The story of Cream

Three roads to London

Cream's story starts with three very different young men. The drummer was Peter Edward Baker, born on the nineteenth of August 1939 in Lewisham, south London, and nicknamed Ginger for his flaming red hair. His father, a bricklayer serving as a signaller in the Second World War, was killed in 1943, when Ginger was four. The boy's first dream was to ride the Tour de France, until a taxi knocked him off his bike at sixteen. Soon after, friends at a party dared him to sit behind a drum kit, and he found he could simply play. By his late teens he was working in jazz bands, and at eighteen he lost one job after setting fire to a hotel on a European tour. His hero, the jazz drummer Phil Seamen, taught him about African rhythm and also introduced him to heroin.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The bassist was John Symon Asher Bruce, known as Jack, born on the fourteenth of May 1943 in Bishopbriggs, just north of Glasgow. His parents were musical and firmly left wing, and they moved so often that he went to more than a dozen schools. At home his father loved traditional jazz and his older brother loved modern jazz, and Jack remembered the two of them coming to blows over it. He won a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music to study cello and composition, but the academy frowned on him playing jazz gigs at night, and he left. He toured Italy with a dance band that wore kilts on stage, then headed south. At a Cambridge college ball he talked his way onto the stage with Ginger Baker and the saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, and coped with everything they threw at him.[1] [2] [3]

That gig led Jack Bruce into Blues Incorporated, the London band of the blues pioneer Alexis Korner, in 1962. Ginger Baker joined too, taking the drum stool when Charlie Watts left for the Rolling Stones, and the organist and saxophonist Graham Bond was also in the line up. In 1963 Bond broke away and took Bruce and Baker with him. Bruce later said he turned up to a rehearsal and discovered he had apparently resigned from Korner's band, and Korner did not speak to him for years. With the guitarist John McLaughlin and later Heckstall-Smith on saxophone, the group became the Graham Bond Organisation. It was a fierce rhythm and blues band that musicians adored, and one of the first British groups to record with a Mellotron. It never sold many records.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The third man was Eric Clapton, born on the thirtieth of March 1945 in Surrey. He joined the Yardbirds in October 1963, where the slow handclaps of crowds waiting for him to change a broken string earned him the nickname Slowhand. When the band went pop with For Your Love in March 1965, the blues purist walked out on the very day it was released. He joined John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, swapped to a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall amplifier, and became the most talked about guitarist on the London club circuit. Around this time an unknown fan spray painted the words Clapton is God on a wall in Islington, a slogan that embarrassed him. Yet in America almost nobody knew his name.[1] [2]

A feud before the band

Inside the Graham Bond Organisation, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce could not stand each other. Baker complained that Bruce's playing was far too busy, and the two sabotaged each other's equipment and fought on stage. The BBC later recounted one night when Baker tried to end a Bruce solo by bouncing a drumstick off his snare and into Bruce's head. Bruce said he answered by grabbing his double bass and demolishing Baker and his drum kit. Graham Bond was sinking into heroin addiction and handed the running of the band to Baker, who used that power to fire Bruce in August 1965. Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, and he was only driven off for good when Baker threatened him with a knife.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jack Bruce was already in demand. Marvin Gaye once asked him to join his band in America, and Bruce said no, feeling too young and, by one account, about to marry Janet Godfrey, the secretary of the Graham Bond fan club. After the firing he cut a solo single for Polydor, then had a short spell in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, where he met Eric Clapton. After that he joined Manfred Mann and played on Pretty Flamingo, a British number one in 1966. Manfred Mann remembered Bruce playing his first gig with no rehearsal at all and not missing a chord. Bruce later called the job a brief and unhappy stint in a band he found far too commercial.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the spring of 1966, the record producer Joe Boyd gathered a one off studio group for the Elektra label under the name Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse. Clapton played guitar, Jack Bruce played bass, a young Steve Winwood sang under the alias Steve Anglo, Paul Jones of Manfred Mann played harmonica, Ben Palmer played piano and Pete York played drums. Ginger Baker had reportedly been lined up for the session at first. They cut a slowed down arrangement of Robert Johnson's blues Crossroads that Clapton had built from two Johnson songs, along with Steppin' Out. Both tracks came out on a sampler album called What's Shakin', and both would soon become cornerstones of Cream's live show.[1] [2] [3]

