Their first album, Fresh Cream, released at the end of 1966, went Top 10 in the UK and spent four months in the chart. More significantly, Cream proved that there was an audience for their music.
He called it “blues, ancient and modern”. It was a gift, and we three had it in abundance.”Ĭlapton was more succinct. You’re listening to this fantastic sound that you’re a part of. “It was as if something else had taken over,” Baker explains.
On stage the chemistry within Cream was staggering. I felt it was the possibility of a new kind of language with this band.” It sounds like of presumptuous to say it. “It was sort of rewriting the blues, if you like. “I was full of very big ideas about what I felt we could do,” Jack Bruce explains. Clapton may not have had the musical knowledge and technique that Baker and Bruce possessed, but he had a God-given gift that enabled the group to justify their audacious name. The dynamic that propelled Cream hinged on Baker and Bruce’s jazz backgrounds and Clapton’s blues roots. This wasn’t a new idea, but it was largely confined to jazz – a style that by the mid-60s, as Frank Zappa famously remarked, “wasn’t dead, it just smelled funny”. For example, they took the two-note riff that comprised Willie Dixon’s Spoonful and stretched it from two-and-a-half minutes to six-and-a-half, exaggerated it, and improvised all around it with a dazzling display of virtuoso playing.
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