The embarrassing performance that Jack Bruce called “sort of a fart”
Led Zeppelin is an example of a band who have always been celebrated as one of the most innovative musical outfits to ever grace the confines of rock; they didn’t just subscribe to a specific rock ‘n’ roll sound, but instead experimented with multiple genres in a bid to bring a range of different styles of music into the fold, and the result was something haphazard but also deeply exciting.
Additionally, within this chaotic sound, you also have the members contributing to that very chaos. Jimmy Page, John Bonham and Robert Plant were always enthusiastic when it came to pushing the boundaries of the music they were making and lending their most unhinged selves to it, which was great fun to witness, but if left to run riot, it would have amounted to a sonic mess, and this is where the bass came in to anchor things.
John Paul Jones, despite being relatively understated, was one of the band’s most important members, which, as Geddy Lee noted, was due to his bass chops, which served as the glue: “The thing that held the whole thing down was John Paul Jones’ bass playing. So if you listen to ‘How Many More Times’, I mean, no matter how wild that song gets at times, there’s John Paul Jones just holding it all down in such a fluid way.”
Of course, while Lee was a fan and thought Jones was a good example of what a bassist can offer a band, he wasn’t the bassist who originally led Lee to start playing, as that’s an honour reserved specifically for Jack Bruce and the other members of Cream. The band had a unique way with music, which paved the way for prog rock way back in the early days, and remains pretty timeless now.
Cream has always had the ability to merge different styles of music, intertwining the likes of rock, jazz and metal to truly give rise to a sound that people previously weren’t familiar with. It was this imagination that really captured the heart of Geddy Lee, who went to see them play and realised that all he wanted to do was also make music.
While having such an innovative approach to music is a good thing, it can also be a double-edged sword for some players, and Bruce fell into this trap often. Since he could play with such a varying array of sounds, different musicians would ask him to tap into something dependent on what they were trying to achieve, which was all well and good, but playing the bass was an incredibly personal thing for the man, and sometimes, what people asked him to embrace wasn’t what he was happy playing.
“The way I play is very personal,” he said. “It’s some techniques I’ve developed because I was a cellist and then an acoustic bass player, and all of those things are not really much good to anybody else”.
Where most musicians would have been ecstatic to have the opportunity to work with Frank Zappa, Bruce wasn’t too chuffed with Zappa asking him to use effects which created a sound he was embarrassed by. He had gone from being the rock in a band that held everything together to being someone responsible for creating an incredibly extreme sound that he wasn’t sure how to define, which got him feeling down.
“Frank Zappa wanted the most outrageous Jack Bruce sound when I did his album Apostrophe,” he concluded. “Not the Cream Bruce sound, which was sort of a fart, but an extremely cranked buzz. People comment on what a great sound it is, but I was ashamed of it!”
