Cream Still Rises To The Top

I hope some of you out there received holiday gift cards about a month or so ago to Barnes and Noble, Borders, Best Buys, or other places that sell DVDs. If you haven’t maxed them out yet, then I’ve got a great gift idea for you.

And I’ll bet you’ll NEVER guess what I’m referring to (I mean, the ad has only appeared on this site in the right column since Christmas, right?).

“Cream: Classic Artists” is a two-disc set that includes the following:

- (DVD) A two-hour documentary on the band, as well as extended interviews, concert performances, and videos of the band, as well as photographs and other memorabilia

- (CD) A set of five songs from a Stockholm concert in 1967: “NSU,” “Steppin’ Out,” “Traintime,” “Toad,” and “I’m So Glad”

Recorded at the time of the 2005 reunion concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Madison Square Garden in New York, the documentary begins with drummer Ginger Baker’s answer to the question of whether or not Cream is still popular: “39 years (after the breakup), the show (at the Royal Albert Hall) sold out in two hours (after the tickets went on sale),” indicating that, while Baker is ostensibly right, he has to work on his math (he’s still a kickass drummer, though, as evidenced in an interview with him at his ranch).

The documentary, narrated by Russ Williams of the BBC, then proceeds with an interview of Eric Clapton, who recalls his early band The Roosters and fellow band mates Tom McGuinness (guitar) and Ben Palmer (piano, who would become Cream’s road manager later). McGuiness went onto the Manfred Mann band (which featured Jack Bruce for a time – as you watch this, you realize how truly incestuous the relationships were with personnel moving back and forth from one band to another) along with vocalist Paul Jones also (who recalled a funny story about the band escaping a Scotland gig in an interview).

While Clapton moved from the Yardbirds (earning his nickname “slow hand” for his extended solos) onto John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in the early ‘60s (Palmer, in an interview, recalled that Mayall captured blues music well from a technical point of view, but Clapton seemed to feel constricted), Bruce began a tempestuous relationship with drummer Ginger Baker when he joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated in 1962, a band that played primarily blues and jazz, with Bruce, Baker, and saxophonists Graham Bond and Dick Heckstall-Smith dedicated primarily to jazz. Bond left Alexis Korner and formed his own group, the Graham Bond Organization, taking Bruce, Baker and Heckstall-Smith with him.

Bruce sought to play the bass as a lead instrument with Graham Bond, which (as nearly as I can tell from the documentary) was one of the reasons why Baker (an accomplished drummer in his own right, and a visionary in exploring other types of music) grew infuriated with him. After a backstage assault by Baker (for which Baker profusely apologized later), Bruce eventually left Graham Bond and wondered if he was on the right track with his music, but as the documentary recalls, he encountered James Jamerson of Motown’s “Funk Brothers,” the session players whose wonderful contributions to the legendary hits of Motown can never be applauded enough, and Jamerson (along with Marvin Gaye, who was a session drummer at that time) convinced Bruce that he was on the right track.

Baker, meanwhile, left Graham Bond also and sought to form a new group, just as Clapton sought to leave John Mayall. The two found each other independently, though they had not decided on a bass player. Clapton knew of Bruce through McGuinness and also because Bruce had sat in with John Mayall for a time, and Clapton recommended Bruce, unaware of his conflict with Baker. Baker realized that Bruce was the right fit, and after making amends with Bruce, persuaded him to join the new band, which was given the name Cream by Clapton.

Have you got all that? I told you it was incestuous.

With all of the requisite hoopla helped in part by the British music press (notable Melody Maker), Cream, under the control of the Robert Stigwood management company and his Polydor recording label, went to work in 1966. The band’s first single, “Wrapping Paper,” was more or less a promotional recording for “Tops Of The Pops,” a popular British music variety show, at Stigwood’s urging; the song marked an inauspicious debut for the band, with Baker calling it “an absolute piece of shit.”

In an effort to create a unique sound reflective of the times, Ahmet Ertegun, the visionary founder of Atlantic Records who oversaw the studio recordings, recruited poet Pete Brown to write lyrics for the band, and Brown was originally supposed to team with Ginger Baker for that purpose. When that failed, Brown started working with Jack Bruce, and the two of them wrote some of Cream’s many memorable songs, beginning with “I Feel Free” on “Fresh Cream,” the group’s debut album consisting primarily of blues cover songs. Brown, whose sensibilities were influenced by the popular absurdist British T.V. series The Goon Show, was responsible for such lyrics as “Silver horses run down moonbeams in your dark eyes," and “Lie in the dark where the shadows run from themselves,” in “White Room,” and “I can drive down the road; my eyes don't see, though my mind wants to cry out loud,” from “I Feel Free.”

“Fresh Cream” did not produce the breakthrough sought by Stigwood and Ertegun, though, so when the band returned to the studio to begin work on the second album in 1967, Ertegun sought Felix Pappalardi, the co-founder of the group Mountain with Leslie West (and speaking of Mountain, today is drummer Corky Laing’s birthday). As Bruce recounted in an interview, the band wanted the input of another musician in the recording process, and Pappalardi certainly provided that, helping to meld the distinctive Cream sound for “Disraeli Gears.” The free-from, psychedelic influence of the time became noteworthy also (helped along after appearing at the Fillmore West in San Francisco), reflected in the album’s cover art and also in the extended solos that were becoming an important part of the band’s live performances (and in another example of the incestuousness I mentioned earlier, Mountain would record “Theme From An Imaginary Western,” written by Bruce). “Sunshine Of Your Love,” perhaps Cream’s signature song from that album, was released in the U.K. in 1967, but made it to the U.S. charts a year later.

