“We had front row centre seats and two girls paid money to sit on our laps. Halfway through the show the girls ... started making out with each other.”

I was a huge fan of Eric Clapton’s music a long time ago. In the 1960s, his playing with the Yardbirds, John Mayall and Cream inspired an almost religious fervour in his fans: graffiti in London decreed he was God. In retrospect, with Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Peter Green and Jimi Hendrix all active at the same time, he was not the best guitarist around. But he was far from the worst and, with his extended versions of decades-old blues standards, he was the most popular.

I was too young to see him when he came to the United States with Cream or Blind Faith. The first time I saw him live was at the Fillmore East in New York City in February, 1970, as a member of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. After the hype explosion of Blind Faith, he was looking to do something more low key and playing in someone else’s band seemed like the right move.

The Fillmore East, an offshoot of the original Fillmore in San Francisco, was managed by the legendary Bill Graham and featured amazing combinations of groups with a top ticket price of US$5. The first concert I saw there featured Albert King and Chuck Berry, with the last minute addition of The Who (who performed all of Tommy about one month before the album’s release). Other combinations within a single night included Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead; Jimi Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone; Fleetwood Mac and Van Morrison; Neil Young, Steve Miller and Miles Davis – you get the idea.

On that night in February, the opening act was Wilbert Harrison, who’d had a hit 20 years earlier with Kansas City. He was doing a one-man band thing and it was kind of hokey. He was followed by Seals and Crofts, who had yet to score any of their subsequent boring hit singles. In other words, the night was not too promising.

Delaney and Bonnie came out and were just astonishing. The band included a line-up of great musicians and Clapton was merely the most famous. He stayed in the background while Bonnie Bramlett’s amazing voice held the spotlight for most of the evening. (Bonnie, among other things, was famous for having been the only white Ikette in the Ike and Tina Turner touring band.) The day after the show, my friend and I ran out and bought every Delaney and Bonnie album. The album documenting this particular tour, On Tour With Eric Clapton, is still available on CD and a worthwhile addition to any collection.

The concert was also notable because my friend and I had eighth row centre seats. A cute young blonde-haired girl sitting several rows back asked if she could sit on my lap during the concert. That’s how things were in those days. (When a friend and I saw David Bowie on his Diamond Dogs tour at Madison Square Garden in New York, we had front row centre seats and two girls paid money to sit on our laps. Halfway through the show the girls, still sitting on our laps, started making out with each other.

In the early ’70s, I worked concert security for Don Law, the ‘Bill Graham of Boston’, and was in heaven because I was being paid to see every rock concert to come to town. When Clapton came to the Boston Garden (I think it was 1974), he was in the depths of his drugs and alcohol phase and I didn’t find his sleepy imitation of J.J. Cale’s music that interesting. Working backstage, my friends and I couldn’t wait for him to go on, because that meant we could raid his dressing room – tons of free food and cases of vodka, who cared about the music? I cared more about the fact that his relatives from Toronto had come to see the show. I spent much of the night chatting up his 17-year-old cousin and had brief fantasies about marrying into his family.

I stopped caring about Clapton. He cleaned himself up, got off the drugs and liquor, and released a series of albums I found quite boring. His 1992 Unplugged album featured what Elton John tagged a “bossa nova version” of Layla. His Robert Johnson tribute album put me to sleep. The Cream reunion shows, CD and DVD proved only one thing – that sort of reunion is almost never a good idea.

So at this stage of my life, going to an Eric Clapton concert is not high on my list of priorities. But I live in Hong Kong and, as you know, we don’t get a lot of superstar western acts here. So when someone does decide the money in our little ‘Special’ Administrative Region buys the same as money from other countries, I feel almost duty bound to attend shows I never would go near if I was still living in the US of A.

In this case, as you might have guessed, my expectations were running quite low. I was expecting Clapton to come on stage in a wheelchair or oxygen tent, sing his crappy later hits and let his band carry him. So I was pleasantly surprised when the musician opened with a Derek & the Dominos tune (Layla remaining one of my top 10 all-time favourite albums) and proceeded to really focus in on his guitar playing throughout the night. He was backed by the best band money can buy, including two other very decent guitarists, and I found it an enjoyable concert.

To be sure, despite the relatively spartan setting, plenty of rock excess was on show. Did we really need all three guitarists to take turns soloing in every song? And while Willie Weeks is an excellent bass guitar player, did he have to do a solo as well? I was afraid a 15-minute drum solo was going to rear its ugly head: fortunately we were spared.

So after all these years, I finally got to see a proper Eric Clapton concert. I finally had a chance to enjoy Clapton being Clapton and was even inspired to create a Clapton playlist on my iPod. Even though it stops at 1971.