That summer Ginger Baker came to see Clapton play with the Bluesbreakers and drove him back to London in his Rover. Baker was tired of Graham Bond's drug problems and wanted his own band. Clapton said yes, on one condition. The bass player and singer had to be Jack Bruce. By Clapton's account, Baker was so shocked he nearly crashed the car. Clapton had seen the two play together and thought they were a well oiled machine, feud or not. Other singers were considered before Bruce agreed to carry most of the vocals, including Steve Winwood. The trio thought about calling themselves Sweet and Sour Rock and Roll, but settled on Cream, because each of them was already thought of as the cream of the crop.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fresh Cream, 1966

Cream made an unofficial debut at the Twisted Wheel club in Manchester on the twenty ninth of July 1966, and two nights later played their official first show at the National Jazz and Blues Festival in Windsor. They had hardly any original songs, so they tore into old blues numbers, and the big crowd loved it. Their manager was the Australian impresario Robert Stigwood, who already had Clapton, Bruce and Baker under contract through their old bands. He signed Cream to his own new label, Reaction, with Polydor handling distribution in Britain, while Atco, part of Atlantic Records, would release them in America. Because all three were already well known, Cream is widely remembered as rock's very first supergroup.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the first of October 1966, Hendrix's manager Chas Chandler brought Jimi Hendrix to a Cream show at the Central London Polytechnic on Regent Street. Hendrix had been in England barely a week. He asked if he could sit in, and halfway through the set he stepped up and played a frantic, double speed version of Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor. Clapton later said Hendrix played just about every style you could think of, and that after that night his life was never the same again. The meeting went straight into Cream's music. On their first album, Clapton's long solos full of echo, fuzz and feedback were inspired directly by what he had just seen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cream began recording in August 1966 at a small studio in Chalk Farm, with Robert Stigwood producing on a tiny budget and four track tape. Their first single, Wrapping Paper, was a quaint, music hall flavoured tune, and it puzzled fans who expected heavy blues. The fix came from the poet Pete Brown. Baker had invited him to help finish songs, but Brown and Baker got nowhere, so Bruce's wife Janet sat down with Ginger and wrote Sweet Wine while Bruce started working with Brown. Their first song together was I Feel Free. Released as a single in December 1966, it reached number eleven in Britain and showed what Cream really sounded like.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fresh Cream came out in Britain on the ninth of December 1966, the first album on the Reaction label. Half of it was old blues, songs like Spoonful, I'm So Glad and Rollin' and Tumblin', and half was new material, most of it by Jack Bruce. Baker's contribution Toad was a five minute drum solo, one of the earliest ever put on a rock record, and it grew out of a piece he had written with the Graham Bond Organisation. The album reached number six in Britain and number thirty nine in America, where I Feel Free replaced Spoonful. Clapton was not satisfied. Soon after it came out he said the band had already moved on and he was not happy with the production.[1] [2] [3] [4]

New York and Disraeli Gears, 1967

Cream first went to America in March 1967, for a run of shows at the RKO Theatre on 58th Street in New York, part of the disc jockey Murray the K's package show. It was hardly a triumph. They sat at the bottom of a crowded bill that played three times a day, and in the end they were reduced to a single song per show. But Clapton unveiled a new guitar there. It was a 1964 Gibson SG painted in psychedelic day glo colours by the Dutch design collective The Fool, who also painted a drum kit for Baker and a bass for Bruce, which Bruce did not much like. The guitar became known simply as the Fool.[1] [2] [3]

Straight after those shows, on the third of April 1967, Cream went into Atlantic Studios in New York with the label boss Ahmet Ertegun and recorded an old blues called Lawdy Mama. The engineer Tom Dowd was stunned by the volume. The trio arrived with a wall of Marshall amplifiers, when the big soul bands he recorded used small Fender amps. A young producer named Felix Pappalardi took the tape home and, with his wife Gail Collins, wrote new words over the same backing track overnight. The result was Strange Brew, with Clapton singing lead. Bruce later said it was against his wishes, but that Ertegun was more or less in love with Eric and saw him as the frontman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band came back in May and recorded most of Disraeli Gears at Atlantic between the eleventh and fifteenth of May 1967. It took about three and a half days, because their American work visas were about to run out, and according to Dowd the sessions ended when a driver arrived to take them to the airport. Friends dropped in, among them Linda Eastman, Al Kooper and Janis Joplin. Ertegun had expected a blues album and was dismayed by the psychedelic new songs, until Booker T Jones and Otis Redding told him Sunshine of Your Love was great. There were quirkier moments too. Baker sang his own Blue Condition, and the closing Mother's Lament was a pub singalong the band did for a laugh, not knowing the tape was running.[1] [2] [3]

