Eric Clapton announces 2007 Crossroads for Chicago

Eric Clapton has announced the details of his second Crossroads Guitar Festival. The 2007 edition will be held July 28th in Bridgeview, Illinois, just outside Chicago, and it will feature many of Clapton's friends, including Steve Winwood, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, and Jimmie Vaughan. The one-day event, which will get underway at noon, will also feature performances by Clapton band members Derek Trucks and Doyle Bramhall II. Clapton said, "The Crossroads Festival is the realization of a dream for me, to gather a group of amazingly talented musicians to perform on one stage. The Crossroads performers are all musicians I admire and respect."

Unlike the original three-day Crossroads Festival in Dallas in 2004, when most performers got to play their own sets, this year's show is expected to feature many more on-stage collaborations between musicians who normally wouldn't appear together, with pop star John Mayer and jazz legend John McLaughlin being just one possibility.

Clapton said that organizing an all-star event is harder than you might imagine: "These things, when they do happen, you wouldn't imagine how hard it is to find, you know, more than three or four people that are actually not doing something at the same time. You've gotta have a damn good reason to get these guys to change their course, and come and do something that they hadn't planned to do. But it needs a focal point -- I don't think you can just do it for fun. You know, it needs to be for a reason."

Tickets, which are priced at $90, go on sale next Saturday (March 31st), and like the first Crossroads Festival, proceeds will go to the Crossroads Centre drug treatment facility in Antigua that Clapton founded in 1998.

There's no word yet on whether this year's festival will be chronicled for later release on CD and/or DVD.

The lineup for the 2007 Crossroads Festival includes (subject to change):
Jeff Beck
Doyle Bramhall II
Eric Clapton
Robert Cray
Sheryl Crow
Vince Gill
Buddy Guy
B.B. King
Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas
Sonny Landreth
Albert Lee
Los Lobos
John Mayer
John McLaughlin
Willie Nelson
Robert Randolph & the Family Band
Hubert Sumlin
Derek Trucks
Jimmie Vaughan
Steve Winwood
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