Cream (band) life and biography

Cream were a 1960s British rock supergroup consisting of bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker. Their sound was characterised by a hybrid of blues rock, hard rock and psychedelic rock,combining the psychedelia-themed lyrics, Eric Clapton's blues guitar playing, Jack Bruce's voice and prominent bass playing and Ginger Baker's jazz-influenced drumming.

Cream, for better or worse, brought instrumental virtuosity to rock and roll. Rolling Stone once referred to them as "rock's first true supergroup." The first real power trio, Cream reestablished the link between rock and the blues, and their freewheeling improvisations took them into territory that was once the province of jazz musicians. By breaking the strictures of pop song forms and making instrumental solos the heart of their sound, they paved the way for Led Zeppelin and heavy metal bands that followed.

Though Cream found its greatest popularity in the United States, all three members had strong individual reputations in England before they decided to join forces. Jack Bruce was a classically trained cellist who took up jazz bass in his teens. He eventually earned a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and began playing in a dance band to support himself. The academy, however, disapproved of its students playing jazz. "They found out," Bruce told Musician correspondent Jim Macnie, "and said 'you either stop, or leave college.' So I left college."

In the early 1960s Bruce played in a series of traditional jazz, rhythm and blues, and jump blues groups. In 1965, while playing a recording session, he borrowed an electric bass. He recalled to Dan Hedges of Guitar Player, "[I] found that I ... could get a completely different kind of thing out of it."

By that time Bruce was working with Ginger Baker in the Graham Bond Organisation, a group that also included fusion guitarist John McLaughin. Baker also came from a jazz background and was particularly influenced by the avant-garde work of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He had played in the house band at Ronnie Scott's, London's premier jazz club, and in Alexis Korner's Blues, Inc., the band that gave birth to the British blues revival, before leaving to pursue a more progressive direction with Bond.

Guitarist Eric Clapton became a star with the Yardbirds, a band that won a following in England for their extended blues jams on stage and their exotic Eastern-tinged pop experimentation in the studio. Feeling that they had sold out by abandoning the blues for pop music, Clapton quit the band immediately after they recorded their first hit single. He then played in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers but left the group shortly after Bruce joined it.

In 1966 Baker, Bruce, and Clapton were all at loose ends in their careers. Baker and Bruce had been playing throughout London as a jazz rhythm section, but, as Bruce recalled it to Macnie, "We'd had a kind of falling out. [Baker] thought my bass playing was getting too busy.... I was trying to make the bass stand up there with the other instruments. Ginger didn't agree with that. But when he went to Eric and said, 'Let's form a band,' Eric said, 'Yeah, but you've got to have Jack in it; he's the singer.' So we went by Ginger's little suburban pad and set up in his living room. And it was obvious from the start that there was a magical thing happening."

The trio may have had magic, but they lacked material; rehearsals consisted mainly of blues jams. Bruce, the most experienced songwriter in the band, wrote a light pop tune for their first single, "Wrapping Paper." It was the opposite of what everyone expected from three jazz/blues virtuosos, and it flopped. Cream's next record, however, another Bruce composition, "I Feel Free," made the British charts and set the band on their way to acclaim.

Cream didn't really hit their stride until they toured the United States in 1967. Though their first album, Fresh Cream, had only moderate sales in America, they had a considerable word-of-mouth reputation among music fans in the growing "underground" scene. American fans seemed more receptive to experimental music, and it was during Cream's stint at San Francisco's Fillmore West in 1967, Bruce told MacNie, that the band "got into the more improvised thing.... The audience began shouting 'Just play!' We were getting a bit bored just doing the tunes, actually, and were quite happy to open up."

The new improvisational direction thrilled audiences, and Cream quickly became one of the hottest bands in rock. Time praised their "exultant technical mastery that surpasses anything yet heard in rock;" Newsweek noted "a new freedom of self-expression that, if not a step toward jazz, is running on a parallel course." The first American tour was followed in short order by a new album, Disraeli Gears, and a hit single, "Sunshine of Your Love."