Sunshine of Your Love grew from a bass riff Jack Bruce played on his old double bass after a long, fruitless night of writing with Pete Brown, as dawn came up outside the window. Clapton added the chorus section, and on the solo he used what he called his woman tone, a smooth, singing sound from the Fool with the tone turned right down, even slipping in a quote from the old standard Blue Moon. Baker played much of it on his tom toms. Atco was not convinced it was a single, but an edited version came out in December 1967. It crept to number thirty six, then returned to the chart and climbed to number five in August 1968, selling a million copies in America.[1] [2] [3]

The album's look came from Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who lived in the same Chelsea building as Clapton, a crumbling bohemian house called the Pheasantry. Sharp had already handed Clapton a poem written on a napkin, and Clapton set it to music as Tales of Brave Ulysses, one of the first records built on a wah wah pedal. Sharp's cover was a glowing fluorescent collage over a band photo. The title was an accident. A roadie, Mick Turner, heard Clapton talking about racing bikes and said Disraeli gears instead of derailleur gears, and everyone fell about laughing. Released in November 1967, Disraeli Gears reached number five in Britain and number four in America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Kings of the Fillmore

In August 1967 Cream headlined the Fillmore in San Francisco for the first time, and it changed them. The hippie audience wanted them to stretch out, so songs like Spoonful, I'm So Glad and Sweet Wine became jams of up to twenty minutes. The crowds would cheer almost anything. Classic Rock later reported nights when the vocal microphones failed, or Clapton's guitar cut out, and the fans applauded just as wildly. Cream spent most of the next year touring America. Their management even turned down the Monterey Pop Festival without telling them. Clapton later said they were not so much indulging themselves as indulging audiences who wanted endless solos.[1] [2] [3]

The third album was made in bursts over nearly a year, from July 1967 in London to June 1968 in New York, squeezed between tours. Felix Pappalardi added viola, trumpet and bells, and the songs grew stranger. White Room came from a long poem Pete Brown wrote about a bare, white walled flat where he gave up drink and drugs. It opens in an unusual five four time and has Clapton's wah wah guitar all over it. Politician was written in a single day at a BBC radio session. The jazz pianist Mike Taylor wrote the music for three of Baker's songs, and on As You Said Jack Bruce sang and played acoustic guitars and cello, with Baker only on hi hat, making it the only Cream recording without Clapton.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wheels of Fire was a double album, one disc from the studio and one recorded live in San Francisco in March 1968. The live disc was labelled Live at the Fillmore, but three of its four tracks actually came from the Winterland Ballroom. It held a Spoonful lasting nearly seventeen minutes and a Toad of about sixteen, most of it drum solo. It also held Crossroads, the Robert Johnson song Clapton had first cut with the Powerhouse, now a tight, driving rock song. Critics put his second solo on it among the greatest ever recorded. Clapton never agreed. He later said he found it hard to listen to his old work, especially Crossroads.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Wheels of Fire came out in America on the fourteenth of June 1968 and in Britain on the ninth of August. It went to number one in America, Canada and Australia and number three at home, and it became the first double album ever to go platinum. Its covers, again by Martin Sharp, came printed on silver foil. Rolling Stone's editor Jann Wenner panned most of the studio disc but loved the live one. It hardly mattered. By the time the British edition was in the shops, Cream had already told the world they were splitting up.[1] [2] [3]

Too loud to last, 1968

On the road, Cream was becoming a battle. New Marshall stacks gave them more power than ever, and Jack Bruce kept pushing up the volume, which left Ginger Baker struggling to be heard. Baker later said the last year of Cream was agony and that the sheer noise damaged his hearing for life. The old feud flared nightly, with Clapton stuck as the peacemaker. The BBC reported that one row even drove him to tears. Clapton also felt nobody was listening to anyone else. He recalled a concert where he simply stopped playing and neither of the others noticed. Bruce summed it up bleakly, saying travel can kill a group.[1] [2] [3]

