Virgin £18.99 pp282
Biographies of Cream have been rare and this latest is impeccably timed. Next month the original trio play their first concerts in 26 years at the Royal Albert Hall, the venue where they played their last shows before splitting up in November 1968. Interest in this comeback has been strong: all of their concerts sold out instantly and tickets are now changing hands for four-figure sums. Yet outside the community of devotees plenty of people have little idea what, or even who, all the fuss is about.
To recap. Cream were pioneers of the ultra-loud, blues-inflected version of pop that became known, around 1966, as “rock”. They were the first “power trio”, a formation copied by, among others, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They played songs that lasted up to half an hour, and thanks to their fondness for competitive soloing, introduced pop audiences, for better or worse, to the jazz-derived cult of the virtuoso. They sounded as hairy as they looked, preferring unstructured jams to the neatly groomed set-lists of the beat groups.
While most bands at the time grew out of adolescent friendships or chance meetings, Cream had individual reputations and pedigree, hence their billing as a “supergroup”. According to the Who’s Pete Townshend they were “created by the machine” of a rapidly expanding pop industry; and Dave Thompson’s book is a mine of hagiographical information detailing the interlocking cliques which dominated it.
The eldest member at 27, drummer Ginger Baker was a maverick trad-jazzer who had moved into R&B mainly for the pay cheques. The 21-year-old Eric Clapton had just served time with the headmaster of the British blues revival, John Mayall; and Cream’s third man, 22-year-old bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce, was classically trained and considered Bach to be the bassman’s true mentor. He boasted of his preference for Beethoven’s string quartets and the symphonies of Shostakovitch. Despite having played on some of Manfred Mann’s biggest pop hits, Bruce was Cream’s most articulate musical snob. “Pink Floyd and all those bands — no thanks,” he once remarked.
It was probably inevitable that three such well-developed musical egos would quarrel, and Cream were almost as famous for their rows as their music. Baker, a volatile heroin user, was often at Bruce’s throat, once with a knife. On another occasion he amused himself by chucking drumsticks at Bruce’s head while he was off on a big solo. Clapton, a less confrontational character, was sometimes reduced to tears in the dressing room by these shenanigans. Of all the many phases of his career, Cream is the one about which he has always been the most reticent.
Thompson is no psychologist and a pretty scrappy writer, but he has trawled the cuttings, talked to most of the players (but not Clapton) and produced a book that is packed with drama and extraordinary anecdotes. The most bizarre concerns a promotional film in which Cream, dressed as American cops and miming with tennis rackets, stood and watched while live frogs were hammered into the ground in front of them.
While Thompson never really inquires why this lot haven’t achieved as much general recognition recently as their peers — who, from George Harrison down, absolutely worshipped Cream at the time — the clues are all here. Cream came and went incredibly fast. They made four albums and played around 200 concerts all within the space of two and a half years — roughly how long it takes a band nowadays to clear the paperwork for their debut. The reason why you hardly ever hear Cream on the Gold stations is because of their hopeless choice of singles. There were no big hits, only whimsical oddities such as Anyone for Tennis? and Wrapping Paper. They turned up more often on second division radio shows hosted by the likes of Joe Loss than they did on Top of the Pops.
In America it was a different story. Thanks to their willingness to tour, Cream were soon the equals of deities such as the Stones, Hendrix and the Who. It was an English graffito that first declared Eric Clapton to be God in 1965; but it was in America three years later that the foundations of his superstar status were laid.
For a while, Cream ran second only to the Beatles in the affections of American audiences. Everybody loved them. Their wild, improvisational approach went down a storm with the San Francisco hippies while their extreme loudness appealed equally to boozy, blue-collar crowds in the mid-west. By the end they were earning $60,000 a night. According to Thompson, one of the leading American “underground” bands of the day, the Electric Flag, broke up in despair after supporting Cream in concert.
Useful as it is to be reminded of their hours of greatness, the best bits of this book evoke the distinctly unsuper environment in which these rock giants grew up. Cream played together for the first time in the front room of Baker’s semi in Neasden, and shared their first rehearsal space with a Brownie troop down the road in Kensal Green. They would drive, with all their gear crammed into an Austin Princess, to gigs at end-of-the-pier ballrooms or agricultural sheds in the East Midlands.
Even at the very end, Cream were still, in the eyes of straight Britain, just a bunch of errant kids. The Daily Express called Tony Palmer’s 1968 BBC documentary of their final concert, “A disturbing piece of television . . . which no parent could afford to miss.” This book, by contrast, is essential reading for any youngsters wondering what all those old folks will be up to in the Albert Hall next month.
ROCK ON
Clapton, Bruce and Baker will be some of rock’s oldest performers when they take to the stage next month. Clapton may be a relatively sprightly 60, and Bruce 61, but 65-year-old Baker is even older than Mick Jagger.
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