Cream's success as a recording band, however, only underscored the disparity between their live work and their efforts in the studio. They seemed almost to be two bands, and the critical response fell roughly into two camps: those who considered Cream's live shows a harbinger of a new freedom in rock, but found their recorded output to suffer from mediocre songwriting, undistinguished vocals, and poor production; and those who judged the studio recordings interesting, if inconsistent, and felt the extended onstage jamming was merely self-indulgent. Clapton himself was ambivalent, commenting in Rolling Stone in 1967, "That's where I want to be at: where I just don't ever have to play anything but improvisation." But in 1988 he told David Fricke in the same magazine, "Maybe we should not have been allowed that much luxury. We probably started burning out at that point. We were just going for the moon every time we played, instead of confining it and economizing."

On their third album, Wheels of Fire, Cream tried to have the best of both worlds, recording one disc in the studio and one live at the Fillmore. Rolling Stone correspondent Jann Wenner dismissed the studio half of the project: "Cream is good at a number of things; unfortunately songwriting and recording are not among them." Wenner went on to praise the live portion of Wheels of Fire, observing, "This is the kind of thing that people who have seen Cream perform walk away raving about and it's good to at last have it on a record." Even so, the studio disc featured "White Room," one of Cream's biggest hits, and the live sides included what Phil Hardy described in The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music as "the excesses of 'Train Time' and 'Toad"s seventeen minutes of drumming."

By the time Wheels of Fire began to climb the charts, relationships among the members of Cream had soured. Musical disagreements, personality clashes, and egos--Bruce and Baker resented the fact that the public saw Cream as Clapton's band, even though Bruce was the chief singer and songwriter and Baker's drumming was a vital component of the sound--had created such tension that the three often stayed in separate hotels when on tour. In August of 1968 Clapton announced that Cream had lost its musical direction and were disbanding. They played their last concert on November 26 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where a more enthusiastic audience then they had ever before found in their homeland shouted "God save the Cream!" as the trio left the stage.

Clapton and Baker stayed together for a year in the short-lived band Blind Faith, while Bruce went on to a successful, though lower profile, solo career, playing jazz with the Tony Williams Lifetime and Mose Allison and more blues-rock with West, Bruce, and Laing and BLT, as well as making a series of innovative solo albums. Baker eventually built a recording studio in Nigeria and recorded with Fela Kuti and other African musicians. He also formed the jazz-rock bands Ginger Baker's Air Force and the Baker-Gurvitz Army. In 1989 Baker rejoined Bruce for an album, A Question of Time, and a brief tour. Clapton went on to form Derek and the Dominos and to build a career as one of rock's senior superstars.

Short as its ascendancy was, Cream permanently changed the nature of rock and roll. Clapton defined the role of the guitar hero; Bruce brought the bass out of the shadows of the rhythm section, revealing its possibilities as a melodic instrument; and Baker introduced new levels of rhythmic complexity to rock percussion. Nineteen years after Cream's farewell, Rolling Stone characterized the group as "essentially a jazz trio playing blues changes with rock muscle. Clapton, Bruce and Baker were liberating rock bands once and for all from the constraints of the Top Forty pop song."

Cream reunited for a series of four shows, on 2, 3, 5, and 6 May 2005 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the venue of their final concerts in 1968, at Clapton's request. Although the three musicians chose not to speak publicly about the shows, Clapton would later state that he had become more "generous" in regard to his past, and that the physical health of Bruce and Baker was a major factor: Bruce had recently undergone a liver transplant for liver cancer, and had almost lost his life, while Baker had severe arthritis.

In an interview with BBC 6 Music in April 2010, Bruce confirmed that there would be no more Cream shows. He said: "Cream is over."

Cream made a significant impact upon the popular music of the time, and, along with Jimi Hendrix, popularised the use of the wah-wah pedal. They provided a heavy yet technically proficient musical theme that foreshadowed and influenced the emergence of British bands such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and The Jeff Beck Group in the late 1960s. The band's live performances influenced progressive rock acts such as Rush, jam bands such as The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead, Phish and heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath.

Cream was ranked number 16 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock and Rolling Stone named them the sixty-seventh greatest artist of all time. In 2010 VH1 also ranked them number 61 on their 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Discography:
1966 – Fresh Cream
1967 – Disraeli Gears
1968 – Wheels of Fire
1969 – Goodbye

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