Clapton had his own crisis. He idolised Rolling Stone magazine, and in 1968 its critic Jon Landau wrote a scathing review calling him a master of the blues cliché. It hit him hard. At the same time he was listening obsessively to Music from Big Pink, the debut album by Bob Dylan's former backing group the Band, which was quiet, rootsy and built on songs rather than solos. Clapton later said it changed his life. The band agreed to split in May 1968 while touring America. Baker remembered the moment in Texas, when Eric told him he had had enough, and Ginger said he had too. The split was announced on the tenth of July 1968.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

First there was a farewell tour, twenty two shows across America from the fourth of October to the fourth of November 1968. The concert at the Forum in Los Angeles on the nineteenth of October was taped for a final album. The last American show, at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence, ended almost before it began. The band arrived late and because of local rules could play only two songs, Toad and a Spoonful of more than twenty minutes. Days later, on the twenty first of November, Cream were at a Los Angeles studio with a special guest, their friend George Harrison, to record a song he had written with Clapton called Badge.[1] [2] [3]

Cream said goodbye at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the twenty fifth and twenty sixth of November 1968. The opening acts were Taste, the trio of the Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher, and a new band called Yes. Both shows sold out, and the director Tony Palmer filmed the second night for the BBC, which broadcast it on the fifth of January 1969. The film has been mocked ever since for its swirling effects and endless close ups of Bruce's teeth. The band were not proud of the music either. Baker said it was not a good gig and that they knew they were just getting it over with, and Bruce said they were getting worse by the minute.[1] [2] [3]

Cream were talked into one last album, fittingly titled Goodbye. Each member brought one new studio song. Bruce wrote Doing That Scrapyard Thing with Pete Brown, Baker wrote What a Bringdown, and Clapton wrote Badge with George Harrison, who played rhythm guitar under the name L'Angelo Misterioso for contract reasons. The other three tracks came from the Forum show. The cover showed the trio in top hats and silver tails, and the inner sleeve was a painted cemetery with the song titles on the gravestones. Released in February 1969, after the band was gone, Goodbye went to number one in Britain and number two in America, and dragged their first two albums back into the British top ten.[1] [2] [3]

Separate roads

Within weeks, Clapton was jamming with Steve Winwood, and Ginger Baker turned up and sat in. Clapton hesitated, because he had promised Bruce that if any of them worked together again, all three would. But Winwood persuaded him, and with the bassist Ric Grech they became Blind Faith, a supergroup that played its first show to around one hundred thousand people in Hyde Park on the seventh of June 1969. Their only album topped the charts in Britain and America. On tour, though, they were short of songs and ended up playing Cream numbers, which Clapton hated. He drifted towards the support act Delaney and Bonnie, and Blind Faith was over by the end of August. Baker went on to lead a sprawling jazz rock band, Ginger Baker's Air Force.[1] [2] [3]

Jack Bruce went straight into a solo career. His first release, Songs for a Tailor, came out in September 1969 and reached the British top ten. It was named after Jeannie Franklyn, a designer who made clothes for Cream, known to friends as Genie the Tailor. She had written to Bruce asking him to sing some high notes for her, and the letter reached him on his birthday in May 1969, two days after she was killed in a crash in Fairport Convention's touring van. Bruce went on to play with the Tony Williams Lifetime, formed West, Bruce and Laing with two members of Mountain, and played bass on Lou Reed's Berlin. All the while he was fighting a heroin addiction, and by 1979 it had cost him most of his money.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For Ginger Baker, the death of his friend Jimi Hendrix in September 1970 was a warning to get out of London and away from heroin. In 1971 he drove a Range Rover across the Sahara to Nigeria, filmed by Tony Palmer, and in Lagos he built a recording studio that opened in 1973. He played with the Afrobeat star Fela Kuti and was known locally as the white drummer. Paul McCartney's Wings recorded part of Band on the Run there, with Baker shaking a tin can full of gravel. It ended badly. Baker said business partners threatened him at gunpoint and he sold the studio for a fraction of its cost. He kicked heroin for good only after moving to an olive farm in Tuscany in 1981, by his count after about twenty nine attempts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Clapton's own road was the darkest. After Derek and the Dominos he spent years addicted to heroin and then to alcohol, and went into rehab at Hazelden in 1982 and again in 1987, staying sober after that. In August 1976, drunk on stage in Birmingham, he made a racist speech backing the politician Enoch Powell, which helped spark the Rock Against Racism movement. He later said he was disgusted with himself. He married Pattie Boyd in 1979, and in a 1999 interview he admitted to raping and abusing her during their marriage, when he was a full blown alcoholic. In March 1991 his four year old son Conor died after falling from a window of a New York apartment building.[1] [2] [3]

