The tragic final meeting of Jack Bruce and Jaco Pastorius
As far as bass-playing prodigies go, there were few more prolific or worshipped than the late Jack Bruce. He was just one of the greatest to ever tread the boards, and the legacy of Cream, as well as rock music in general, will always be that little bit dimmer without his light boldly blazing new paths amid the darkness. Put simply, it was rare to find anyone who could ever come near to matching his talent.
That was until Jaco Pastorius rocked onto the scene, all funk-infused and Florida sun-drenched, to truly prove a reckoning in terms of which bassist ruled supreme. With two kings of the instrument making moves in the industry at the same time, you would imagine that there could have been the potential for some element of rivalry between the pair, but rather sweetly, their relationship was one far more defined by platonic romance.
Indeed, it was almost like the tale of Bruce and Pastorius’ encounters was akin to the rock and roll version of Romeo and Juliet, as their love burned bright but not for long. In fact, it only lasted for the span of one evening, but it was enough to forever alter Bruce’s perspective on life, after it wreaked untold tragic consequences on Pastorius, whose life was cut devastatingly short not long after.
Bruce recalled the star-crossed evening in a 2001 interview, when he explained that he was busy rehearsing in New York back in 1984 when Pastorius sent a request to meet him in a club that evening, which he obliged. Naturally taking part in a jam session, Bruce then said: “We talked a bit afterwards, and he told me I had influenced him, but I don’t know if he was just schmoozing me”.
But Pastorius’ worship of the Cream bassist was clear for all to see, even if his manner was more than a little erratic. “He was kind of crazed at the time. He was going up to people in the bar and yelling, ‘Hey, here’s the guy who wrote ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.’ He seemed to be going in all directions at once,” Bruce admitted, with no harshness towards the ebullient bass genius intended.
Yet his character assessment did hold some salience, as Pastorius, of course, had his demons. Plagued by drug addiction and occasional homelessness, before the violent attack outside a club in South Florida only three years later that would ultimately take his life, this was a troubled soul whose talent was seemingly too precious for the world to properly take care of.
In that vein, he possibly felt an intrinsic kinship to those like Bruce, whose bass-playing godliness gave him something in common. Yet it was clear that these connections were also very fragile. “At one point, he told me there was going to be an after-hours jam at a recording studio and asked if I would come,” Bruce recalled. “I said, ‘Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got something to do, but it’s been really nice meeting you’. He got really upset and ran off down the street. He turned the corner, and I never saw him again.”
Just like that, Pastorius had vanished into the thin air of the New York City night, and within a few short years, the world as a whole. For Bruce, the whole pained episode clearly painted the portrait of a tragedy—but for the rest of the music legions, with all the lessons that rock and roll has taught us, we know that only the best geniuses of the genre are taken before their time. It’s unfair, but just the lay of the law.
