The Crossroads Guitar Festival was a guitar fan's wet dream, especially for those of us whose influences extend a bit past the Korns, Linkin Parks and other drop-D aficionados of the world. What we have here is a gathering of many of the world's greatest living guitarists, who came together for a three day festival at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, in June 2004, to help their friend and idol Eric Clapton raise some money for his addiction treatment center in Antigua, called the Crossroads Center. Although this is primarily a blues-guitar summit, there is enough variety of music styles to keep everybody happy. Not only do you get all of the blues legends like Buddy Guy, B.B. King, and Clapton jamming together, but you also get the guitar wizardry of Steve Vai, the jazz stylings of John McLaughlin, the folk-rock of James Taylor, and the funk-rock of Joe Walsh.

As with any festival of this size and variety, you would expect some of the performances to be great and others to be not so great. That was not the case with Crossroads, as almost all of the performances were extraordinary. I own about six different Clapton-featured concert DVDs, and this is easily one of his best performances in a long while. He seemed very inspired to be jamming with some of his guitar heroes, and this carried over to all of his performances. The icing on the cake was having Doyle Bramhall IIplaying guitar in his band. He helped to make "Cocaine", and "Have You Ever Loved A Woman" some of the best versions I have ever heard. Clapton was playing heavier, more distorted, and more energized than ever--as if he was rehearsing for the forthcoming Cream reunion. His jams with Buddy Guy, Robert Cray and Jimmy Vaughan were an absolute pleasure to behold.

I could not begin to cover all of the festival highlights, and keep this areasonable length review, so I will just touch on some of my personal favorites. Dan Tyminski and Ron Block, perform "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow", the song that made the O' Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack such a hit. Armed with only acoustic guitars and some excellent harmony vocals, they nearly stole the show. Joe Walsh was loose and having fun, as he tore through some great improvised versions of his classics "Funk 49", and "Rocky Mountain Way". He also came out to add some serious muscle to James Taylor's performance of "Steamroller". Steve Vai, and his all-star band, gave a blazing performance of "I'm the Hell Outta Here", which was followed by the ever reclusive Eric Johnson, who turned in a incredible performance of "Desert Rose". It sure would be nice to get an album from him more than once every five or six years--who does he think he is Tom Scholtz?!

There are a couple of notable shortcomings with this DVD. First of all, the festival is not presented in chronological order. Not even close. Most annoying, is that Clapton's set is completely scattered throughout the other performances. The performances will jump between daylight opening acts, to evening headliners, and back and forth. Several notable performers also did not make it on the DVD, including Jeff Beck, Pat Metheny, and Neal Schon, and other's sets were severely underrepresented, such as B.B King. I could have lived without two songs each from Vince Gill and J.J. Cale, in order to squeeze in a few other performances. There is no "concert only" option, so you have to sit through, or fast forward past, the between-song interviews and backstage footage.