The year: 2004. The place: Dallas, Texas. Crossroads Guitar Festival, a series of music festivals and benefit concerts founded by British rock musician Eric Clapton.
The festivals benefit the Crossroads Centre, a drug treatment centre in Antigua founded in 1998 by Clapton and Richard Conte, CEO of The Priory Hospitals Group in London. The concerts showcase a variety of guitarists across all generations hand-picked by Clapton personally.
Now even on their own, rock legends and real life guitar heroes Clapton and Carlos Santana, are amazing musicians; but together, they’re absolutely unstoppable and this 2004 performance from the Crossroads Festival is proof.
The concert was being held at the Cotton Bowl, an outdoor stadium with a capacity to hold 92,000 people in Dallas, Texas. The house is PACKED. Carlos Santana takes to the stage as Eric Clapton saunters out rocking a custom-painted Fender Stratocaster around his shoulder. The two icons meet in the centre of the stage and share a warm embrace as the audience loses their minds.
Then, the magic begins.
Fifteen years after the festival, a high-quality video of the performance has finally found its way on YouTube, and has been viewed nearly a million times since. One watch of the legends’ sensational rendition of Santana’s Jingo (Jin Go Lo Ba) and its easy to understand why.