Never mind the release dates, check the session chronology and you’ve got a rather remarkable couple of quantum leaps from Fresh Cream (various dates, July to October 1966) to Disraeli Gears (three and a half days in May 1967) to Wheels of Fire (basic sessions at IBC Studios in London in July and August 1967, overdubs at Atlantic Studios in New York City during September and October and some finishing touches at the same location in January and February 1968), basically at times the band’s hectic touring schedule allowed.
That’s sort of twelve months from something approximating Well if we’re going to make a go of this we’re going to need some product to sell to an exercise in tweaking the boundaries of what was possible on a rock record, and not just on the studio side of things. Producer Felix Pappalardi arranged for a mobile recording setup from Los Angeles to be shipped to San Francisco to record shows at the Fillmore auditorium and the Winterland Ballroom. Pappalardi and recording engineer Bill Halverson recorded six shows split between the two venues, and what didn’t end up on the Live at the Fillmore half of Wheels of Fire ended up on two volumes of Live Cream.
As far as Disc one: In the Studio is concerned, it starts with a monumental roar in the shape of White Room's multi-tracked guitar, single strings feeding back while the tympani pound and the bass thunders, and the recording details of this one track are mirrored throughout the rest of the album. Initial sessions at IBC Studios in London in July and August 1967, overdubs in New York in September and October and the wah wah effects inserted at Atlantic Studios in early 1968.
After that pounding intro there’s a great set of Brown lyrics, allegedly relating to his new apartment and a psychedelic experience Where the shadows run from themselves that was powerful enough to have him swear off the stuff. Clapton’s working the wah wah towards the borders of excess, Baker’s drum sound is nothing short of majestic and Bruce delivers one of his best vocal performances.
There are any number of versions of Sitting on Top of the World (credited to Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon; arranged by Chester Burnett a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf) but this one probably set the benchmark as far as the post-Wolf generation was concerned. Great rock-blues guitar work employing classic phrasing pushed to the point of reverbed distortion underpins a fine vocal performance, and Baker’s drums set things up just right. He’s there banging away again on Passing the Time, co-written with British jazz composer and pianist Mike Taylor (Baker provides the lyrics).
After Disraeli Gears’ Blue Condition, Baker must have realised he needed the right collaborator (big tick as far as Hughesy’s concerned) and appears to have put some effort into the words, which mightn’t tell a great story, but set a scene that works well with the studio production. Wisely, the vocal duties go to Bruce, and the result is a rather quirky, slightly hypnotic gem, full of deftly executed time changes, heavy on the glockenspiel with the quiet, melancholy of the verses shifting into all-out hard rock on the chorus.
With Clapton missing and Baker limited to the high hat cymbal, Bruce gets almost total credit on As You Said, contributing acoustic guitar, cellos, lead vocals in what amounts to a solo performance. Acoustic guitar and droning cello play back and forth and the result is a quirky piece that delivers a mixture of menace, mystery and melancholy (the sun is out of reach)...
Baker continues to demonstrate a recognition that song on Disraeli Gears could (and should) have been better by reciting the vocal line on Pressed Rat and Warthog. Your mileage may well vary with this fractured bit of whimsical nonsense concerning purveyors of atonal apples and amplified heat / And Pressed Rat’s collection of dogs’ legs and feet, but from the first time I heard it (as the B-side of Clapton and Sharp's decidedly oddball Anyone for Tennis), I’ve seen it as a pretty harmless bit of fun with its own peculiar charm, with Pappalardi’s trumpet figures lilting over Baker’s drum rolls and Clapton's subdued chord (before he cuts loose on the instrumental play-out).
A prowling, menacing riff leads into the Bruce/Brown Politician that could have been slow heavy metal twelve bar by numbers if it wasn’t for Clapton’s interwoven guitar overdubs, Baker’s precise percussive punctuation and Brown’s cynical lyric line given a reasonably straight delivery in Bruce’s vocal. Contrast, if you will, with the Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments version, complete with Brown’s introductory monologue in all its twelve-minute glory here.
The Ginger Baker/Mike Taylor combo scores again on Those Were the Days, a percussion showpiece with Baker on drums, marimba, tubular bells and Felix Pappalardi banging away on Swiss hand bells. Again, there seems to have been some thought and effort going into the words, Bruce gets to sing and Clapton unleashes some stinging frenetic guitar over the percussive melee.
That’s followed by Born Under a Bad Sign, a fairly orthodox rendition of a contemporary blues standard by Booker T. Jones and William Bell, originally recorded by Albert King with any number of subsequent versions (Wikipedia lists, among others, Big Mama Thornton, Blue Cheer, Booker T. and the M.G.s, Buddy Miles, Etta James, Jimi Hendrix, Koko Taylor with Buddy Guy, Paul Butterfield, Paul Rodgers, Peter Green, Rita Coolidge and Robben Ford). Bruce walks around the basic riff on bass, Baker syncopates around that and Clapton reworks King’s solo in his own style, with an edgy sound that’s unmistakably Claptonesque.