Death came early to several people around Cream. Mike Taylor, the jazz pianist who wrote the music for three of Baker's songs, drowned in the River Thames near Leigh on Sea in January 1969 after years of heavy drug use and homelessness, and his death went almost unnoticed. Graham Bond was killed under a train at Finsbury Park station in London on the eighth of May 1974, aged thirty six. And on the seventeenth of April 1983, Felix Pappalardi, the producer who had shaped Disraeli Gears, was shot dead in his Manhattan apartment by his wife Gail Collins, with a small derringer pistol he had given her. Charged with murder, she was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, jailed for sixteen months to four years, and paroled in 1985.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Back on stage, 1989 to 2005

Bruce and Baker kept circling back to each other. In 1989 Baker drummed on two tracks of Bruce's album A Question of Time, their first recordings together since Cream, and then toured America in Bruce's band. In 1993, at concerts in Cologne for Bruce's fiftieth birthday, the Irish guitarist Gary Moore joined the two of them for a set of Cream songs. That led to a new power trio, BBM, whose album Around the Next Dream reached number nine in Britain in 1994. It did not last. The old arguments between Bruce and Baker came back, the tour was cut short, and the band broke up.[1] [2] [3]

In January 1993 Cream were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Clapton admitted he had never believed in the institution, saying rock and roll should never be respectable, but his friend Robbie Robertson of the Band talked him round. The rehearsal the day before was the first time the three had played together in twenty five years. At the ceremony they played Sunshine of Your Love, Crossroads and Born Under a Bad Sign, a song they had played live only three times in the sixties. Clapton told the audience he had been reunited with two people he loved very dearly. Talk of a reunion tour started at once, but it would take twelve more years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

What finally brought Cream back was illness. In 2003 Jack Bruce was diagnosed with liver cancer, the result of years of heroin and alcohol, and his body almost rejected the transplant he received that September. Baker, living in South Africa, was suffering badly from arthritis. Clapton said it made him more generous about the past. On the second, third, fifth and sixth of May 2005, Cream played four nights at the Royal Albert Hall, where they had said goodbye in 1968. Tickets sold out in under an hour, and some changed hands for seventeen hundred pounds. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jimmy Page and Brian May were in the crowd. Clapton opened by thanking fans for waiting all these years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The London shows went so well that Cream agreed to three nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, from the twenty fourth to the twenty sixth of October 2005. Clapton came to regret it. He wrote in his memoir that the shows were a pale shadow of London, and that the arrogance was back. Baker said Bruce turned his bass up so loud on the first night that it deafened him, and shouted at him on stage in front of everyone. Bruce joked afterwards that he and Ginger were now happily living on different continents, though he was thinking of asking Ginger to move further away. There were offers for many more shows, but Clapton turned them down.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Last words and legacy

In February 2006 Cream received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Bruce hinted at more shows, but Clapton said life was too short, and Baker said Bruce had killed the magic in New York and there would never be another Cream gig. Baker spent his reunion money on polo ponies and a horse clinic near his South African home. In 2010 Bruce told the BBC plainly that Cream was over. He kept recording, and in March 2014 released Silver Rails, his first solo studio album in more than a decade. Jack Bruce died of liver disease at his home in Suffolk on the twenty fifth of October 2014, aged seventy one. Clapton and Baker both came to his funeral in north London.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Ginger Baker's last years were as stormy as the rest. In the 2012 documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, named after the sign outside his South African ranch, he is seen hitting the director Jay Bulger with his cane. He fought degenerative arthritis and a lung disease caused by decades of smoking, was defrauded by an assistant he had hired, and moved back to England. In 2016 he had open heart surgery and cancelled all his gigs. Ginger Baker died in hospital in Canterbury on the sixth of October 2019, aged eighty. Jack Bruce's family said Ginger had been like an older brother to Jack, despite their love hate relationship.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The circle kept shrinking. Martin Sharp, who painted their album covers, died in Sydney in December 2013. Robert Stigwood died in January 2016. Pete Brown, whose words were on so many of their songs, died of cancer in May 2023, aged eighty two, and Bruce's family mourned him as Jack's long term friend and writing partner. As of 2026, Eric Clapton is the last surviving member of Cream. Their sons have carried the music on. In 2018 Kofi Baker and Malcolm Bruce toured as the Music of Cream with the guitarist Will Johns, a nephew of both Clapton and George Harrison through marriage. And in June 2026 Wheels of Fire was reissued as a five disc super deluxe edition.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Cream lasted barely two and a half years, yet their shadow is huge. They proved that three players could fill an arena, that a rock song could stretch into a long improvisation, and that a drum solo could sit on a rock album. Musicologists call the riff of Sunshine of Your Love a direct ancestor of Led Zeppelin and heavy metal, and Clapton himself said Cream were an early heavy metal band without knowing it. Baker hated that idea. Jack Bruce became a hero to bassists from Geddy Lee to Geezer Butler, and Ginger Baker to drummers from John Bonham to Neil Peart. They sold more than fifteen million records, and they are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Cream

Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. The feud that powered and wrecked Cream began years before it, in the Graham Bond Organisation, where Baker fired Bruce and threatened him with a knife. They put it aside to form Cream, then fought over volume, credits and control, with Baker claiming Bruce once tried to fire him from his own band. They worked together again and again, yet the 2005 reunion ended in shouting. Baker still came to Bruce's funeral, and Bruce's family said Ginger had been like an older brother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. Baker invited Clapton to form a band in 1966, and they stayed together through Cream and Blind Faith. Clapton was often the one keeping the peace, and in his memoir he blamed Baker's heroin for part of the Blind Faith gloom. Yet the respect ran deep. Asked in Baker's documentary whether John Bonham or Keith Moon compared, Clapton said no, they were in a completely different league. After Baker died, Clapton and Winwood played Blind Faith songs at a tribute concert.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. They met in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and played together in the Powerhouse, and Clapton made Bruce's arrival a condition of joining Cream. Bruce wrote and sang most of the songs while Clapton drew the spotlight, a tension Bruce felt keenly when Ahmet Ertegun pushed Clapton as the frontman. They stayed friends. Clapton played on Bruce's solo albums in 1993 and 2001, and after Bruce's death he wrote that Jack had been a tremendous inspiration to him.[1] [2] [3]

Jack Bruce and Pete Brown. The beat poet Pete Brown was first brought in to write with Ginger Baker, but it was with Bruce that the words started flowing, beginning with I Feel Free. Together they wrote White Room, Politician, SWLABR and, with Clapton, Sunshine of Your Love. Their partnership outlived Cream by more than four decades, running from 1965 to Bruce's final album in 2014. When Brown died in 2023, the Bruce family mourned him as Jack's long term friend and writing partner.[1] [2] [3]

Felix Pappalardi and Cream. A classically trained New Yorker, Pappalardi was brought in by Ahmet Ertegun in 1967 as a go between for the band and the engineer Tom Dowd. He turned Lawdy Mama into Strange Brew overnight and produced Disraeli Gears, Wheels of Fire and Goodbye, playing viola, trumpet and keyboards on them. He was so much part of the sound that the band called the studio line up the Cream quartet. He later took that sound into Mountain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Felix Pappalardi and Gail Collins. Married in 1969, Pappalardi and Gail Collins were a creative team. She helped write Strange Brew and World of Pain for Cream and painted Mountain's album covers. Friends described a marriage later soaked in drugs, guns and affairs. In April 1983 she shot him dead in their Manhattan apartment. She was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, paroled in 1985, and died in Mexico in 2013.[1] [2] [3]

Robert Stigwood and Cream. The Australian impresario had Clapton, Bruce and Baker under contract through their old bands, and he managed Cream from the start, signing them to his Reaction label and producing Fresh Cream himself. The Guardian's obituary says it was at one of his parties that Clapton was introduced to George Harrison and Pattie Boyd. He announced the split, kept Clapton under contract afterwards, and went on to huge success with the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix's first big moment in London was jamming with Cream in October 1966, and it shook Clapton to the core. The two became close friends. Jack Bruce said the music of White Room was inspired by meeting Hendrix, and Hendrix ended one BBC television show by abandoning Hey Joe to play Sunshine of Your Love for Cream. The day before Hendrix died in September 1970, Clapton bought a left handed Stratocaster he meant to give him as a gift.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Clapton and George Harrison. Harrison and Clapton became close friends in the late sixties. Clapton played the solo on the Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and Harrison repaid him by helping write Badge and playing on it as L'Angelo Misterioso. Their friendship survived Clapton falling in love with Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, whom Clapton married in 1979. After Harrison died in 2001, Clapton led the Concert for George.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ginger Baker and Graham Bond. Bond gave Baker and Bruce their first real platform, and Baker drummed in his band for three years. Both were heroin users, and when Bond's addiction and mental health worsened, he handed Baker control of the band. Bond was devastated when Cream became an instant success without him. He later played saxophone in Baker's Air Force and died under a train in 1974. His biographer Harry Shapiro reported a claim that Bond sexually abused his stepdaughter, which Bond never admitted or denied.[1] [2] [3]

