Sour Cream: how record label politics destroyed Eric Clapton’s breakout band
When it came to forming Cream, Eric Clapton must have known what he was getting into. In 1966, the guitar legend had just split from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, looking to graduate from a phenomenally talented sideman to a singer and songwriter in his own right. He already had the “Clapton is God” reputation that was now being spraypainted on walls across the country, so he had the clout to not just make a band but also the best, most exciting band in the country. The trouble was that the rhythm section he had in mind weren’t huge fans of each other.
By that, I mean that when Clapton approached drummer Ginger Baker about forming a power trio with bassist Jack Bruce the last time they’d shared a stage together, Baker had charged at Bruce with a knife. Baker was driving Clapton home from a gig when the guitarist pitched the idea and was so astonished that he nearly swerved off the road when he heard it. However, deep down, they both knew just how good this band could be, so they put aside their personal animosity for the sake of making some great music. For about a month or so, at least.
The fights between Baker and Bruce were legendary, which makes sense. When a maniac like Ginger Baker has it out for you, there are few places one can hide. However, their hatred for each other wasn’t the only reason that Cream came to such a bitter end after barely two years. Despite the vision for the band being little more than “we’re the ‘Cream’ of British rock instrumentalists, why not do that together?”, everything started to get very complicated very quickly.
Typically, that complication came from a bunch of suits getting very excited over how much money Cream could make them. You see, while Clapton was a hero in his home country, he hadn’t quite broken into America yet. When the first album, 1966’s Fresh Cream, was a hit, a number of labels suddenly saw Cream as a way of breaking Clapton into the US. Thus, the band were signed to a subsidiary of Atlantic Records to record their second album, Disraeli Gears, at Atlantic Studios in New York City.
How did Atlantic meddle with Cream?
An interview Bruce gave to Guitarist magazine sheds some light on what the suits saw Cream as, via their classic song ‘Strange Brew’. He said, “We had already made a recording of a blues song called ‘Hey Lawdy Mama’, but then [producer] Felix Pappalardi was told there had been an executive decision that Eric had to front the band, and I was going to be the bass-player guy who stood in the background quietly.”
“So all of my material was sort of ‘non grata’, and they had to come up with a song for Eric to sing. So, Felix took ‘Lawdy Mama’ home and came back the next day with ‘Strange Brew’, which he had co-written with his wife, Gail”. Bruce had been the main songwriter behind Cream’s biggest moments, including the immortal ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’.
Despite all that he found, as he went on to say in the interview, “I had absolutely no power in the band, in the studio—because [head of Atlantic Records] Ahmet Ertegun was more or less in love with Eric. He thought Eric should be the frontman.” Annoyingly, this way of presenting the band did work, with Disraeli Gears being an even bigger hit in America than the UK and Clapton finally making a name for himself in the United States.
However, the rush to capitalize on that success was the final nail in Cream’s coffin. Bruce says, “It was enjoyable until they broke the band’s spirit by putting us on the one-nighters for seven months without anybody to help us, that was what destroyed us.” The sheer strain of staying on the road for that long while also writing and recording two new albums exacerbated the existing tensions in the band. So much so that, after a mere two years of playing together, they were done.
A lot of the time, Cream is a story about warring band members and, fair play to the lads, they earned that reputation. However, it didn’t have to be that way. While there was probably no way Bruce and Baker could have worked out their differences, as the documentary Beware of Mr Baker showed. It’s a miracle Bruce lived through the experience at all. However, they may have at least found a way to ignore them had they been given the time and space to do so.
They were a rock band in the late 1960s, though. Time and space were the absolute last things they were going to get, so the only way Cream was ever going to work it out was by coming to an end. At least we still have the music.
