I See GOD, preceded by ARC Angels

Monday, May 25, 2009.

Unlike the family in South Wales who recently saw Jesus in the goo left on the cap of a bottle of Marmite, I had a more personal encounter with the divine last week, and it occurred at the Royal Albert Hall.

The Allen family of Ystrad, Rhondda, Wales, UK, whose mother/grandmother is seriously ill, were comforted recently by the appearance of a face-like blob of brown yeasty goo which manifested itself as they were making sandwiches . "People might think I'm nuts, but I like to think it's Jesus looking out for us” said Claire Allen, daughter of the ill woman, the South Wales Echo reported, after she and her husband and children agreed that the blob of goo WAS a sign from God.

My own encounter with a manifestation of the divine took place several days earlier at a concert by blues and rock guitarist Eric Clapton. Readers of a certain age may remember the graffiti that used to pepper London in the mid-1960’s, which famously declared that “Clapton is God”. The graffiti is said to have appeared in the underground station in Islington, north London, and soon was spotted in other areas of the city and the world.

I married into Clapton fandom. Before that, I had been aware of EC’s music and loved both it and his contributions to songs by George Harrison and the Beatles, especially “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. I didn’t really own any of his recordings, however, until I bought the “Crossroads” boxed-set compilation for Hubster, on tape cassette, no less, for his very first “Father’s Day” gift in 1988. That was when my true appreciation for Clapton’s guitar genius really began to grow, and I’d like to think that all the hours we spent listening to that music with baby and toddler “Son” in the back seat of the 1988 Chevy Nova might have had some influence on his own musical talent.

When Clapton announced last winter that there would be two weeks of concert dates at the Royal Albert Hall in May, I was ecstatic. Son might be visiting us then, I was informed, so I tried to score some tickets for the guys to go. Unfortunately, the tickets I could find were about 200 GBP apiece, roughly 350 dollars each at the time. As we had only recently left the rolls of those “between jobs”, I decided to let it go.

The dream of scoring Clapton tickets awoke again in April. Several weeks before, Hubster’s dad had passed away after a long illness. I thought that an evening out at the Royal Albert Hall listening to one of our favorite musicians of all time and space would be just the thing to cheer us up. A brief stint trolling the listings on “Gumtree”, London’s answer to CraigsList, showed me that someone had spare tickets in the 4th Row!! I wrote to the person, and received a price quoted at 120 GBP per ticket. After running it by Hubster, he was still of the mind that it was too much money to spend. I reluctantly told the gentleman to release the tickets to whoever was next in the queue. I was secretly afraid that the tickets would be fakes, and Googled the guy who was selling them. He was listed on a professional development website as an employee of L’Oreal. Was I worth it? Evidently not.

A few weeks later, Hubster was watching a Clapton documentary on telly. “Clapton is coming!” he said in a reverential tone. “Yeah, and we could have been there, in the FOURTH ROW”. I was not happy. I guessed it was just not meant to be.

On the Thursday before the 3-day “late May Bank Holiday Weekend” (which kicks off the summer season here as Memorial Day does in the US) I received an email from an address that looked familiar. It was from my “new best friend”, Nir Malka, of L’Oreal employment fame. It turned out that he didn’t trust the guy who wanted to buy the tickets not to just turn around and sell them at a huge profit. His friends were all busy due to the bank holiday weekend, and he and his wife were going the night after the long weekend. He wanted the tickets to be used by REAL Clapton fans, and would sell them to me at FACE VALUE, which was 75 GBP each. He wrote that I seemed to be a nice person. Did I want the tickets? I didn’t hesitate long. YES!! If Hubster still felt HE wasn’t worth it, I’d sell his ticket (at face value to a real fan). I made a plan to meet Mr. Malka at the South Hampstead Tube station, a few bus stops up Abbey Road. It was if there was some kind of force orchestrating the whole thing.

As I waited at the station I checked out every guy that exited from the Tube. My Googling had revealed that Mr. Malka was Israeli and a Clapton fan. How old would he be? He could have been any of the scores of middle-aged men emerging from the stairway. After a 10-minute wait, someone approached me. He turned out to be a lot younger than I expected. I asked him if he worked for L’Oreal, and indeed he did. He and his wife had just moved to London within the last year. He told me that when he had Googled me, my participation in a Spiritual Art Show had turned up, along with a photo of me, TeenE, and a paintings I did of a mountain in Scotland and of Glastonbury Tor. We did “the deal”, knowing all the while that our tickets-for-cash exchange was being captured by security camera. (You have to have a street-vendor’s license in order to sell tickets on the street in London—this is to prevent scalpers.)

