The Cream gig that made Ginger Baker finally recognise Jack Bruce’s genius
Most supergroups outstay their welcome. Yes, even the ones with only one album to their name. Cream, though, had a lot more to give. In their mid-1960s pomp, their popularity rivalled that of the biggest non-Beatles names of the day and, in the eyes of their die-hard cult following, surpassed their Fab counterparts. After all, John Lennon may have dubbed his band “bigger than Jesus”, but that might have been an act of spite as no one was calling him God the way they were with Eric Clapton. Yet still, the band were absolutely not built to last and, for a change, it wasn’t due to the standard supergroup reasons of conflicting egos.
In fact, in terms of creating music, the band had a fairly functioning system. Bassist Jack Bruce was the core songwriter, with lyrical assistance from his poet friend Pete Brown. Afterwards, the band would collaborate on arranging the songs. There was no real struggle for creative control of the band. Instead, the tensions came purely because Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker hated each other with a passion that made Kendrick Lamar and Drake look like an episode of Bluey.
What’s more, Baker and Bruce had the time to at least try to work out their differences. After all, they’d first started playing together in 1962 with Blues Incorporated, and again a year later in the Graham Bond Quartet. Right from the off, they despised each other. We’re not talking about handbags at dawn either, the two men never far away from a full-on punch up. On one occasion, Baker came at Bruce with a knife. An event made all the more shocking by the fact they were on stage playing a gig at the time.
That was the last straw for Bruce, who left the band soon afterwards. So, you can imagine when Clapton pitched the idea of Cream to Baker as a band consisting of themselves and Jack Bruce, he was a little surprised. By this, I mean Baker was driving Clapton home from a gig when he pitched the idea, and when he heard Bruce would be involved, he nearly crashed the car. However, because the definition of insanity is A) doing the same action repeatedly and expecting a different result and B) Ginger Baker, they decided to give it a go in their third band.
It’s a miracle they even lasted two years. The band’s success didn’t make their relationship any better. Clapton got sick of constantly playing the peacemaker between the two, and the band was finished by 1968. So, you can only imagine how titanically good their reunion gigs at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2005 must have been to achieve the impossible. To make Ginger Baker compliment Jack Bruce and mean it sincerely.
In an interview with Bass Player magazine, Bruce spoke of those reunion gigs with genuine fondness. When asked how he felt the band sounded at the Albert Hall, he replied, “I was astonished. It felt really fresh and natural – that was what amazed us all, from the start of rehearsals. It sounded different; it sounded like now.” He went on to say “There’s a lot more respect and honesty, in a way – and, not to get maudlin, but there’s a lot of love as well. After one of the shows, Ginger said to me, ‘You are a great bass player after all.’ I couldn’t believe it – he’d never once said that in all the years.”
Typically, the band tried to replicate it with some follow-up shows at Madison Square Garden that were ruined by old grudges resurfacing. Honestly, though, that moment proved one thing. No matter how much you hate someone, you don’t spend the prime years of your career working together without a huge amount of respect for each other. For that brief moment, it shined over their considerable animosity. Maybe that was enough.