Jack Bruce and Janet Godfrey. Janet Godfrey ran the Graham Bond Organisation's fan club and married Jack Bruce in 1964. She wrote songs with him before Cream and helped write two on Fresh Cream, Sleepy Time Time with Jack and Sweet Wine with Ginger Baker. They had two sons, Jonas and Malcolm, before divorcing in 1982. Jonas, a keyboard player, died in 1997. Malcolm later played guitar in the Music of Cream.[1] [2] [3]

Ginger Baker and Fela Kuti. Baker sat in with the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in 1971 and then moved to Lagos, where the two became lifelong friends and played to vast crowds together. Fela appeared on Baker's album Stratavarious. Fela's drummer Tony Allen said Baker understood the African beat better than any other Westerner. For Baker, Africa was both musical home and a place to try to escape heroin.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Cream

• Before settling on Cream, the trio considered calling themselves Sweet and Sour Rock and Roll. The name Cream won because each member was already seen as the cream of the crop among British blues and jazz players. The rejected alternative sounded more like a takeaway menu.[1]
• Ginger Baker's first dream was to race in the Tour de France, not to play drums. A taxi crashed into him when he was sixteen and wrecked his bicycle. Baker later said the leg strength from long rides helped him play two bass drums.[1] [2]
• At eighteen, Ginger Baker lost a jazz job after setting fire to a hotel on a European tour. He was touring with the jazz guitarist Diz Disley at the time. The Guardian's obituary listed it among the first signs of a famously turbulent career.[1]
• Jack Bruce turned down an offer to join Marvin Gaye's band in America. In the mid sixties Gaye wanted him, but Bruce was about to marry and felt too young. He later said that if he had gone, there would have been no Cream.[1] [2]
• Outside Cream, Jack Bruce played on two British number one singles. One was Manfred Mann's Pretty Flamingo in 1966. The other was The Scaffold's Lily the Pink, on which his bass part went uncredited.[1]
• Ginger Baker wrote a song that ended up as the B side of a Who single under a fake band name. The Graham Bond Organisation's Waltz for a Pig, credited to the Who Orchestra, appeared on the flip side of Substitute in 1966, which reached number five in Britain.[1]
• Steve Winwood sang on the Powerhouse sessions under the made up name Steve Anglo. The 1966 studio group also included Clapton and Jack Bruce, and its version of Crossroads became a cornerstone of Cream's shows.[1] [2]
• Cream's very first single, Wrapping Paper, was a gentle music hall style tune that baffled their blues fans. It came out in October 1966. The next single, I Feel Free, was the one that showed what the band really sounded like, and it reached number eleven.[1] [2]
• Toad, Baker's drum solo on Fresh Cream, began life as a Graham Bond Organisation piece called Camels and Elephants. Recorded in 1965 with Bond's band, it grew into one of the earliest drum solos on a rock album. A live version on Wheels of Fire runs about sixteen minutes.[1] [2]
• Clapton's famous Fool guitar was later owned by Todd Rundgren, who nicknamed it Sunny. Rundgren had seen Clapton play it at the RKO Theatre in 1967. It later sold at auction for about one point two seven million dollars, a record for a Clapton guitar.[1] [2]
• Clapton chose Outside Woman Blues for Disraeli Gears so that its old writer could collect royalties. The song was by the bluesman Blind Joe Reynolds. Clapton said he picked it so one of his old blues idols would get paid.[1]
• Dance the Night Away is the only Cream recording that uses a twelve string guitar. Clapton described it as Jack Bruce's tribute to the Byrds, a band Cream admired and were friendly with.[1]
• Some of the photos for Disraeli Gears were taken on Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. The photographer was Bob Whitaker, known for the Beatles' notorious butcher cover. By the time the album came out, Clapton's permed hair in the photos had already grown out.[1]
• Martin Sharp wrote the words to Tales of Brave Ulysses to the tune of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne. He was thinking of Judy Collins's version, but Clapton set the poem to new music inspired by the Lovin' Spoonful's Summer in the City.[1]
• Jimi Hendrix first heard a wah wah pedal on an electric guitar on Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses. The song came out in May 1967 as the B side of Strange Brew. Hendrix went on to make the effect one of his signatures.[1] [2]
