Cream

Cream are the most celebrated band of the blues revival scene that took hold in mid-1960s England. Their sound sprang from African-American music, Mississippi Delta blues and 1950s rock 'n' roll, and landed in territory very close to hard rock. Cream acted as a bridge between the white blues-rock of John Mayall and the early Yardbirds, and the hard rock of Led Zeppelin and the early Black Sabbath. Alongside them stood the Who of "My Generation" and the early Rolling Stones, who, unlike Eric Clapton and his bandmates, were white-skinned but remained "Black" in spirit. Jimi Hendrix, who by his own admission decided to form his band riding the very fire unleashed by Cream, deserves, in this writer's opinion, a category of his own, being the direct heir to the suffering and exploitation endured by the great Black bluesmen of the past. Blues is pain to be soothed, and the difference between Hendrix and Clapton (the two most beloved guitarists of the Sixties) is that the latter loved the blues, while Hendrix was the blues.

Cream were also one of the first rock supergroups: guitarist Eric Clapton, a veteran of the Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers; drummer Ginger Baker, who had worked with Alexis Korner and Nigerian musician Fela Kuti; and bassist Jack Bruce, who had also previously been affiliated with Mayall's and Korner's bands.

They debuted with "Fresh Cream" in 1966, an album made up essentially of covers of old blues numbers reworked with the power of electrified sound. The innovation lay in Clapton's thunderous distortions, achieved through the so-called wah-wah effect, which marked a new way of playing electric guitar, pointing to a different territory on which to display one's virtuosity — a territory that Jimi Hendrix would go on to dominate completely.

With their second album, "Disraeli Gears", Cream, aided in the arrangements by producer Felix Pappalardi, found their own compositional direction, freeing themselves from the weight of the covers that had dominated the previous record. This way, the trio, while keeping their structural ties to blues, were free to venture stylistically towards hard rock and psychedelic music, thus averting the risk of their music remaining a merely pleasant but banal revival.

The album opens with "Strange Brew", a pop-flavoured track dominated by Baker's sly drumming and Clapton's elusive solos. As for Bruce, he is often regarded as one of the greatest bassists of all time: his role isn't that of a mere timekeeper, but that of a shrewd weaver of harmonic guidelines for Baker and Clapton's assaults. Proof of this comes with the following "Sunshine Of Your Love", their masterpiece, with Bruce also standing out for his powerful vocal performance. Clapton and Baker do the rest: the former with one of his most memorable solos, the latter with his raw yet clean style.

"World Of Pain" is another track at the mercy of Bruce's bass, which lends it an almost elegiac tone; it's followed by the brief psychedelic gallop of "Dance The Night Away", with Bruce's bass weaving enchanted arabesques and Clapton's guitar seeming to almost mimic the sound of a sitar. "Blue Condition" comes across as downright ironic: a burlesque, half-country, half-blues chant.

The phantasmagoric reverberations of Clapton's guitar on "Tales Of Brave Ulysses" are set ablaze by Baker's towering drumming, while in the final solo the aforementioned wah-wah effect reaches epic heights of vertigo.

"Swlabr", with its supersonic bursts of speed, offers rich pickings for hard rock lovers. The most fascinating track on the album, however, is "We're Going Wrong": a spectral, alienated raga-blues driven by the feverish crescendo of the drums and Bruce's messianic singing.

Only towards the end of the record does the band unleash two of its masterful blues-rock numbers: the rocky "Outside Woman Blues" and the rustic, harmonica-laced "Take It Back".

The traditional "Mother's Lament", sung in chorus like a gathering of drunks stumbling out of a pub, brings the album to a close.

Cream couldn't last long; there were too many primadonna tantrums, too much mutual envy, too much ambition on each of the three's part to outdo the others, and indeed, after two more albums, in November '68 each went their own way: Bruce turned to jazz, Baker to world music, and Clapton struck out on his own. The latter would even manage to kick his heroin habit, but he would never manage to shake off the arid technical mannerism that pervades almost all of his solo work. It's sad today to see how the once-revolutionary guitarist quickly turned into just another Steve Vai.

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10/02/2008