“The new Bach”: the one album Eric Clapton said influenced Cream the most
Revolutionary rock and roll outfits seemed to arrive on the scene on a weekly basis during the height of the 1960s and its kaleidoscopic explosion of psychedelia, but very few of them could boast quite the same otherworldly impact as Eric Clapton and Cream.
For the unsuspecting airwaves of the mid-1960s, Cream may as well have been beamed down to Earth via a flying saucer fueled by LSD and paisley shirts. Over the course of their relatively short tenure, the supergroup established itself as an essential voice – perhaps the definitive voice – of psychedelic rock, blowing open the floodgates for countless other groups to follow in their footsteps, from the hippie heroes of Jefferson Airplane to the rock god that was Jimi Hendrix. Their influence was virtually impossible to escape.
Like every half-decent rock band from that era, Cream cited the age-old sounds of the blues as their prevailing influence, with Clapton always particularly open about his outright adoration for Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters among countless other blues heroes. Of course, those blues sounds were passed through the psychedelic lens to end up creating the basis of albums like Disraeli Gears, which were far beyond the remit of artists like Johnson back in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, Jack Bruce brought an entirely different angle to the band’s sound: “I’d never known any kind of musical scale, other than the strict blues scale,” Clapton told Uncut in 2004.
“Jack brought with him an immense experience of classical and jazz and popular music.”
With that expansive wealth of influences, Cream struck upon one of the most innovative and influential sounds of the decade. They weren’t, however, the only band of the 1960s experimenting with the parameters of rock and roll.
In fact, one of their greatest and yet most unexpected influences came from the realm of popular music that Jack Bruce coveted, and he tended to wear beach shorts rather than paisley flares.
“Believe it or not,” Clapton revealed, “When Cream was evolving its ideology of what we wanted the sound to be, the thing we were listening to most, apart from the blues, was Pet Sounds.” On one hand, you might struggle to see the connection between the vast rock energy of Cream and the vulnerable, multi-layered mastery of Brian Wilson’s ultimate innovation, but it must be remembered just how drastically The Beach Boys’ 1966 album changed the musical landscape.
Whether it was The Beatles and their attempts to evoke Pet Sounds’ spirit of Sgt Pepper’s, or Cream and their more melodic moments, the album was a cultural touchstone that few musicians of that era could truly escape. As Clapton continued, “Jack was very interested in Brian Wilson’s viewpoint, and saw it as the new Bach.” High praise indeed, but praise which Pet Sounds certainly merits.
So, although it was the blues pioneers who inspired the unmistakable sounds of Clapton’s psych riffs, the backbone of Cream itself wouldn’t have been quite the same without the inspiration of that landmark Beach Boys album – a testament to just how wide-reaching and revolutionary Brian Wilson’s output was during that period.
