By MSN Music

After more than four decades in the spotlight, Eric Clapton is still a reluctant superstar. For all his platinum and gold records, Grammy statuettes and stints atop the charts with group and solo projects, the English-born guitarist, singer and songwriter remains a musician's musician who approaches his work with exacting craft.

Though he helped establish two of rock's first "supergroups" -- Cream and Blind Faith -- Clapton has always prized collaboration with other guitarists over unchallenged grandstanding. So it's appropriate that for this summer's third annual Crossroads Guitar Festival, Clapton has assembled an A-list of superb rock, blues and country musicians -- including some of the best guitar-slingers alive.

"The Crossroads Festival is the realization of a dream for me, to gather a group of amazingly talented musicians to perform on one stage," said Clapton. "The Crossroads performers are all musicians I admire and respect."

The lineup for the July 28 festival in Bridgeview, Ill., includes Jeff Beck, Robert Cray, Sheryl Crow, Vince Gill, B.B. King, John Mayer and Willie Nelson, among others. The concert benefits the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a treatment and education facility for chemical dependence founded by Clapton, who earlier in his career struggled with substance abuse.

The Crossroads festival weaves together many strands of Clapton's professional and personal life. It reunites him with several famed bandmates from the '60s, including fellow Yardbird and guitar icon Jeff Beck, and continues his long history of collaborating with other guitar greats, from his days with Derek & the Dominos through recent albums with blues legend B.B. King and maverick Oklahoma singer-songwriter J.J. Cale. It celebrates his lifelong reverence for American blues, which Clapton says is now something he plays for enjoyment, not to exorcise his demons. And it helps support others in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction that once made his life "absolute madness."

Once an angry young guitar god and rock pioneer, Clapton is now 62, still playing as well as ever, still thinking about artists he wants to work with and music he wants to make. "I don't really want to be singing about the past when I could really be using that time and energy to be celebrating the present," he said. "It means I have to let go of the past and live in the now."

Clapton looks back on his storied career, the demons that no longer drive him, today's musicians and life as a father to three young daughters, in these excerpts from a 2006 interview with friend and veteran journalist Alan Franks of the Times of London.

On how his unusual childhood (Clapton grew up believing that his grandmother was his mother) affected his life, and how music was his salvation:
I think it has affected the way that I have conducted my relationships. They have all been colored by that. It's almost like my childhood was split in half. I had almost an illusionary childhood up until the time when I met my mother and discovered who she was. It seemed at the outset that I was an only child with very old parents, because obviously, they were my grandparents. Then the door was opened and I saw there were a lot of other explanations for this, and I was very confused for a little while. Then that turned to anger and insecurity, and I think that picking up and playing the guitar was a way of healing myself of this, or getting back some of my own security and identity and achieving a certain amount of status for myself that didn't depend on other people's view of me.

On how he recognized early the importance music would have in his life:
I think I listened to music with more intensity than other children. Music had more meaning to me. I was aware of that. I was aware of the fact that I could be stirred emotionally by different kinds of music, and that it was eclectic, not necessarily confined to one area of music. I could be classically orientated, or towards jazz or folk music or anything across the board. Anything could provoke an emotion in me.

Did he ever, as a younger man, envision the life and career he's had?
In my late teens, I think I entertained a period where I thought it would all burn up and end quickly. My 20s would be it and then I would die. Then, in my 20s, I thought, who knows, I don't know where I'm going. I don't think I ever had a concrete ambition about where I wanted to end up. I've always been a player, and always wanted to be a player.

On how he turned to the blues:
It [the blues] involved so many of the other things that intrigued me. Like being a rebel, an outcast. All these things were echoed in the way I saw myself. I could fit. I found it easy to fit myself into that mold, that persona. Essentially you were on the move and a nonconformist.

It fits into my view of everything, as a language. A language that I learned to talk. If I am going to communicate with other musicians, I will do so in that language. I'm not governed so much by the demons that drive the need to play that music as I used to be. It's something I can do with pleasure, that I turn to for fun, to play and speak this language as a source of fun. I matured through it, I hope, to see it as something other than just an outlet for angst.

Once you have studied the essence of what the Delta blues is, for instance, then that can be applied to the way you play anything. There is something at the heart of it that seems to place it aside from all the other forms of music.

On why the '60s produced such enduring musical talent:
I think we were trying to get in touch with what we thought was the real thing, over in America. We were hanging on to the earliest influences we had, which were Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Elvis and Buddy Holly and all of that stuff. For the researchers like me, it meant delving deep. Today, by comparison, it's become very ethereal. It doesn't seem to make that much sense. Or if it does, it's much more caught up in just being a celebrity. There was something important in the seriousness of why we did it in those days.

And we were much more driven by how the music was sounding. Now it's more to do with what it represents. And what it can get you, too. What becoming a musician or a singer can get you. Like fame or money. I'm not really sure what it's all about anymore.

On his contemporaries from the '60s, including influential guitarists Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, and their relationship now:
I think we all have the same regard for one another that we did back then. I think probably now because I am older and more relaxed and comfortable with myself, I look at them with more affection than I did then. But we didn't ever really interact. Jeff and Jimmy did much more because they were part of the Yardbirds. Back then, I used to view them with a great deal of suspicion, because I wasn't really sure what they were up to, or what they liked. I think with Jeff I was more comfortable, because we had the same tastes to a certain extent, but both of those guys were much more influenced, I think, by rockabilly than by the blues. I've never really met an English musician who had the same kind of taste in music as myself. I've always been fairly cut off in that respect.

