Here’s a classic example of how quickly things progressed in the hothouse musical world of the late sixties. Barely six months after the sessions that produced Fresh Cream, coming off the end of nine shows as part of Murray the K's Music in the 5th Dimension concert series in May 1967 the band had three and a half days before their visas expired to record a second album at Atlantic Studios in New York. Their American label, Atco, was a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, so the sessions were engineered by Atlantic’s Tom Dowd with label ownerAhmet Ertegun present through the sessions.
It was around six months since the sessions that produced the first album and were, with the benefit of hindsight, aimed at building the core of a live repertoire, but things were moving pretty quickly in early 1967, and it must have seemed fairly obvious that the three players weren’t possessed of the sort of skill set that would deliver material of the quality that was needed on their own. That must have been obvious at the time, at least as far as the lyrics were concerned. If you glance back to Fresh Cream the playing was fine, the instrumental interplay close to spot on, but the words were in desperate need of attention.
There’s probably no better example of that situation than the contrast between the tracks that open and close the first side of the vinyl version. Clapton had taken a Buddy Guy riff and reworked it slightly after the style of Albert King, labelled it Lawdy Mama (a title that obviously needed changing) and needed some words. Cream had been playing it live as an instrumental. It could have remained in the set list in that guise, but a live tape had Disraeli Gears’ producer Felix Pappalardi and his wife Gail Collins playing with the melody line and adding some suitably psychedelic lyrics and the result was Strange Brew.
Contrast that with the leaden plodding and genuinely duff words of Ginger Baker’s Blue Condition at the end of the side, and you can probably see exactly where I’m coming from. About the best thing that can be said about Blue Condition was that (from Ginger Baker’s perspective) he didn’t get to share the writer’s royalties with anyone.
As far as the writing goes, leave out the jokey Mother’s Lament and you’re left with ten tracks, an uncompleted piece buffed up and polished by Pappalardi and Collins (Strange Brew) and one that was entirely their own (World of Pain), one Martin Sharp poem set to a tune from Clapton (Tales of Brave Ulysses), an old time blues (Outside Woman Blues), Baker’s contribution (Blue Condition) and Bruce’s We’re Going Wrong as well as four Bruce collaborations with poet Pete Brown that contribute a much more consistent quality rating. It definitely helps to have people who know their way around words on board.
As far as openers go, they don’t come too much better than Strange Brew, the first single off the album and a significant departure from Clapton’s previous blues stylings. Cutting the track in New York with an engineer who knew his way around multitrack recording (the late great Tom Dowd) added a sonic complexity they couldn’t have managed earlier. In places, the guitar work seems to have been triple-tracked (at least), with little riffs that wind their way around, in and out of each other with the whole thing held together at the seams by Baker's drumming.
Driven by one of the all-time great riffs, Sunshine of Your Love, according to Tom Dowd, wasn’t working until he suggested that Ginger Baker try something akin to the war drums in a Western movie as the Indians ominously appear on the sky line, and it’s Baker’s drums that drives and underpins that iconic ten-note riff, allegedly the result of Bruce seeing the Jimi Hendrix Experience for the first time.
Bruce and Clapton share the vocals, with the lyrics stemming from the end of an all-night Bruce/Brown writing session that hadn’t produced much of note (It’s getting near dawn / Where nights close their tired eyes). Throw in a Clapton solo that’s built around Billie Holliday’s Blue Moon and you’ve got the makings of a hugely successful single, and one of the classic tracks of the psychedelic era.
But we’re still looking at an outfit looking to cement a place in the marketplace, and while you could look at the Pappalardi/Collins World of Pain as a lightweight successor to what had preceded it, for mine it’s a fairly classy piece of understated pop, with Clapton’s multi-tracked wah-wah guitar underlining the argument that amid all the fuss about Cream as thundering bluesmeisters, or some such hyperbole, there was a fairly sophisticated experimental pop outfit lurking under the surface.
That’s equally obvious on the soaring 12-string driven Dance the Night Away, which along with the masterful We’re Going Wrong, is one of the best examples of Cream as quality purveyors of power pop. There’s nothing fancy about Pete Brown’s lyrics, just a clear expression of an intent to dance myself to nothing over an instrumental track that invokes both The Byrds and Middle Eastern Sufi mystics.
On the other hand it’s difficult to find any redeeming features in the leaden Blue Condition. You could, perhaps, liken Baker’s spot in the limelight as akin to Ringo’s vocal contributions to Beatle albums, but one would gently point out that for most of the time Mr Starr had Lennon and McCartney doing the writing. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that if they’d had more than three and a half days to cut the album or anything else in the way of Baker-penned material Blue Condition would have been consigned to the outtakes basket.