However, the touring grind was starting to catch up with Baker, Bruce and Clapton, and the simmering animosity between Baker and Bruce heated up as well, with Clapton frequently playing peacemaker (it’s hard to get an understanding of what exactly precipitated that, but it probably was the egos of two prodigious musicians more than anything else – Clapton recalled in an interview that it was like breaking up the fights between his young daughters that he experienced many years after the band broke up). Also, Robert Stigwood shortchanged the band financially in a manner typical of what just about everyone else managing a musical act did for that time, leading to a showdown of sorts with Clapton (Clapton recalled later that he was only half serious about it and did it to keep Baker from physically harming Stigwood). All of this was manifested when, at certain times, Clapton or Baker would stop playing onstage while Bruce continued; eventually the band members stopped speaking with each other entirely. Still, they completed “Wheels Of Fire,” the third album, once more with Pappalardi producing.

Clapton recalled in an interview that he was hurt by a review in Rolling Stone when he was referred to as “master of the blues cliché,” though that reinforced his own perception of how the group was disintegrating (writer David Fricke of Philadelphia, also interviewed, recalled that the personalities of the three were so strong that they would not have been sabotaged by a single bad review unless it confirmed what they already suspected). The three eventually decided to break up in 1968, after recording “Goodbye” with Pappalardi once more, and they performed their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in November of that year (and again, in typical fashion for that time, the studio album hit the U.S. in 1969 after achieving success in the U.K. earlier).

When asked exactly why they decided to reform for the reunion concerts in 2005, Clapton felt that he wanted to give back some more to the people he knew and had worked with previously, and Jack Bruce said that Cream was one of the few bands “left alive,” so we’d better do this “before we snuff it.” Baker, however, soundly discouraged the idea that there may be more concerts yet from the band at the very end of the documentary.

The DVD-CD set also includes great interviews, some of which I mentioned earlier. Here are some highlights:

- Clapton recalled meeting Jimi Hendrix in London in 1967, and the two became friends, After Cream left to tour in the U.S., they returned to England to see that The Jimi Hendrix Experience, a trio of musicians also like Cream (though, with all due respect to Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell of Jimi Hendrix’s band, they will never be confused for Bruce and Baker in their musicianship) had more or less stolen their thunder, as it were, which actually was a bit appropriate since Clapton got the idea for a musical trio from blues musician Buddy Guy many years earlier.

- Bruce noted that he changed from a 12-string bass to a 6-string bass due to the influence of guitarist Ernest Ranglin.

- Baker (filmed on his ranch in South Africa I believe; the location isn’t identified, and throughout the interviews, it’s hard to hear the questions) played an extended riff from “Toad,” showing that he still has “the chops” after all these years. In the documentary, Baker briefly refers to his one-time heroin use, though he cleaned himself up many years ago (as well as the fact that he hates being called “a rock drummer” because of his other musical influences).

- Ben Palmer recalled a story of how the group, on a tour after “Fresh Cream,” sold its equipment to get out of Athens, Greece.

- Tony Palmer (no relation, I believe), who produced the ’68 Royal Albert Hall concert for British T.V., recalled the technical difficulties of recording the concert and remarked that the concert would be a good addition to a DVD set (I agreed and wondered why it wasn’t included here).

- Drummer Alan White paid tribute to Baker and noted that Cream’s drummer used cymbal stacks, which was unusual for the time; White was one of four (!) drummers in “Ginger Baker’s Air Force,” his 15-piece band formed subsequent to Cream. White also noted about Baker that “he’d never seen a drummer throw his sticks at the bass player before…he was a good shot.”

Also included on the DVD set are Cream concert videos including a filmed performance at London’s Revolution Club during the peak of the group’s fame, including the songs “Spoonful,” “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” and “Sunshine Of Your Love.” Other performances include “I Feel Free” and “Strange Brew,” as well as sort of a music-video-ish, Jack-Bruce-messing-around film with the song “NSU” in the background. The galleries include a few photos of the band members prior to Cream’s formation, as well as some after the group formed in various stages of mod/psychedelic attire, and some nice photos of the three at the reunion concerts (including the one pictured above).

The CD contains five songs from a set the group performed in Stockholm in 1967: “NSU,” “Steppin’ Out” (with a truly great Clapton solo), “Traintime,” “Toad,” and “I’m So Glad” (which, though performed well here, is not as good as the live version of the song on “Goodbye”).

Though the packaging is a little sloppy (there’s no documentary scene selection on the box, and the Revolution Club songs aren’t listed on the DVD menu), there is absolutely no denying that this is a fine set paying tribute to the band through the superb documentary and great musical performances and interviews (though, speaking of the interviews, I found myself wondering what B.B. King and Solomon Burke were talking about, since it apparently had nothing to do with the band).

All the same, though, I cannot recommend this set highly enough. If you have any appreciation for this music whatsoever, buy it.