Original subtitles

The Disraeli Gears experience was my first experience in an American

recording studio and part of my first introduction into the American music

scene. And that's the home of the music that I love.

What kind of fool are you?

Nobody's ever been able to emulate Cream.

And nobody ever will.

And the colours of the sea.

Find your eyes with trembling mermaids. And you touch the distant beaches.

I think it's got a lot to do with the simplicity of the times.

It does kind of sum it up, you know. If you hear one of those songs, it sounds

like the 60s. But without the, you know, it's kind of serious stuff.

To hear Cream on the radio in 1967 was an amazing shock

because for all of the innovation in popular music at that time, you had the

Beatles, you had the Stones, you had Dylan, there was no other band and

certainly no other English band that sounded that muscular and funky.

When cream formed, they were already stars, and they were already being...

They had plenty of accolades.

Cream was originally Ginger's idea.

He had the idea of forming a band with Eric.

Eric was God at the time.

Eric, for his age, was certainly being acclaimed as a great guitarist. He'd

already been in the Yardbirds.

He'd already been with Mayall. Jazz and blues and rock all came together because

of the backgrounds of all the three different musicians.

a magic blend really i had seen buddy guy play at the marquee with a trio so

i had it in my mind that the trio was the the ideal sort of combo size

and um jack had spent a short stint with john male so i knew jack was the bass

player ginger baker and jack bruce were

famous names on the jazz circuit and on the R&B circuit. They'd been the

mainstay of Alexis Corner Blues Incorporated and then the Graham Bond

Quartet. Jack was available at the time when John McVie was not in the Blues

Breakers.

And I offered him the job then, and he was with me for three months or so, and

then got an offer for more money to go and play with Manfred Mann.

It just seemed so wrong to be playing with somebody as good as Jack and doing

Duar Didi. But Jack's first gig with us, he played straight through the gig with

no rehearsal.

Absolutely straight through, a whole gig, picking it up.

I suppose it was so obvious where the next chord was going to be, he just

knew. Ginger is a time.

expert and is a great jazz drummer but also has an incredible interest in in

the root of it in africa we used to get angry like jazz guys would get angry

because the white rock rock press would say you know who's the greatest drummer

is it ginger or is it elvin and you're like we're saying like what what's the

question you know like what are you joking when you listen back you know you

can hear that ginger baker was a spectacular drummer we were all much the

same really we're all improvising musicians

with a blues background because if you're a jazz player you have to have a

knowledge of the blues as well because jazz comes from there. I guess it seemed

quite logical really to bring all these influences together in what became known

as a supergroup.

We first played in my masonette in Braemar Avenue

which was an extraordinary event.

It was just...

total magic musically, immediately.

There's something about the playing in all of us that really is closely bonded.

No matter what our tastes are, we still seem to find a common ground.

We all fed off each other. It just exploded and continued to explode.

In the 60s, there was no doubt that there was a big new kind of music

coming from Great Britain that was heavily influenced by people who were

deeply imbued by the American blues tradition.

I thought you could take the language of the blues and without being too

big headed about it,

kind of take it somewhere else because, let's face it, Eric, Ginger and myself

are not black guys from the Mississippi Delta.

Cream always had a tendency to do the unexpected and surprise people.

They weren't going to be just a simple straight-ahead blues band with guitar,

bass and drums.

When we were making Fresh Cream and when we were starting to evolve our style,

there were a lot of other things in play, fashion and a sense of theatre. I

was very young.

wrapped up in Dadaism at the time in the 60s. I was kind of interested in

absurdity and stuff like this as a, you know, as an art form.

And so we had great ideas, grand ideas about how we present ourselves on stage.

And also there was this notion too that we would confuse the audience.

The idea of putting the first song out with a wrapping paper which was written

by Pete Brown and Jack appealed to me because although it wasn't really

exactly the nature of what I wanted to do with the band, I liked the idea of

giving, you know, kind of shocking the audience. I was in that frame of mind,

we all were.

All of us realised that lyrics wasn't really a strong point and I phoned up

Pete Brown.