• Clapton's solo on Sunshine of Your Love quotes the old pop standard Blue Moon. He played it with his woman tone, turning his guitar's tone control right down and the volume full up.[1] [2]
• The engineer who recorded Disraeli Gears, Tom Dowd, had worked on the Manhattan Project as a young soldier. Dowd later became one of Atlantic's great engineers, recording Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Clapton's Layla.[1]
• Cream's management turned down the Monterey Pop Festival without even telling the band. Classic Rock reported it as one reason Cream never got the festival fame of Jimi Hendrix, who made his name in America there.[1]
• Politician was written and recorded in a single day for a BBC radio session. Needing one more song in January 1968, Bruce came up with a riff and Pete Brown matched it to a poem he had written years earlier.[1]
• As You Said is the only Cream recording on which Eric Clapton does not play. Jack Bruce sang and played acoustic guitars and cello, and Ginger Baker added only hi hat.[1]
• Most of the live disc labelled Live at the Fillmore was actually recorded at the Winterland Ballroom. Only Toad came from the Fillmore. Crossroads, Spoonful and Traintime were all taped at Winterland in March 1968.[1] [2]
• Wheels of Fire was the first double album ever to go platinum. It topped the American chart in the summer of 1968, even as the band announced they were splitting up.[1] [2]
• Cream's final American concert lasted only two songs. At the Rhode Island Auditorium on the fourth of November 1968 the band arrived late, and local rules meant they could play only Toad and a long Spoonful.[1]
• The band Yes opened for Cream's farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Yes were just starting out. The other opener was Taste, the trio led by the Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher.[1] [2]
• The inner sleeve of Goodbye showed a cemetery with the song titles written on the gravestones. The front cover, by contrast, had the three in top hats and silver silk tails, doing a showbiz soft shoe shuffle.[1] [2]
• Clapton once escaped a police drugs raid by slipping out of the back of his Chelsea home. The officer, Norman Pilcher, rang the bell at the Pheasantry pretending to be a postman with a special delivery.[1]
• Jack Bruce's Songs for a Tailor was named after a Cream costume designer killed in a crash. Jeannie Franklyn died in Fairport Convention's van in May 1969. Her letter asking Bruce to sing some high notes for her reached him two days later, on his birthday.[1]
• Ginger Baker played a tin can full of gravel on Paul McCartney and Wings' Band on the Run album. Wings recorded Picasso's Last Words at Baker's studio in Lagos. Baker's relationship with McCartney later soured over claims he was never paid.[1] [2]
• Ginger Baker once auditioned for Weird Al Yankovic's comedy film UHF. In the late eighties he moved to Los Angeles hoping to act, and tried for the part of a homeless man, without success.[1]
• Late in life, Ginger Baker was still playing the same cymbals he had used on Cream's last two tours in 1968. They were a twenty two inch rivet ride and fourteen inch hi hats, all made by Zildjian.[1]
• Baker and Keith Moon both switched to two bass drums after watching the same Duke Ellington concert in 1966. They saw Sam Woodyard play. Moon bought two kits and stuck them together at once, while Baker waited months for Ludwig to build his.[1]
• Jack Bruce recorded a new version of I Feel Free in 1986 for a Renault car advert. The version, promoting the Renault 21, gave him his only solo British hit, spending a single week at number ninety five.[1] [2]
• In 2007 a rehearsal hall at Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama was named after Jack Bruce. It was the same school he had left as a teenager because it frowned on him playing jazz gigs. Two years later Glasgow Caledonian University gave him an honorary doctorate.[1] [2]
• Pete Brown had his first poem published in America at the age of fourteen. It appeared in the Evergreen Review. He was later the first poet to perform at Newcastle's Morden Tower.[1]
• After her 1983 arrest, Gail Collins sold her share of the royalties for Strange Brew and World of Pain. Mountain's Leslie West said she sold it to Felix Pappalardi's own business partner, Bud Prager, for twenty five thousand dollars, apparently to raise money while facing trial.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.