Years before Cream: the night the Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce feud was crystallised
Despite playing in two mightily consequential acts in The Graham Bond Organisation (GBO) and Cream, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce simply could not get along. Masters of their respective instruments in the drums and bass, this violent rivalry materialised out of numerous factors, including their very different personalities. In essence, it was a matter of pride because they couldn’t help from seemingly trying to outdo each other
The outspoken heroin-addicted Baker was the most scintillating drummer London produced in the 1960s, fusing rock ‘n’ roll with jazz panache and an obsession with complex West African rhythms. He first rose to prominence in the early stages of the decade as part of Blues Incorporated, which would then see him join GBO in 1963. It was in this lauded outfit that he would first encounter Jack Bruce. Their volatile personalities and visceral musicianship would lead to an unavoidable schism forming, setting the scene for the other more notorious instances they would partake in after they formed the psychedelic supergroup Cream in 1966 with mutual friend and blues master Eric Clapton.
It seems strange that two men who hated each other so intensely and apparently right until the very end should form a group after such an intense period together in the GBO, particularly when Cream was Baker’s conception. Even stranger still, they would enjoy immense, culturally significant success in their short two years as a group.
To give a glimpse of how bitter their rivalry was, after their celebrated 2005 reunion shows, Bruce was asked if they had any designs on more performances and told Jim Clash in Forbes: “We had plans, until Ginger turned into a c*nt.” There’s also a well-known story, which might well be a total fabrication, that states that when Bruce was only a matter of hours from dying in 2014, he rang Baker and told him, “I’m dying, Ginger, f*ck you,” before slamming down the phone, and never picked up when the drummer rang back on numerous occasions.
The feud between Baker and Bruce is traced back to one night in the GBO, and unsurprisingly, both men have differing takes on what occurred. What is clear, though, is that the drummer fired the hot-tempered bassist. He says it was on Bond’s orders, as Bruce had lashed out and nearly killed the band.
At the time, the GBO were one of the most famous bands in the UK. They were so sought-after that they played 320 shows a year. However, in a discussion with Clash once again, Baker claimed that sometimes Bruce would get angry on stage and start yelling at him, describing his character as “Jekyll and Hyde”. Constantly on tenterhooks, if he said the wrong thing, Bruce was prone to extreme anger.
It all came to a head one day when, during a drum solo, Bruce began grooving on the bass, with Baker phrasing with him using the kick drum. However, this brief equilibrium would soon be eviscerated when the bassist turned to his flame-haired companion and asserted, “You’re playing too f**king loud.” Already bubbling inside, this was the moment that Baker exploded, as he recalled: “The result was that I nearly killed him. A bouncer had to pull me off. After the gig, he was okay for a while, but then he’d yell again.”
Baker maintained that it was the band’s unanimous decision to fire Bruce, not his own. He even claimed that Bond tried to discuss things with the Scot one night, but his reaction was what they expected: wrath. Following this, when the enraged bassist was driving the band’s bus out of Ipswich, he apparently nearly killed them all, something the drummer didn’t expand upon. He explained: “Graham got out and said, ‘He’s got to go.’ Of course, I was the heavy, so I had the job of doing it. But it was a band decision.”
In his own account with the same journalist, Bruce offered his version of what happened that fateful night when he made perennial enemies with Baker. “He took it upon himself to fire me from Graham Bond, although he wasn’t the band leader,” Bruce stated. “He said I was playing ‘too busy’. I think I was just finding myself and a style very much influenced by James Jamerson.”
He believed that the firing was underpinned by his desire to change the context of the bass and move it away from its traditional home of the rhythm section, an idea influenced by the business inherent to jazz. Playing more notes than Baker wanted from a bassist, Bruce maintained that his partner in the rhythm section didn’t like the four-string so prominent. Accordingly, it is said that Baker pulled a knife on Bruce near the stage one evening to make his feelings clear, but he just walked away instead of getting into a possibly hazardous altercation.
Bruce would also maintain that beneath the violence and competitive musical choices, the feud was down to Baker being a junkie with a chaotic character who was scared of success.
Offering a salient point about the relationship is Bruce’s son Malcolm, who once noted: “I saw them together getting on fine, and I saw them not speaking… They were layered people with stuff going on. Addiction, creativity, personal stuff, like we all do.”