I knew they were doing it, I'd sort of got the rumours and whatever, but I got

a phone call from them saying, we're down in the studio.

We need some words or something remotely like that. Pete Brown was the ideal man.

Although he actually started out writing with Ginger, eventually he ended up

writing with Jack. I don't know what he is. I think he's Pete Brown.

But I always thought of him as a poet. He was from that jazz and poetry thing,

which is where I first came across Pete.

Jack and I always had the chemistry. It was something indefinable that we, you

know, we would fight, you know.

But at the same time, the artistic chemistry somehow was absolutely

fated. Although Pete very much, the guy who wrote the lyrics, I would work with

him in order to get things that were singable.

Feel when I dance with you We

move like the sea You...

They made the first record, Fresh Cream, which was not a tremendous hit.

I was kind of disappointed in the thrust of it. So for the second record, they

agreed to come to America and record in our studio.

It was actually a really good move for us to go to Atlantic and to be

introduced to the Erdogan brothers and to be accepted into that particular

family, musical family, was a fantastic piece of good fortune. Meeting all those

people, including Aretha Franklin and Booker T and Otis Redding.

All those fabulous people were in and out of that studio. It was like a dream

really. We were represented by Robert Stigwood and he had some pretty novel

ideas about launching bands and stuff.

I think Amit and Stigwood in particular was very keen for Eric to become the

front man of the band and for it to be Eric's band with us as backing musicians

really.

Strangely enough, you know, Eric was a little shy about singing.

at the time and I really couldn't understand and of course Jack Bruce was

a strong singer but not the blues type of

singer that Eric was.

The thing was that Eric wasn't ready anyway. I think it was good in a way

that Eric kind of got prodded into becoming a bit of a singer.

I was kind of...

growing as a singer as because so i would sing harmonies with jack and every

now and then i'd do a blues we didn't really have much idea of what we were

going to do at the time you know which is i mean the first thing we

did was hey lordy mama wanna go out babe too late at

night lordy mama no need to worry

This came from hearing an album that Buddy Guy and Junior Wells did together.

And he did Hey Lordy Mama on that. But that riff is from another song, which I

think a Little Walter song called Everything's Gonna Be Alright.

What we did was we took it from shuffle to straight time. Shuffle is... Straight

time is... So we took that riff and...

And

then just wrote the song over that.

We turned up at Atlantic Studios.

There was Tom Dowd and Felix Papalardi. And Felix sort of got on rather well

with us all. Kind of like an A&R man who would take what we had and try to make

that. more evolved.

And it said, okay, you're the producer, Felix.

Felix took Hey Lordy Mama away and put Strange Brew on top with Eric singing.

He took that really from a blues, just a standard 12 bar and turned it into a

kind of McCartney-esque pop song.

Strange Brew, killing what's inside of you.

She's the windshot trouble in electric blue.

In her own mad mind, she's in love with you, with you.

Now what you gonna do?

Strange brew, killing what's inside of you.

I wasn't that mad, still not that mad about it as a form, but I respected the

fact that it could be done and that he knew how to do it.

And of course, you know, he let me play a guitar solo, which was, I mean, that

was almost like an unspoken deal that if I was to play, if I kind of gave in and

played on this kind of pop song, I could play an Albert King guitar solo.

It was like a great weight of responsibility lay in those few days.

There was tension.

It wasn't smooth running by any means.

Ahmed saw it as the guitar player, much like Chuck Berry or

any of these guys, and the rhythm section was there, but

not featured.

I was kind of gutted, really, because I had done a lot of work.

and was, you know, had been the singer, was the singer, mostly the lead singer,

and it was working pretty well, you know, the way that it was.

There was some resistance to some of Jack Bruce's and Pete Brown's ideas.

Perhaps people couldn't always see quite what they were doing. It was so

experimental, so off the wall.

Once I personally got over the sort of slight I felt about...

my material not being sort of taken, you know, taken seriously, if you like.

Because I really believed in it. I sort of knew that this stuff was happening.

But apart from... Once I got over that initial thing, Felix and me became very,

very close friends.

There's no doubt that Felix had a vision as well. He felt...

