Performer: Blind Faith
Songwriter: Steve Winwood
Original
Release:
Blind Faith
Year: 1969
Definitive
Version:
The original studio version.
As
I write this, Laurie and I are coming off a benefit performance at the Metro—a
hallowed Chicago rock barn. One of the songs was a cover of About a Girl by
Nirvana—the electric version.
Although
I suppose a lot of people know that that song, made famous by Nirvana’s
Unplugged performance, was originally an electric song, I wonder how many know
that that’s also true of this song. OK, maybe the original version wasn’t
electric, but Blind Faith recorded an electric version of this song. As far as
I know, it surfaced only on Steve Winwood’s The Finer Things album and a deluxe
copy of Blind Faith. I’ve heard the electric version of this song once.
I
remember that night well. Debbie and I planned to go out to dinner with Sharon
and Roger, Debbie’s best friends in Columbus, whom we saw a lot. The night in
question, sometime in 1998 or 1999, I think, was to celebrate Roger’s birthday.
We went to dinner at a restaurant that long has slipped my mind. What I recall,
however, was that a storm of positively cataclysmic proportions was forecast to
hit the city that night.
The
local news was apoplectic in their dire predictions of devestation—nothing
unusual, really, when it comes to reporting storms—and from the radar, it did
seem to be a big one. A tornado watch was put into effect, like, days before
the storm’s arrival.
Anyway,
our plan had been to go from dinner to Sharon and Roger’s house for birthday
cake and post-dinner drinks, and the timing was such that we’d be leaving the
restaurant right at about the time the storm was expected to hit. We had dinner
in Worthington, and Sharon and Roger lived in Gahanna, so we had a fairly long
drive ahead of us.
As
we got into Roger’s car, the sky just lit up, as though someone turned on a
strobe. It was—and still is—the most incredible lightning display I’ve seen.
The only storm that I could recall coming close to matching it was the night I
saw the tornado when I was a little boy in 1973. But this lightning was almost overhead,
just north of I-270, and it was constant to the point where you couldn’t see
where one flash stopped and another started—a strobe light, like I said.
I
figured that rain, hail and for all I knew frogs were about to bury us on the
freeway, but if we had five raindrops hit the windshield, we certainly had no
more than that. We got to Sharon and Roger’s feeling as though we got home just
in the nick of time, but a funny thing happened: The storm missed us completely.
The
lightning continued to rage, seemingly just to the north of where we were—we could
see it out the skylights in Sharon and Roger’s great room—but that was all. We
turned on the TV to the radar channel, and the storm—massive, all right—was
bearing down on Columbus from the north, but it seemed to curl right around
I-270. Every time we checked, it continued to bend around and miss the city
when there seemed to be no reason we wouldn’t take a direct hit.
At
this point, it no longer mattered. We were safely indoors, enjoying cake and
libations and the music over Roger’s newly installed 5.1 sound system (one of
the first of those I remember seeing).
Sharon
chose the Winwood album, and when this song came on, I voiced my surprise. I
had no idea Blind Faith did an electric version of this song; I couldn’t even
conceive of such a thing. To my complete lack of surprise, the electric version
failed to stand out in any way other than its mere existence, which probably is
why its existence has been all but forgotten.
Speaking
of electric, when it was time to find our way home home, Debbie and I discovered
that the conditions there matched those of Gahanna farther to the south. The
storm of the century, which was spectacular, was a dud in terms of impact. We
didn’t get a drop of rain.
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