The band Eric Clapton said was his perfect match: “Musically we are idealistic”
By the mid-1960s, Eric Clapton had already become known as a deity among guitar players.
No one in England could have even imagined someone playing with that much ferocity, and looking at his record collection, he had already been studying under some of the greatest players that the blues ever spat out. But for all of the great musicians that he played with, it took him a while before he had a group that was anywhere near the level that he wanted to be as a virtuoso musician.
Because for all of the opportunities he had with The Yardbirds, there was no way he was going to be staying in that band for the rest of his life. He had spent years honing his craft and listening to the best guitar players to come from the US, so when the record label motioned for them to start making more radio-friendly stuff, ‘Slowhand’ would have rather gone down doing what he loved than be forced to make pop tunes.
So when he hooked up with John Mayall, it was like he flipped the switch all the way to the other side. He wasn’t interested in making the bog-standard blues rock tunes anymore, and when listening to him play the solos on that record, he truly seemed unleashed. Nobody could touch him anymore, but there came a point where even Mayall seemed to be playing things a little bit too safe for what Clapton wanted.
Mayall was a great player, but he could feel that things would get a bit too stagnant if he played the same blues progressions over and over. He needed players that could match him at his level, and when he saw the building blocks of Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, they were bound to offer him a different kind of musical ride than what he was used to hearing from the blues troubadours.
But the greatest advantage was that Bruce and Baker weren’t necessarily rock and roll players. Both of them had grown up playing blues progressions, but there was also a healthy dose of jazz sprinkled in the mix whenever they made one of their tunes, so if Clapton put his spin on that kind of music, he knew that things would start taking off a lot faster.
While Cream were heralded as the first supergroup, Clapton felt that the trio was the first time that he felt like he had musical equals, saying at the time, “Musically we are idealistic. When I first met Ginger and Jack I realized they were the only two musicians I could ever play with.” Then again, Clapton would have a lot more opportunities to show his stuff when working on the next few records.
Fresh Cream was a good proof of concept, but since he would soon be working with The Beatles, he wasn’t looking to stay in Cream the rest of his life. After all, Bruce and Baker weren’t exactly the easiest relationship to monitor, and when they started fighting about every single tune on the record, Clapton’s next move was to go out on his own and see if he could make that same kind of magic with a backing band behind him.
A lot of what he did later may have been more downtempo than what he did with Cream, but if you listen to his body of work, he wouldn’t have reached half of his later works without his old bandmates. They were the best in the world at the time, and while musical legends like Duane Allman and Stevie Ray Vaughan were able to share a stage with Clapton, Bruce and Baker will forever be the first musicians that made him feel at home.