Just like some Americans say, hey, this is my band. I'm going to do this thing

with this band.

Some of it's bullshit, you know, but Felix really delivered.

We were both very similar kinds of musicians, really. We were both

classically trained and had a wide knowledge of music of different kinds.

We were very similar, really, both bass players.

He was clearly a good songwriter, and he understood what we were trying to do.

Cream was not just the blues band.

of blues was it was purple you know it had some polka dots in it

coming

to me in the morning leaving me

alone

You got that rainbow feel, but the rainbow has a beard.

She was like a bearded rainbow.

Drugs.

SWLABR was about the idea that somebody's kind of comparing the woman

that he's been involved with with the Mona Lisa, but then he's going around

defacing her picture. You know, it's actually quite perverted.

The rainbow has a beard, you know, and it's like, basically, it's defacing due

to being dumped.

That's revenge.

But the picture has a moustache.

You come into me with that soulful look on your face.

Come in looking like you've never, ever done one wrong thing.

The blues is about the war between the sexes.

A lot of it is. And so that's kind of just an episode in that war, really.

The best part of it, really, as well as, you know, making this great record, was

meeting Tommy. Because Tom Dowd became an incredibly close friend and was very

instrumental in a lot of my future music.

and I miss him, you know, and he was a wonderful man. Felix was good musically.

He would be sure that they had arrangements that worked and could

rewrite songs and so forth.

Tommy was a great master of getting a good sound.

They were very impressive, you know, professional.

musical people to work with.

That part of it was very, very good.

Tom Dowd was one of the first engineers that people would say, like, whoa, where

do you hear what this guy does? Where do you hear his sound?

There was a particular way of working, a very good, professional, and efficient

way, which was that, for instance, the bass player would use a little Ampeg amp

that had a key, the Union key sort of thing.

and it would be the same amp for everybody.

So for us to come in with Marshall stacks, he wasn't used to it. He very

quickly got used to it, you know. That was the loudest group I had ever heard.

Like when Aretha recorded there, everybody was smoking.

I mean, it was, they were kicking, but you couldn't hear it three blocks away.

Cream was in there, man. They had, you know, all kinds of gobos and everything

set up at stacks of Marshalls. They are one of the groups that are partially

responsible for...

my not hearing as well as I used to. We had always exported music.

We never imported music.

And a lot of us who were traditional, you know, like American music fans, you

know, it's like, who are these guys?

This is ours. This isn't yours.

But at the end of it, you know, you guys saved the blues.

When I first heard them, I already knew what

I had.

What I had was Eric Clapton.

And the trio was a great trio, but the soul part

was going to come from Eric Clapton.

If you lose your money, great God don't lose your mind.

If you lose your money, great God don't lose your mind.

If you lose your woman, please don't fool with mine

Gonna buy me a bulldog,

watch my old lady while I sleep

Gonna buy me a bulldog,

watch my old lady while I sleep

My only way of tapping into my taste was to use old material.

But I've also always been driven by the idea of turning people on to stuff. I

just think it's very important to educate people or illustrate where music

has come from.

especially contemporary rock music.

And if you knew a little bit about the songs that they were playing and

covering, you know, I'm So Glad, Four Until Late by Robert Johnson, you know,

Outside Woman Blues later on, Joe Reynolds, you know, you got a sense that

they knew their stuff.

I had a predisposition to take things from the early history of blues and

adapt them, arrange them, as it were, for a rock.

outfit and it has that riff which is great for an electric

band you know bass and guitar and and i like i've never heard that particular um

term before outside woman you know that you have your wife and your outside

woman i just think the whole thing i mean is what it kind of captures what

the blues is about for me the kind of you know the good stuff

Well, you can't watch your wife and your outside women, too.

You know, you can't watch your wife and your outside women, too.

Because when you're out with your woman, your wife would be at home cooking your

food, doing your diet. Buddy, what you trying to do?

The impact of that sound on radio, that very fat guitar that

Clapton had at that point, Jack's bass was actually very rubbery, very

elastic. It almost ping-ponged. It bounced inside the performances.

And Ginger's drumming was not... He wasn't playing straight 4-4s. A lot of

the action in his drumming was on the toms.

