The supergroup Geezer Butler hailed as “the second coming of Jesus”
The 1960s was an incredibly exciting time for music, as you were just starting to have genres like psychedelic rock and prog rock establish themselves. With these new sounds came a range of innovative artists with bright ideas.
One of these artists was Eric Clapton, as he was able to merge multiple different guitar playing styles and create what we effectively know as the modern guitarist. There were a lot of sounds all happening at the same time before Clapton came along, as you had pop, rock, R&B and blues all making their way around the world, but he managed to play in a way that combined all of them.
“Before Clapton, rock guitar was the Chuck Berry method, modernised by Keith Richards, and the rockabilly sound – Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup – popularised by George Harrison,” said Steve Van Zandt when talking about the iconic guitarist, “Clapton absorbed that, then introduced the essence of black electric blues: the power and vocabulary of Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and the three Kings – B.B., Albert and Freddie – to create an attack that defined the fundamentals of rock and roll lead guitar.”
While you might have had a great guitarist on hand with Eric Clapton, he couldn’t have made the excellent music he became known for without the right people surrounding him. The best band he was a part of is obviously up for debate; however, if you were to ask Geezer Butler, he’d say that it was Cream.
Eric Clapton wasn’t the only exceptional musician doing a lot of heavy lifting in Cream; you also had Ginger Baker on drums and Jack Bruce on bass. According to Gerald Butler, they were the first ever supergroup that music had ever known, long before the days of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and The Traveling Wilbury’s.
Butler said: “When Clapton left the Bluesbreakers to form Cream, the first-ever supergroup, it felt like the second coming of Jesus, musically speaking.”
That’s incredibly high praise, to the extent that a lot of people might resent it slightly; however, one of the more grounded pieces of praise that the band received was the fact that they can be credited with starting the prog rock movement. When the trio came together, they had a penchant for combining different genres of music, the same way Clapton did with his guitar style, and it led to a sound that essentially laid the foundation for prog.
While the genre remains difficult to define, there is a common consensus that it essentially means any and all kinds of rock music that has elements which remove it from the mainstream. That was basically the greatest way to describe Cream, as they had an undeniable rock sound, but would also add elements from plenty of different genres in a bid to expose listeners to a brand new sound. It might not have been the second coming of Jesus, but it certainly was the first coming of prog.
“A more progressive approach, which had been the latter part of ’66, listening to people like Graham Bond, who had at that point in his band Jack Bruce on bass and Ginger Baker on drums. In many ways, Graham Bond was kind of a precursor of that thing that became progressive rock,” said Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, “And, of course, Cream in its way when those two guys left Graham Bond and set out as Cream, that became something that moved Eric Clapton along from just being a blues guitarist.”