On the music he listens to today, musical roots and the "American Idol" factor:
My taste has always been very narrow in that if I go into a record store, I will always try and single out one thing to listen to because of the overwhelming amount of choice. Of all the things that have come out in the last five years, the only one that has really interested me to any great extent has been David Gray. It's quite easy to home in on. It fits my criteria. I am not particularly a fan of groups. I don't particularly understand the group ethic. I was never really mad on the Beatles or the Stones anyway when I was a kid.

My only experience of being in a group was Cream and the Yardbirds. But then, when I really wanted to play, it had to be me. If you went through my record collection, you would find records by individuals more than anything else.

I can't tell, from just listening, the difference between Coldplay and U2. They sound the same. What worries about what's going on right now is that people don't really know where it's all come from, and I don't suppose they're that interested. I heard that guy from Coldplay saying that Richard Ashcroft was the greatest singer that had ever lived singing the greatest song that had ever been written, and I think, well ... I think he probably meant it. But I think what it shows is how incredibly detached all the current stuff is from its roots. It's all become very disconnected. Then again, you've got the marketplace of it, which is, you know, Simon Cowell [judge on TV's "American Idol"]. That's the face of popular music today. That's where the power of music is right now. It sits with Simon Cowell and Coldplay and U2, who are really people who attend awards shows. That's what they do. I don't have anything against them; I just wouldn't want to listen to them.

On the 2005 Cream reunion, playing London and New York with '60s bandmates Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker:
I thought it was interesting and exciting. When we were in London, I really enjoyed it. When it got to New York, we hit a brick wall in that we were too small for the venue [Madison Square Garden]. That was very big and we weren't big enough to carry our weight. We sounded really small. There is a capacity of 20,000, compared with the 5,000 at the Albert Hall, where we did rather well and which is much more like a club.

The thing about Cream, even in its heyday, was that its fascination was its limits. Here were three people who were essentially in disagreement with one another. You latched onto those rare moments of cohesion and made the most of them. But they were rare. It was an experiment. For me the whole thing was about putting a ghost to bed. I had been fielding questions about that for so long: "Is Cream going to reform? Is Cream going to reform?'' It used to drive me mad.

On whether there will be further Cream concerts:
Not for me. No. That's it. We did it and it was fun. But life is too short. I've got lots of other things I would much rather do, including stay at home with my kids.

I think Jack's keen. Ginger, I know, isn't, because he's quite happy where he is ... I think we satisfied most of our curiosity about whether it would work ... I like the company of the guys, but actually I prefer to be in control. This is the problem about bands. How to have a democratic situation like that is a very difficult question. Normally speaking there usually is a leader. With Cream it couldn't work. None of us could be leaders. We are all too headstrong for any one of us to lead.

On his past substance abuse, and whether it seems like a different life:
I do my best to embrace it all, but it is quite hard to see footage of myself on TV or photographs of me when I was on the bottom and drunk out of my mind, and into heroin, and abusive. Those are things I'm not proud of at all. I accept and embrace it as much as I can because I know that in its way it's of use. It has tremendous value to people who I try to help and talk to about coming away from that stuff. I can show them that I was exactly like them, if not worse. I can say, "That's then and this is now." It still causes me pain.

I don't actually sit down and watch videos of myself. What I do is I go to meetings. That's my way of replaying those videos. I go to hear someone else talking about "my life" and to identify. The good answer to this question is that without the presence of 12-step meetings I would entirely forget that there was a life like that. In a sense I can easily fall into believing that my life has always been where it is now. And it hasn't, obviously. Half of my life, at least, was spent pursuing absolute madness. And quite miserable. What I like about being a member of that fellowship is that all I have to do is go to one of those meetings and it helps me to embrace that past.

I think that to begin with I was fueled by anger. My first couple years of abstinence were a period of grieving for the loss of that, of my relationship with alcohol, and the need to examine my addiction. I did that as best I could but I haven't yet come up with an answer that anyone else hasn't already said -- that it could be genetic, but most of it, I accept, is a disease that I have. It permeates every area of my life. The one thing I know is that it's not alcohol. Definitely not the substance, but something that my personality suffers from, and I need to address it on a daily basis.

On being a father late in life (he married in 2002 and has three daughters younger than 7 years old), and how it's changed the way he works:
Because of the way I see life now, it's fairly manageable, and it's more about me putting my needs and wants to the side a lot more. I find that quite easy, actually, at this time in my life. Ten or 20 years ago, it wouldn't have been possible, because I was so hungry for different things and ambitious, not in a financial or successful way, but just to work with people ... for example, I was dying to work with B.B. King, I was dying to work with J.J. Cale, just all these things claiming my attention for me to worry about. Now I've done all this stuff, so there's a lot that I've achieved that I don't have to worry about. Just now I can't work very much at home. I kind of have to go on the road to indulge my need to play.

View a photo gallery of legendary Crossroads artists
See the full Crossroads 2007 lineup
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