I re-boarded the 139 bus and sailed down Abbey Road in utter triumph. I was afraid to tell Hubster what I had done, as I sensed that in his current mood he would not be amenable to spending the money that way. I was correct. After a heated “discussion”, I decided to sell his ticket by posting a sign in Starbucks. Surely SOMEONE in NW8 would want to spend 75 pounds on a ticket to hear Eric Clapton FROM THE FOURTH ROW! I made up the sign, and then heard Hubster say resignedly “Oh I’ll go……….” Now don’t trouble yourself too much there, Sir!

So we went. On Bank Holiday Monday afternoon I got decked out in floral dress. “You’re NOT going to a garden party!” TeenE announced. She convinced me to let her be my stylist for the evening. She picked out a black short skirt and a white short-sleeved silk top embellished with some black silk roses around the neckline. Necklace and earrings of silver and topaz were added, the full makeup (with “rock-chick” eyeliner) was applied, my hair was teased and put up with combs, I removed my support hose, put on black tights and my and my extra-cool black pointy flat shoes and I was ready to Rock and Roll!

Off we went on the Jubilee Line and the Number 9 bus. I found “our seats” in the Section A, row 4, seats 9 and 10. We were early enough to have time to grab a bite and a beer in the bar before the opening act. When we returned to our seats, our coats and brollies had been moved across the aisle to an EVEN BETTER LOCATION. It turned out seats 9 and 10 of Section A, Row 4 were at the corner of the stage, angled in such a way as to have a completely unobstructed view, being in the second row of a diagonal set of 3 seats. Hubster even had space to stick his feet out in the aisle, and there were NO HEADS in front of either of us!!! Thank you again, Nir Malka! He had tried to describe to me the magnitude of the awesomeness of the seats, but I just hadn’t comprehended it!

The opening act was called “The ARC Angels”. They were a very good blues-rock group from Austin, Texas. You could tell that they “hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck”, as Grandad used to say. They even played an old McCartney tune from the RAM album, called “Too Many People”. I marveled at the fact that even though they were very, very good, the audience seemed so laid back as to appear uninterested. Oh well. Even after the lead singer wished us all a Happy Bank Holiday there was hardly a “woo!” to be heard.

After the Arcangels left the stage there was a short “interval” where the roadies set up the stage for Clapton. Finally, as the guitar god took the stage, the audience erupted into a smiling mass of applause and ovation. Then, it quickly re-seated itself and settled politely into a quiet listening attitude. It turned out that the audience behavior I had witnessed before was due to cultural mores. Most members of the audience refrained from tapping their feet, nodding their heads, or “chair-dancing”. They listened almost stock-still. I couldn’t do it. You could tell who the Americans and other non-British were: we were tapping, and nodding away, albeit no less raptly. Dancing in the aisles was strictly forbidden by the ushers.

The different levels of the Royal Albert Hall are arranged almost like reverse tiers of a wedding cake. The floor in front of the stage is divided into four sections of chair seating, surrounded by what I would call a sloped “loge” section. Above that, the lower boxes, and multiple tiers of boxes and sloped loges rising above that. Finally, up at the top, a gallery of Standing Room Only. THOSE folks were allowed to dance. We were treated to over two house of blues and rock that transported us into another realm. I had tears rolling down my face during “Wonderful Tonight”, which is about how much a husband loves and adores his wife.

One thing that I had remembered to bring with me when getting ready was “protection” of the aural variety, and I was certainly glad of it. Our seats, being there in the angle between the stage and the side of our section, were approximately eight feet from an enormous set of amplifiers. I used the earplugs in both ears for the Arcangels, but decided that I would be sacrificing sound quality for decreased decibels. During Clapton’s performance, I kept IN the left earplug, which faced not only the stack of speakers, but certain permanent hearing damage had I not used “protection”. The right ear was angle back toward the rear of the hall and did not require any prophylaxis. It was a little odd to leave the hall after the concert with only ONE ear ringing.
So, “GOD?” you say? Does she really think he’s GOD? “A” god, yes, a “guitar god”. One who has mastered his craft in such a way that the hand of “God” seems to be present, spark of the divine that exists in all of us, but that only a few kindle and stoke until we are able to present our true lights to the world. An article in Christianity Today claims that Clapton’s favorite hymn while growing up was "Jesus Bids Us Shine":

Jesus bids us shine with a clear, pure light,
Like a little candle burning in the night;
In this world of darkness, we must shine,
You in your small corner, and I in mine.

Throughout his life, Eric has succumbed to addictions to both heroin and alcohol, and has overcome them. He has faced the unimaginable tragedy of the death of his young son, yet still had faith enough to remarry at over 50 and to start a young family. To sum it up his own spirituality I’ll quote Clapton himself from the song “Presence of the Lord”:

I have finally found a place to live
Just like I never could before
And I know I don't have much to give
But soon I'll open any door.
Everybody knows the secret,
Everybody knows the score.
I have finally found a place to live
In the presence of the Lord.

May his music continue to inspire us to connect with something greater than ourselves for many, many generations.