Or maybe it suffers a bit more than it deserves (a possibility I’d be inclined to discount, but there you go) because it comes straight before the sublime Tales of Brave Ulysses, the product of a chance meeting between Clapton and Australian artist Martin Sharp before they ended up as co-residents in The Pheasantry in Chelsea. The way Clapton tells it he was at the Speakeasy with French model Charlotte Martin when they encountered Sharp, recently returned from Ibiza, where he’d written this poem about the Greek hero Ulysses and Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.
Hearing that Clapton was a musician, Sharp wrote his little poem down on a napkin, handed it over, and the rest, as the saying goes, was history.
Setting Sharp’s words to an uptempo melody he’d been working on based around The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City, Clapton slowed things down, overdubbed lashings of wah-wah guitar and came up with something that’s often rated as the band’s finest effort. While I’m inclined to hand that label to We’re Going Wrong I can see where the Ulysses crew are coming from.The contrast between the calm minimalism of Bruce’s vocal line as Baker pounds away underneath and that frenzied wah wah was mind-blowing back then and still sends chill down the spine forty-five years later. It wasn’t the only Clapton/Sharp composition, but the contrast with the rather charming Anyone for Tennis couldn’t be much more extreme.
They could possibly have left the title of the Bruce/Brown collaboration we’ve come to know, love and attempt to pronounce as SWLABR as the full length She Walks Like a Bearded Rainbow, but the mystery in the initials lines up with the ring a rosy guitar licks Clapton delivers, Bruce’s surreal vocal showcases the substance-driven inspiration behind the lyrics and the whole package rocks along in suitably surreal style (what with the subject matter and all).
But as stated previously, Hughesy’s tick for the album’s standout track goes to Jack Bruce’s We're Going Wrong, which stems from the masterly underplaying Clapton demonstrates throughout, that old saw about what you leave out being as important as what actually goes in. It’s not quite an exercise in minimalism, but check the slow inexorable build under the Bruce vocal line from the starting plea to open your mind, little licks that stay under the surface until that verse gets repeated as Baker gives the rolling drums the mallet treatment. Melancholic, quite majestic with a vocal melody that’s not as simple as it sounds, contrast this with, say Dreaming from Fresh Cream as an indication of how things had progressed in less than a year, then skip over to the reunion version from Royal Albert Hall London May 2-3-5-6 2005 and see where they ended up taking it nearly forty years later and you might note that certain je ne sais quoi that underlies a rather sublime piece of music.
At the time I seem to recall some statement from Clapton about ensuring the old blues men get their fair share of royalties, and Blind Joe Reynolds might have lived long enough to collect a pay cheque for Outside Woman Blues, which Clapton sings, delivering a reasonably traditionalist take on the song an a slightly rock-oriented arrangement.
On the surface you might think there’s nothing sinister about Take It Back, a fairly good time harmonica-driven romp that rocks along merrily, but there’s apparently a fairly significant anti-Vietnam message lurking under a song that was apparently inspired by media images of American students burning their draft cards.
Reading the Clapton autobiography, where he has the band locked away in the RKO Theatre from 10:30 in the morning till 8:30 at night while Wilson Pickett, the Young Rascals, Simon & Garfunkel, Mitch Ryder and The Who went through their paces five times a day in the Murray the K Show, I suspect that rousing singalongs around a backstage piano in between brief appearances on stage to play I Feel Free explains the decision to wind up proceedings with Mother's Lament. The old music hall song probably provided cover in between incidents Clapton describes as all manner of pranks like flooded dressing rooms, and flour and smoke bombs.
That was right before the Disraeli Gears sessions, and while the three part accapella harmony has nothing to do with what had gone before, their contemporaries had a habit of providing incongruous endings to albums, and this one, delivered with great gusto was another one.
While Disraeli Gears has its weak points here and there, Cream's second album has, by and large ironed out the issues that emerged on Fresh Cream (notably the writing, Blue Condition notwithstanding) and the result was a polished package that set one of the benchmarks for what followed. The Bruce/Brown writing combination demonstrated an ability to deliver quality material that took some of the weight off Clapton and Baker, Clapton's playing, driven by technology (multitrack recording), gadgets (the ubiquitous wah wah pedal) and sympathetic engineers (the mighty Tom Dowd) moves up several notches and the rhythm section drives proceedings most magnificently.
They might have hated each other’s guts, but what a combination!
An album of classic proportions that, in many ways, laid out the ground rules for the power trio, helped define psychedelic music in the late sixties and thereafter by a stellar trio at the height of their considerable powers.
And that title. A malapropism. A discussion between Clapton and Baker (there are various versions, but this seems to be the consensus version) that had something to do with a racing bicycle with derailleur gears allegedly produced a comment from roadie Mick Turner along the lines of it's got them Disraeli Gears.
