The one singer Eric Clapton said should have joined Cream: “I was absolutely certain”
It was bound to be difficult for Eric Clapton to get a word in when he was working with a band like Cream.
He may have been happy not to have to play the watered-down version of the blues that he was playing with The Yardbirds, but seeing Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker argue back and forth every other time they played was bound to have an impact on his psyche after one too many times. It’s hard enough balancing out a power trio even at the best of times, but ‘Slowhand’ felt that they could have been a lot more if they had settled on his original idea for getting the right fourth member in the group.
But when you look at how Cream operated, Clapton was almost being outdone by both of his bandmates. Bruce and Baker had both come from the world of jazz, and while Clapton could make his blues licks work over nearly any genre of rock and roll, he found himself trying to play catch-up with his bandmates every single time they started jamming, almost as if every one of the members were soloing at the exact same time.
If there was a de facto “frontman” of the group, though, it was Bruce. He was the one with that operatic vocal range whenever he performed, and while Clapton was the resident guitar genius in the band, his prowess as a songwriter hadn’t really bloomed yet compared to the countless songs Bruce had come in with. But even at their height, you could tell that the camaraderie was missing every single time they played.
Any two of them could have worked perfectly off each other, but when all three of them got into it, it was practically impossible to get everyone to fully agree on what the arrangement should be. That resentment didn’t even dull after decades away from each other, but Clapton felt that the band could have carried on had they asked someone like Steve Winwood to sit in with them a handful of times.
After all, the band was already spellbound when they first started jamming with Jimi Hendrix during his first trip across the pond, and Winwood was the kind of unassuming presence that would have been perfect for the band. His keyboard lines would have been a fine addition to their massive wall of sound, and while Bruce may have had to take a back seat whenever he sang, it would have been a lot easier for Winwood to throw some different vocal lines into the mix that were more reminiscent of bluesier acts like Ray Charles.
Even Clapton remembered the idea of Cream becoming more like The Band with Winwood before everything fell through, saying, “I was absolutely certain if we had engaged the assistance of Steve Winwood we could have gone in that direction, but done it in a very English way. I think I even had a contempt for what they were doing. But later I realised Traffic were the English version of The Band. I’d been trying to get Steve in for ages. I think I must have talked to Jack and Ginger about it. But he was rooted in what he was doing in Traffic.”
Cream would be forever confined to the acid-soaked brand of rock and roll, but Clapton wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass him by when he formed Blind Faith. The supergroup was already a soft reboot for Cream without Bruce’s involvement, and on a song like ‘Presence of the Lord’, you can hear the kind of direction that Clapton was hearing in his head when he first floated the idea of working with Winwood.
We’ll never know what that version of Cream might have sounded like if all of them were playing together, but it’s almost better to see them going out in a blaze of glory. Not all of their songs were meant to be classics by any stretch, but when you get past the more forgettable pieces like ‘Wrapping Paper’, there are songs that are still going to be seen as some of the best rock and roll ever conceived.
