The band who left Roger Waters “simply staggered” and changed the music scene forever
They may have become a dominant force in music during the 1970s, but one thing is certain: Pink Floyd were a band born out of the 1960s.
During the mid-1960s, the English rock scene progressed by leaps and bounds. Although the ‘British Invasion’ may have won hearts all over England in the wake of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, the Summer of Love gave way to new psychedelic bands emerging in the scene, having a healthy respect for noise and distortion rather than running blues scales.
Pink Floyd were a fledgling twinkle in the eyes of Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, while David Gilmour was still not even in the band. But while their psychedelic rock was in the offing, one group were beginning to dominate. In the middle of the haze of London’s newest music scene was Cream, with a sound unlike anything the rock world had ever heard before.
In the early days, Cream started as a supergroup by Eric Clapton. Having spent his time playing the same British take on the blues with the Yardbirds, Cream was meant as something different. Being awakened by what was happening on Beatles records, songs like ‘I Feel Free’ and ‘Spoonful’ held onto the core power of the blues with a more psychedelic flourish. This music started a new art form in England, and it had a huge impression on a young Roger Waters.
At the time, Waters was a college student, and his university put on a show with Cream that blew him away. While Waters had his experience with musical theatre at the same venue, the electricity coming off the stage that night changed his entire musical outlook.
Speaking to Rolling Stone (via Brain Damage), Waters mentioned the band going into the song ‘Crossroads’, saying: “I had never seen or heard anything like it before. I was simply staggered by the amount of equipment they had: by Ginger Baker’s double bass drum, by Jack Bruce’s two 4-by-12 Marshall amps and by all of Eric Clapton’s gear. It was an astounding sight and an explosive sound”.
During the set, Waters also remembers the gig featuring Jimi Hendrix as one of the support acts, as he explained: “that was the first night he played in England. He came on and did all that now-famous stuff, like playing with his teeth. That ticket cost about a pound or so. It might have been the best purchase I ever made”.
While Waters had been playing in bands before seeing Cream, seeing both Hendrix and Clapton working on the same stage was bound to have a lasting impact. As the band got through their set, Waters started changing his outlook on what he was doing with Pink Floyd.
After playing around the London clubs, Waters saw a way to make an honest living out of making Cream’s brand of art-focused rock. He noted: “After that, Pink Floyd started to go professional, and we would run into Cream on the road. They affected so many people. Along with the Beatles, they gave those of us entering the business at that time something to aspire to that wasn’t pop but was still popular”.
With Cream as his inspiration, Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, set the benchmark for what psychedelic music was like in the British rock scene. Although Syd Barrett may have been behind most of the songs, Cream’s love of noise and expansive production. When listening to something like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, Floyd were trying to build a mood with their music like Clapton did when he took his guitar solo on ‘Crossroads’.
Pink Floyd would go on to make music much further than the blues, but Waters points to this gig as the moment he found his true calling. And if that is the case, then we have Cream to thank for creating one fo the most illustrious discographies of all time.