It was on the cymbals. It was on everything around the snare. He was all

over the kit, but he was all over the kit with incredible discipline.

Gonna build myself a castle

High up in the

clouds There'll be skies outside

my window It was very much a sort of Buffalo Springfield birds tribute

really with the 12-string guitar eight miles high because all that kind of All

that kind of soloing stuff because we were very very influenced by

them as well

That was the time which I chose to stop drinking and taking drugs, and I was in

a very, very strange state, a state of semi-reality for a bit.

And the things that kept me anchored in some form of reality were dancing and

sex.

And so Dance the Night Away was really related to that.

do mad sort of psychedelic dancing down at psychedelic clubs and feel my

body working so I wasn't actually floating away and disappearing, you

know, which I had previously felt might be the case.

It didn't get that much airplay even on FM radio at the time of Disraeli Gears,

but when it did, it really jumped out because it sounded unlike any of the

other heavy records of its time.

It's not my natural.

place to play that chord.

It's an A minor chord, but it's played in... So it's an A minor 7th.

And it goes up to a B minor 7th.

I would normally play an A minor like that.

Or straight.

But this...

Like that where it came from. I really don't know It's just one of those things

that came into my head because the way that I tend to write It's not sitting

down at guitar or piano The way I tend to write is I just sort of things I get

an idea and go for a walk and work in my head, you know, but Jack Caught it

incredibly. I mean or I'm not quite sure how we wrote that one whether the music

came first or not, but whatever it was the things just just blended really

nicely. And there's a landscape in there.

You know, you can actually feel it. And the words are pretty simple, but they

are part of the landscape.

Once again Cream did something that would surprise people and confuse people

as well I suppose because now the policy for most record makers and producers and

artists is to come up with something that's very

It's always the same.

You've got to write material that follows a pattern or a groove. You

mustn't shock people.

And of course, that's quite the opposite of what Cream is all about.

We're Going Wrong is one of the great Cream songs.

Not a single, not a big hit, but it actually captures everything that was

powerful about them in a very unconventional way.

I had a fight with my wife when I lived in Bracknell Gardens in Hampstead. And I

came out of the flat and I walked down the road and it just came into my head.

It's just like the kind of...

What you say, what you think when you've had a fight with your wife.

I found out today

we're going wrong.

Goes in circles and it climbs but it never seems to reach anywhere.

And Eric doesn't do a whole lot. He plays this chord progression, which is

actually very kind of chunky. And again, it's very funky in its way. But Jack's

vocal is very powerful, very operatic. And again, climbing, you know, it's as

if he's trying to reach something and not quite getting there. The secret

power of We're Going Wrong is Ginger's drumming, because all of the action in

the song is underneath Jack and Eric. It's in the tom rolls.

I play to what I hear. If Eric plays a lick, it will affect what I play, and

then what I play will affect what he plays, etc.

The same with Jack. One of us will play something that triggers somebody else to

play something.

And that's happening all the time, which is why it's never the same.

Kareem did that song at the Albert Hall at the reunion shows. I saw three of

those reunion shows.

And every night, that was the killer.

It's changed. It's become much deeper to me than when I first wrote it, you know.

But that can happen. Songs take on their own life. They become entities and they

disappear and then they come back and they're like kids or something, you

know. And they change.

But everybody thinks it's some kind of deep, deep sort of philosophical thing.

It's not.

The music obviously had to feel there because that's the way we play.

So obviously it always swings from the start and it's always got that

thing which is essentially Cream.

I hadn't heard of Cream.

When I first met Eric I didn't know who he was, I'd never heard their music.

It just happened.

I was in the Speakeasy one night.

Just hanging out not many people there and I certainly I recognized Charlotte

this girl who I'd met I was dating this girl Charlotte Martin very very

beautiful French lady, and she I think she knew Martin I don't know how they

knew one another but she introduced me to him and we started talking we hit it

off I liked him a lot and he was a Designer and an artist he worked he

painted and drew pictures for a magazine called Oz at the time And I said, oh,

I've just written this song, you know.

