Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John - Tokyo Dome, Tokyo, Japan, 11-2-1988

In the late 1980s, lead guitar legends Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler performed many concerts together. They actually first played in concert together in 1985 while Mark Knopfler was still leading his band Dire Straits. But then Dire Straits was disbanded for a few years, and Knopfler didn't had a band until the Notting Hillbillies in 1990 and then a Dire Straits reunion in 1991. In 1987 and 1988 especially, the two of them did entire tours together. They were basically Eric Clapton concerts, but with Knopfler adding lead guitar to every song and singing one or two songs as lead vocalist.

Things got even more interesting when their joint tour stopped by Japan in 1988. Elton John joined them there, and the three of them headlined four concerts together. One of them, in Tokyo, was broadcast on TV and radio in Japan only. This got bootlegged, naturally, and it makes for an excellent recording, with soundboard quality sound. That's what this is here.

The first portion of the concert only featured Clapton and Knopfler. Clapton sang most of the songs, but one of his female backing vocalists sang lead on "Can't Find My Way Home" and Knopfler sang lead on his huge Dire Straits hit "Money for Nothing." Then Elton John joined them for the rest of the concert. Most of the songs from that point on were John's hits, but Clapton sang three more, and Knopfler did one more Dire Straits song, "Solid Rock." John naturally played keyboards even on the songs he didn't sing.

So all in all this is a really nice and very rare collaboration between three rock superstars. It wasn't the last time the three of them did this, however. They also played together during the Knebworth Festival in 1990. I have posted that already, which you can find here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2024/05/knebworth-festival-knebworth-house_50.html

This album is two hours and 13 minutes long.

01 Crossroads (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
02 White Room (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
03 I Shot the Sheriff (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
04 Lay Down Sally (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
05 Wonderful Tonight (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
06 Tearing Us Apart (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
07 After Midnight (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
08 Can't Find My Way Home (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
09 Money for Nothing [Edit] (Eric Clapton & Mark Knopfler)
10 Candle in the Wind (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
11 I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
12 I Don't Wanna Go On with You like That (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
13 I'm Still Standing (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
14 Daniel (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
15 talk (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
16 Cocaine (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
17 Layla (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
18 Solid Rock (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
19 Saturday Night's Alright [For Fighting] (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
20 Sunshine of Your Love (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
21 Percussion Solo (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)
22 Sunshine of Your Love (Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler & Elton John)

https://www.imagenetz.de/e2iJV

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/873KARqh

The cover image was very hard for me to make. It is of this exact concert, right after the end of the final song of the encore. However, I couldn't find any photos of them together, so I had to resort to taking a screenshot from a video of this concert I found on YouTube. But the video was so low-res and blurry that I had to rewatch that section of the video to even figure out Knopfler was holding something (a towel) in his hands. 

The reason this cover looks like it does is due to the free Krea AI program. I ran the screenshot through that program, giving prompts identifying who was in the image. It was a little bit better, but not much. Then I ran that version through the program. Again, some improvement, but still rough. I did it four times in all! Finally, it ended up like this. To show you how drastically things changed, here's the screenshot I started from. Frankly, I'm kind of amazed at what the AI technology is capable of. Yeah, there's a lot of change there, it's not entirely true to reality, but I think the final version looks a hell of a lot better than the screenshot does.