There’d been a fair bit of the cinematic across Disraeli Gears (Tales of Brave Ulysses, World of Pain) and earlier in Wheels of Fire (White Room, Passing the Time) but the Bruce/Brown Deserted Cities of the Heart, three and a half minutes that, for me at least, is the album’s most successful track moves those elements into another dimension.
Or would have if they’d opted to reprise the furious Clapton solo that burns and aches with frustration in the middle as a play out. Now my heart’s drowned in cold dark streams, indeed.
With a couple of nights recorded, the selection of tracks to include on Disc two: Live at the Fillmore seems to have been based on what producer Pappalardi thought needed to go on there (obvious enough, but there’s this issue of sharing the spotlight around three ways, which means we were always going to be getting a lengthy Toad). Bruce needs his turn in the spotlight, which would seem to explain Train Time, and, of course, he gets to nail Spoonful in the vocal department. Clapton’s going to get the guitar spotlight throughout, and gets the vocal on Crossroads so the result is an odd display of diplomatic democracy that, interestingly, works in reverse chronological order as far as the actual performances go.
Crossroads (recorded 10 March 1968 in the first show at Winterland) might kick proceedings off, but it was recorded last, following Spoonful in the actual performance and, at just 4:13 is Clapton's showpiece, and may or may not have been edited down from a longer version. Tom Dowd, who you reckon might be in a position to know, claimed in an interview with Guitar Player magazine (July 1985) Crossroads, onstage, was never under seven to ten minutes long. So, the solos between the vocals were edited, which would explain why this one’s substantially more focussed than the sixteen minute Spoonful that follows (but in real life preceded) it. On the other hand there’s no obvious sign of an edit, and there are other versions recorded in a similar time frame that run around the same length of time.
Spoonful, on the other hand, weighing in at 16:43 is heavy on the improvisation, and while Clapton’s firing on all cylinders Bruce is heading over the top in the vocal department and your mileage will vary depending on your ability to handle extended statements of virtuosity. If you can handle the solos, you’ll probably be rapt, but it’s a track that often attracts the Shuffle forward button, as does Train Time’s harmonica and Bruce vocal overload. Baker does a good job on the choo choo shuffle, but it’s one that’s destined to remain outside Hughesy’s Top 10,000, let along the Top 1500 Most Played, as is Toad. If the relatively brief version on Fresh Cream doesn’t qualify, sixteen and a bit minutes here are no chance whatsoever, though each time I allow the thing to run Baker’s rhythmic invention and sheer stamina impress.
With the live material in the can, the band decided to split, though the announcement to the wider world didn’t happen until July, and there was the obligatory farewell tour of the US and a couple of concerts in London. Wheels of Fire didn’t hit the stores until August, but when it did
With the benefit of hindsight, decision to split was, when you looked at the tensions between Bruce and Baker and Clapton’s feeling that the trio didn’t listen to each other enough (at one point he stopped playing mid-concert and neither Baker nor Bruce noticed) was probably inevitable and the final shows in London came just under twenty-eight months after their debut.
In that context it’s interesting to note the progression in recording technology from four tracks (Fresh Cream, July > October 1966) to eight (Disraeli Gears, May 1967) to what was probably closer to twenty-four once the basic tracks for Wheels of Fire had been cut at IBC in London and they’d transferred operations to Atlantic in New York. There’s a lot more room when you’re on a multiple of eight tracks, and it comes through strongly in the intricate overdubs and the added instrumentation, the cello, trumpet, viola, organ, and a swarms of bells and percussive effects that add a great deal of light and shade.
Casting the gaze backwards, and shedding the live component it would be a tricky issue if you set out to decide which out of Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire amount to a greater achievement. Disraeli Gears, for those of us who were around at the time, was the album that made you stop, listen and note that there was definitely the album where Cream hit their straps, where Wheels of Fire has them in full fight, firing on all cylinders, delivering a sprawling masterpiece of a kind that would very shortly become an endangered species as Cream disbanded, Hendrix left us and the pioneers were succeeded by a wave of lesser performers with less imagination and a greater propensity to work to formulas.
Cream’s heyday coincided with a time when the old definitions of commerciality were temporarily being disregarded. The commercial success of Wheels of Fire (it went platinum in the US within a year of release), and the previously unimagined river of revenue that stemmed from touring the United States, playing large venues (something unimaginable in a British setting) went on to pave the way for a wave of successors and aspirants, but I guess I’ll always have a soft spot for the pioneers who blazed the way...
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