CREAM

1966: Fresh Cream (the superior UK version includes "Spoonful," "Coffee Song" and "Wrapping Paper," but doesn’t include "I Feel Free"). 1967: Disraeli Gears. 1968: Wheels of Fire. 1969: Goodbye Cream. 1970: Live Cream. 1972: Live Cream, Vol. 2.

The members of Cream aren’t best described as visionary pioneers. As frontiersmen they were reckless, ostentatious, opportunistic. A youngster standing at he edge of the stage at the Fillmore Auditorium circa 1968 and witnessing a Cream performance for the first time may very well have been overwhelmed by Eric Clapton’s, Ginger Baker’s and Jack Bruce’s emotionless onslaught of raging ego. Perhaps it helped to be male, because Cream’s improvisational storm was always closer to sport than art, relying on speed and muscle, rather than idea and conception.

Clapton’s, Baker’s and Bruce’s muscles weren’t just in their fingers and hands and Cream was ill conceived from the start. Eric Clapton was a blues purist who decided to join two musicians who hadn’t a purist bone in their respective bodies. It should have worried the band that the most melodic player was the drummer. Ginger Baker often played his kit as colorfully as a kalimba; he had a fluid sound like everything was being played with his hands – though he hit real hard; and his wide-apart tuning, the huge kit (including two kick drums), and his rhythmic and melodic sense gave him the ability to circle and dance around his more droning counterparts. But even this beauty tended to get lost in the trajectory of the improvisations.

Jack Bruce was an inventive bass player and a good multi-instrumentalist as well. He was an ambitious musician who probably felt that proving the bass could be played as fast as a guitar was some sort of accomplishment (which it was). But Clapton and Bruce mimicking each other’s roles, created an ugly, one-sided, improvisational frenzy. Everybody running at top speed left little room for dynamics, color, atmosphere, and variety of mood, structure or texture. Clapton’s blues-based style wasn’t suited to this endeavor. Despite his quickness and clarity, Clapton has never been a virtuoso. In the jams collected on Wheels of Fire, Goodbye, Live- Vol. 1 and Live – Vol. 2, Clapton constantly seems to be resorting back to tricks he already knows, which gives each jam a lack of distinction. He never seems to be finding things he didn’t know he had. There is ho hint of the spontaneous exploration that the San Francisco bands provided which made their improvisations so involving: you never knew what was going to happen next. With Cream the only thing that happened next was more speed. On "I’m So Glad," from Goodbye, the band may have actually set a land-speed record, but the nine minutes surrounding that peak are hardly worth the trouble. "Sleepy Time Time," on Live – Vol. 1, showed that Cream signified the potential of guitar pyrotechnics even if it failed to be moving in any remotely arty/emotional way. "Sunshine of Your Love," on Live – Vol. 2, is one of the few times we get a jam with structure. It’s based around the "Sunshine" riffs and choruses, and Clapton is given several passes within a limited number of bars. The experience is exciting, without being particularly showy, which, I guess, is the point that begs to be made. "Crossroads," on Wheels of Fire has often been spoken of as a classic, but it’s played too fast for much blues feeling and Clapton’s vocal is no more believable than the average adenoidal English kid’s blues.

As songwriters, the band didn’t fare much better. Jack Bruce’s and Peter Brown’s ransacking of Greek mythology and ancient pseudo-history may have served some sort of purpose as a corollary to a form of exotic psychedelia they weren’t hip enough to pull off (i.e. "ripples of my mind"). (Psychedelia had become a new form of American roots music; it flowered fully in the sixties, but had been gestating in odd, stoned bands since the beginning of time). Bruce’s attempts at high art trappings – i.e. the use of cellos, pianos, violins and inept poesy – left much to be desired.

Clapton’s own covers and self-penned tunes kept his personality unpleasantly shrouded in the blues – he comes off as a reverent servant too humble to consider filling the shoes of the master. When he tried escaping the constraints by going pop on "Swalbr" (an almost note for note reworking of their own arrangement of "Lawdy, Mama"), the result was without personality. At the end of Cream’s career, "Badge" would show an attempt by Clapton to relate to his own world, but the song doesn’t hang together despite its fine solo.

Cream ended, as they began, with little evidence of growth in sight. Very few of their songs are completely realized despite some intermittently fine musicianship. They are one of the best examples of a rock band with plenty of talent but without the social graces necessary for great collaborative art. They were in the right place, at the right time, but too busy fighting amongst themselves to grab the Zeitgeist by the tail and roll. Some of Cream’s most interesting songs are consistently left off of their "greatest hits" packages: "Spoonful" (the studio version, with its powerful Jack Bruce vocal performance), "Rollin’ and Tumblin’," "Toad" (studio version and the live cut), "Strange Brew" (and its twin, "Lawdy, Mama), "Sunshine of Your Love," "Dance the Night Away," "We’re Going Wrong," "Politician," (studio version), "As You Said," "White Room" and "Deserted Cities of the Heart."

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