Watch Bill Murray and Eric Clapton join forces to perform the 1960s hit ‘Gloria’
Bill Murray, Hollywood’s favourite lovable rogue, joined forces with Eric Clapton for a bizarre moment of karaoke madness. While not only a wonderful juncture of movie and music crossover, the clip also offers an opportunity to briefly put Clapton’s obscene anti-vax crusade to the back of our minds.
The performance, which took place at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2007, became a major talking point of the charitable fundraiser, an event which showcases a variety of guitarists personally selected by Clapton himself.
Mitch Glazer, Murray’s longtime screenwriter and close friend, explained to Billboard how the performance materialised: “Bill and I have had some rock moments. Eric Clapton is a friend of Bill’s, and a few years ago the producer of Eric’s Crossroads Guitar Festival called me and said, ‘Do you think Bill would host and you guys would write introductions?’ We said yes two years in a row,” Glazer said.
He added: “The second time we did it, I asked Bill, ‘Is there one rock song you can play guitar to?’ He said, ‘Yes, [’60s garage-rock classic] ‘Gloria’. The lineup was Jeff Beck, Clapton and some of the greatest guitarists, but the first one out will be this knucklehead playing ‘Gloria’. I said, ‘Eric should come out behind you playing it too’. We find Eric and he says, ‘I don’t know how to play it.’ Bill goes, ‘A chimp can play ‘Gloria’! Give me a guitar’. And he teaches him the chords. It took a second because Eric’s trying to learn it from Bill saying, ‘No, no, put your fingers here’. It was priceless.”
Detailing the links further, Glazer continued: “The first year, I had the idea of having Bill dress up — throughout the entire festival – as Clapton from different periods of his career. If you’re a Clapton fan, it seemed like Eric’s hair would change hourly. You’d look at an album cover and go, ‘No one could grow hair and a beard that fast’. He was also kind of a clotheshorse — remember the white suit on 461 Ocean Boulevard — and so I had Bill trying to match Eric’s looks over the years.
“For the most extreme one, I had Billy in a perm and Cream-era psychedelic clothes. So, Eric is onstage doing sound check, which is a fairly sacred moment for him — no one goes onstage during soundcheck — and Billy wanders out dressed as Clapton circa 1966 with the perm. People freeze. Really, the band stopped playing and stuff, and Eric turned and walked over. He doesn’t recognise Bill initially, and he has this really intense look on his face. Bill looks at him and goes ‘Like looking in a mirror, isn’t it?’ Fortunately, Eric laughed, but there was a second where I went, ‘This could really end badly’. I could see a [Pete] Townshend guitar swing”.
See the clip below.
