The real abode that inspired the Cream song ‘White Room’
Despite being best known as a self-contained power trio unit, Cream frequently brought in outside help during their relatively brief career. Felix Pappalardi, the bassist for hard rock pioneers Mountain, had become something of an unofficial fourth member of the band, producing their final three albums and playing assorted instruments on them. Ginger Baker worked with musician Mike Taylor to co-write three songs on 1968’s Wheels of Fire. But perhaps the most prominent and longest-lasting collaborator in Cream was lyricist Pete Brown.
A close friend of bassist Jack Bruce, Brown would be the band’s primary outside lyricist, writing the words to classic songs like ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, ‘I Feel Free’, and ‘SWLABR’. Brown was also the lyricist behind the Cream classic ‘White Room’, a poetic take on madness that would become one of the band’s final singles. Brown’s original lyrics were more direct, but Bruce instructed him to change them.
“It was a meandering thing about a relationship that I was in and how I was at the time,” Brown told SongFacts in 2017. “It was a kind of watershed period really. It was a time before I stopped being a relative barman and became a songwriter, because I was a professional poet, you know. I was doing poetry readings and making a living from that. It wasn’t a very good living, and then I got asked to work by Ginger and Jack with them and then started to make a kind of living.”
“And there was this kind of transitional period where I lived in this actual white room and was trying to come to terms with various things that were going on,” Brown added. “It’s a place where I stopped, I gave up all drugs and alcohol at that time in 1967 as a result of being in the white room, so it was a kind of watershed period. That song’s like a kind of weird little movie: it changes perspectives all the time. That’s why it’s probably lasted – it’s got a kind of mystery to it.”
Bruce and Brown are the only two people listed in the song’s writing credits. However, Baker would later claim credit for composing the song’s opening 5/4 bolero, in which his drums are prominently featured. For Baker, it was just one of many slights that he felt were instigated by Brown and Baker.
“It wasn’t written like that. Jack wrote it in 4/4,” Baker claimed in the documentary Beware of Mr. Baker. “He now declares I wrote it in 5/4. I mean, hello. Today, and for the last 40 years, Pete Brown and Jack Bruce have been earning a hell of a lot more money from Cream than Eric and I will ever own. To this day!”
Check out ‘White Room’ down below.
