Clapton honors Robbie Robertson, promotes 2026 Crossroads Guitar Festival tickets
Tickets for Crossroads 2026 go on sale April 3 as Clapton ties the push to a Robbie Robertson tribute and vintage 2013 Madison Square Garden footage.
Eric Clapton is pushing tickets for the 2026 Crossroads Guitar Festival as he marks Robbie Robertson’s birthday with archival footage from their 2013 Madison Square Garden performance. The post links the sale to a memory that guitar fans already know well: Clapton and Robertson sharing “I Shall Be Released” at Crossroads Guitar Festival 2013 in New York City, the same two-night run that later became a live album and DVD set.
The new festival is being billed as the seventh Crossroads Guitar Festival and is scheduled for September 26-27, 2026, at Moody Center ATX in Austin, Texas. Official festival materials say tickets go on sale Friday, April 3 at 10 a.m. local time through Ticketmaster, putting the next buying window front and center as Clapton and the festival accounts roll out the event.
The Robbie Robertson tribute gives the ticket push its emotional frame. Robertson was born in 1943, and Clapton’s social posts used the 2013 footage to reconnect the new festival to one of Crossroads’ most recognizable pairings. That 2013 event took place at Madison Square Garden on April 12-13, 2013, and Clapton’s performance with Robertson remains one of the festival’s signature moments.
The 2026 edition is also tied to the 28th anniversary of Crossroads Centre Antigua, the addiction recovery center Clapton founded, which is being woven into the festival’s promotional messaging. That connection keeps Crossroads from feeling like a standard all-star guitar weekend and places the sale inside the broader cause that has shaped the event since its earliest years.
The lineup being discussed for 2026 is stacked in familiar Crossroads fashion, with Pete Townshend set to join for the first time alongside Billy Gibbons, John Mayer, Buddy Guy, Trey Anastasio, Derek Trucks, and John McLaughlin. For fans, the immediate story is the ticket clock. For Clapton, the pitch is bigger: Crossroads is still being sold not just as a concert, but as a living piece of guitar history, with Robertson’s birthday and the Madison Square Garden archive used to make that case in real time.
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