely amazing how many people in the arena were ready and able to provide the vocals for “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”. Stewart twice silenced the band so the fans could pretend they were him. It was quite moving, and a lot of fun. There’s more!

It’s been five long years now since the Rolling Stones left me holding the bag in Bangkok and I haven’t heard a word of apology from them. Keith’s got magnums of time to make pirate movies, and I see that Mick is lately dragging his granddaughter around other people’s shows in London, which makes for some pretty horrifying pictures in the press.

The above “souvenir” card was one of thousands distributed in Bangkok ahead of what would have been the band’s first concert in Thailand, on April 10, 2003 (even though the card says April 8 — an early slip-up forecasting trouble).

History has lumped that show’s cancellation in with a string of others and tagged it with the SARS excuse — the sub-pandemic of November 2002 to July 2003 that killed 774 people, mostly in Hong Kong. That was indeed the reason given for the Stones making a detour around Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, but that’s not why they backed off Bangkok.

Officially, at least — who knows what might actually have happened? — the band had roared across Australia and played Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Singapore, Bangalore and Mumbai and were ready for Thailand next when their roadies’ airplane was grounded in Mumbai on April 9 “due to a technical problem”. No sound, lighting or stage crew could get airborne.

And that is supposedly why 11,000 people holding tickets to get them into Impact Arena in Muang Thong Thai in Bangkok’s north end didn’t get licked by the Rolling Stones on their “Licks” world tour. There’s more!

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.