One of them said, I've just written this music. And so I wrote down the lyrics on

a serviette and sort of gave them to one of the guys and, you know, so my

address. You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever But you

rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun It's just amazing that the

lyrics should...

suit the music he'd written. That was a bit of fate, I suppose, destiny.

And the colours of the sea Find your eyes with trembling mermaids And you

touch the distant beaches With tales of brave Ulysses How his naked ears were

tortured By the sirens sweetly singing While the sparkling waves are calling

you To kiss the white lace net

I'd been to the Balearic Isles, Ibiza, Formentera, and someone there had told

me, he said, that's the islands where the sirens sang to Ulysses.

Experiences from being on those islands and then coming back to London and

missing the summer, the summer of Sydney, the summer of Ibiza and

Formentera, and I sort of just started to write these words down and really to

the melody of Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, which is actually Judy Collins' version

of it, which I love that song.

literally Martin had written down on a sheet of paper, and Jack found a way to

sing them over this riff.

Summer in the City probably came out about a year before that. I mean, Loving

Spoonful were a big influence on us, and me especially, and Zal Zanofsky was the

guitar player.

And that riff was straight out of it, you know.

One of the key sounds, really, of Tales of Brave Ulysses, as Jack would sing it,

is this fantastic new guitar effect, the wah-wah pedal.

Felix Papalardi had actually taken Eric down to Manny's, where they specialised

in guitars and guitar equipment.

There was a great little guy in there. I remember him saying that he had this

pedal, you know, which could make a sort of cry-bite, a wah-wah sound, and I

said, well, I'll let him, I'll take one, you know. One of the things that's

impressive about the wah-wah on Tales of Brave Ulysses is how clean it is. You

just add that to the mix and makes it sound nicer.

That's all it is really. And then I think the first time you hear it is when

Jack says, you thought the lead and wind, just that stuff.

It's like atmospherics, the wah-wah. It's all it does. It doesn't really add

anything to the music, just the sound.

But I always liked that song.

I think it's the wah-wah that did it for me. I'm a big sucker for wah-wah.

Tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers and you want to take her

with you to the heartland of the winter.

It was a bit of a romance, you know, and I remember sort of certainly dancing in

the water one day and the little fishes run laughing through the fingers. But I

mean, I was inspired by the songs of the time and, you know, the zeitgeist.

I mean, a very nifty way of writing the song and not much to it, really. It was

a chance encounter, you know.

He turned up at the studio with a record, Strange Brewer, the A-side, and

the B-side was Tales of Brave Ulysses. I was a bit disappointed it was on the B

-side, actually, I remember.

Martin Sharp's cover was an important factor in saying, this is cream, this is

a part of 1967.

I got a studio with Bob Whittaker.

in Kings Road, Joubert Place, it was wonderful.

The 100 people who ran the 60s came through our studio one way or another

and it was a fantastic time.

I found a sort of lifestyle there that I always tried to live since.

You know, it was a good amalgam of life and art and music.

He has a remarkably good way of putting things together.

Well, I was trying to get an image of the musicians and...

Warm electric sound.

This was a publicity shot.

Jack's in the middle there.

I would just take pictures and I knew there was a use for them somewhere.

And Martin, in his inimitable way, got his scissors out and cut these expensive

prints up.

These are sort of from some book of classic decoration.

I think the wings are from Albrecht Durer, a book on Albrecht Durer.

Different elements, just put them together.

glued them down and painted them. Great colours, really kind of day glow, you

know, bright, bright colours.

Not many people I think were using fluorescent at the time, but it stood

out. Quite a simple design, really.

I'm glad they liked it.

Take it back, take it back.

I wanted it to be a very definite anti-Vietnam War song.

And I had words that I'd written myself about a guy getting a draft card.

you know, wanting to get rid of it.

But America, we have a love-hate relationship with. We wouldn't be here

if it wasn't for black American culture.

We love the culture.

We love the movies, and yet we hate the politics.

We were in the States so much, we were scared of being drafted ourselves.

There was a visible memory of that in as much as every time we landed at an

airport, there would be fields upon fields of helicopter gunships and

fighters and tanks every day.

