Cream "Wheels of Fire" (Rear View)

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...

Cream "Disraeli Gears" (Rear View)

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.