A Year of Blind Spots: Fresh Cream

I'm exploring a different classic album every week, in a random order, and every Saturday giving each of those albums a couple hundred words at most.

Cream, one of the original power trios. Let's briefly hit each member, one at a time.

JACK BRUCE: Maybe it shouldn't surprise me that Fresh Cream stuffs its 34-minute runtime with heapings of psychedelia, since it was released in 1966, but it still caught me a little off-guard. The ratio of trippy psych rock to hard rock on this album is the inverse of the sum of my knowledge of Cream via their radio presence. Seeing as how Jack Bruce has the majority of songwriting credits and all but one of the vocal performances on Fresh Cream, I'm going to assume that this is his doing.

 

I mean, I'm not seeing too many explicitly 1960's-psychedelic-cliché-type musical projects in his career prior to Cream—the Graham Bond Organisation is described as "progressive rock / jazz fusion" and John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers as "British blues"—so I guess he was just riding the wave of the times, especially on this first Cream album (from what I recall, Disraeli Gears gets a little harder around the edges). I like it, and it kinda makes me want to travel down a few more trippy paths like this in the future (or maybe that's just because the hard rock Cream that I know from the radio has already burned me out).

ERIC CLAPTON: It always kinda confused me that this "legendary" guitarist would be so accepting of a nickname like "Slowhand." I know there's a whole story about it being a reference to Clapton's meticulousness when changing his guitar strings, but as someone who expects a guitar player to have fast hands, I always thought it was an indicator that Eric Clapton is supremely overrated as a guitarist.

I have no idea, though, really. I don't play the guitar or have an intimate knowledge of guitar-playing. He seems fine on Fresh Cream. Nothing noteworthy in the guitar work, as far as I can tell, but nothing boring or pedestrian either.

What I do know, however, is that Eric Clapton is historically a huge fucking racist, and more recently an anti-masker, so... the guitar performance is almost besides the point when discussing this douchebag.

GINGER BAKER: I haven't drummed with regularity in almost a decade (will be ten years this summer since I unofficially hung up the sticks), and yet I still consider myself a "drummer." Some shit never leaves you. Also never leaving me: the fact that I am one clueless ignorant motherfucker. If I was really a drummer, then I should've known about "Toad." I didn't.

 

"Toad," written and performed by Ginger Baker, is one of classic rock's first true drum solos. I refuse to Elvis Theory this solo away—sure, it's not as "creative," per se, as many of rock's famous drum solos that would follow, but it is still proficient and powerful enough that it gives off the "wow" factor anyway. I dunno, maybe I'm just saying this as a drummer, but I thought it was a great fucking way to end Fresh Cream. Maybe people with less appreciation for the percussive arts might be inclined to skip "Toad" when it arrives.

 

Just like "Toad" is to all rock drum solos, I now see Ginger Baker as sort of a godfather to all rock drumming that succeeded him. He didn't have the heft and depth of John Bonham, he lacked the true blue insanity of Keith Moon, he could never match the robotic technical precision of Neil Peart. And yet none of those drummers would even fucking exist if Ginger Baker wasn't doing his thing on this album and on "Toad."