Don't forget, we were flying to all the shows, different city every day, and

every day you'd see this. They toured America.

like no other band I've ever seen.

The tours we did after Disraeli Gears of America were really, really extensive,

and they were powerful. We were playing these tremendous kind of hippie

strongholds in Detroit and New York and especially the West Coast, you know, LA

and San Francisco.

We developed a following that was phenomenal.

We then kind of...

Cracked America, as it were, which is obviously what you have had to do and

still have to do if you're gonna be really big.

It's the land of rock and roll.

Pete

Brown

and myself had been, we were trying to write

something, and we'd been up all night trying to, I hadn't had any luck, hadn't

come up with anything very much. He stood up and grabbed his double bass and

said, well, what about this then?

And I looked out of the window and I said, hmm, it's getting, it's getting

near dawn.

The sun was coming up.

Just biopic stuff.

Jack had the bass line.

I just simply played it up here on the guitar, the octave on the guitar, but I

put it in the chord, which the chord is D, so I put it in.

So there's all those other strings in the chord playing, so it's harmonized

really.

And then back to the bass line.

And then sometimes...

It wasn't a song, it was just a riff really, which modulated from there to

there.

And then we went, I think we had a rehearsal quite soon after that, and I

played it to Eric, and then Eric came up with the turnaround.

So then it became a song, just put those two bits together and there it was,

Sunshine of Your Love.

It's getting near dark When lights close their tired eyes

I'll soon be with you, my love.

Give you my dull surprise.

I'll be with you, darling, soon.

I'll be with you when the stars start falling.

That riff is so powerful, it is so precise, and it's so

heavy that it's irresistible.

to hear that on the radio next to a supreme song it's impossible to describe

it was just amazing the whole thing just works and sometimes things just work um

and they're simple as hell and you you wonder why um you know it was there

waiting to be written sunshine had this uh kind of primeval quality

really that really dragged at people

I don't know what it is. The riff is something that goes very deep. There are

very, very few great rock riffs, and that's one of them, for sure.

The riff in Sunshine gets you first.

That's the thing that it's right up front.

But Jack's vocal and the way that chorus really soars, it's the payoff.

Waiting so long to be where I'm going

in the sunshine of your love.

The thing about Ginger's drumming on Sunshine, he never showed off in the

song. He was always rooting it. He was always anchoring it. And yet, at the

same time, if you listen to Sunshine, you can hear the rolls. You can hear the

way he chops up the beat.

I've played with all the finest drummers in jazz and rock.

Ginger is...

To me, untouchable by any of them as a musician.

He went on to become Atlantic's biggest selling single up to that time.

What you hear is the supergroup that everyone said Cream was supposed to be

in 1966.

In Britain, in 66, they were a supergroup because they had this

incredible pedigree. On Disraeli Gears, they proved why they were worthy of a

name. And when we put out a record after that, we didn't need to have a hit.

I mean, everybody was waiting for the next Scream record.

When we'd finished recording it, you know, we all knew how good it was.

You couldn't escape it.

A blend of all the important aspects.

a creative spirit, songwriting, innovation, technical ability, great

musicianship, fascinating songs and above all creating a mood.

We had really found ourselves and we had found our

promise as individuals in the different areas we were in. The reason why those

songs and some of the other songs that we did are so good, they're fresh still

because they were recorded more or less live.

You can't escape from the fact that you're having fun playing with the guys.

I think what Cream can be looked at is the start of an idea and the breakdown

of categorisation in music that really we could move into all these areas and

improvise and extend ourselves.

There was this whole new beginning for the band, a whole new vibe and I loved

that time very much.

Really you had pop music and you didn't have

you know, hardcore rock really, especially from white musicians. So I

think we were really kind of like a pivotal point in the history of popular

music. I advise anybody listening to pick that up and listen

to it and turn it up kind of loud if you don't mind, even if you wake

up the neighbors.

On the hunt for the next great artist, 14 compete for the biggest prize in the

art world. That's tomorrow at 8.

I've been waiting so long.

I've been waiting so long to be where I'm

going in the sunshine of your love.