Here’s exactly how it happened. I was sitting around thinking about Cream and how much I hate them, loathe them in fact, when I got the craziest idea—why not try actually listening to them? It was such an outlandish notion—after all, I’d spent years never listening to Cream but dismissing them anyway, and it seemed almost a waste to scattering all those wonderful years of ignorant bad mouthing to the four winds.
After all, I had a lot invested in hating the British supergroup and power trio; hating them because they represented the triumph of instrumental prowess over good songwriting, and because they were the epitome of pointless musical virtuosity, but most of all because I’ve had “White Room,” a song I don’t even like, stuck in my head for years, and there seems to be no way of getting it out short of trying to impale and extract it via a coat hanger through my left ear. So they were all giants on their instruments, big whoop. All that pure musical talent and they’d never written a single song even half as great as those beginners Iggy and Stooges’ “No Fun.” Or at least not one I’d ever heard.
Still, how could it hurt to give them an innocent listen? I’ll tell you how. What if I listened to them and liked them? Or even worse, loved them? Where would I be then? Fucked, that’s where I’d be. I’d have a billion words to eat, many of them words with multiple syllables, along with crow and my hat, and I’d have to reconsider my hatred of the dozens of other bands I’ve despised without ever once listening to one of their LPs, bands like Rush and Queen and I could go on but I won’t, because it’s not like I’m being paid by the word.
I’ll be honest with you. I picked 1969’s Goodbye, the band’s fourth and final LP, because it had the least songs on it. Okay, I told myself, I’ll give them a listen, but that’s no reason to go crazy. Plus it included the one Cream song I actually knew I liked, namely “Badge.” Goodbye is a haphazard mish-mash of studio and live recordings, and I knew that this could lead to accusations of my not giving them an honest chance, but I simply wasn’t sure I could mentally handle listening to a Cream LP with more than six songs on it.
Cream featured, as everybody knows, Eric Clapton on guitar and vocals; Jack Bruce on bass, piano, organ, and vocals; and Ginger Baker on drums, percussion, and vocals. Clapton would go on to do great things with Derek and the Dominos, before slowly succumbing to a decades-long case of the sucks. Bruce would put out numerous solo LPs, along with collaborations with everybody from Carla Bley to Leslie West to Vernon Reid before his death this past October. As for Baker, he fronted Ginger Baker’s Air Force and played with everybody from Fela Kuti to Public Image Ltd., and I will refrain from saying anything derogatory about him in this review lest he track me down and punch me in the mouth. Beware Mr. Baker indeed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself; in 1969 the members of Cream knew two things: one, that they were disbanding, and two that their manager Robert Stigwood wanted their final LP to be a big double album blowout, with one disc of studio recordings and one disc of live recordings from the trio’s farewell tour. Unfortunately, the threesome couldn’t produce enough quality material to make the double album a reality, with the result being that Goodbye, which they meant to be a bang, is more of a whimper.
Still, Goodbye has its strong points. For one, neither “White Room” nor “Crossroads” are on it. For another, well, er, I like the cover, which features the trio in silver suits treading the boards of an imaginary stage doing an old-fashioned show biz strut. And then there’s “Badge,” which opens with that cool Jack Bruce bass line after which Clapton sings about the swans that live in the park, at which point his guitar comes in and sounds really cool. Then he plays a righteous solo that knocks the ball out of the park and continues to fling notes even after he’s recommenced singing, which he does until the song stops dead. Oh, and the L’Angelo Misterioso credited as playing rhythm guitar on the track is actually George Harrison, who used to play in a famous band whose name slips my mind.
As for the live “I’m So Glad” I like it, but I don’t like nine minutes of it, even if the bulk of the song is first Clapton and then Bruce showing off their formidable chops. It’s a nice melodic tune, or more a jam riff really, and one of the best things Cream ever wrote, what with its catchy chorus and all. The real question is whether you or I or anybody really wants to listen to Clapton-Bruce churn the waters for, like, long enough for you to get high and come down again. I bet this baby sounded great live, especially if you were crammed with illicit chemicals. It rather reminds me of the Grateful Dead, only a tad more animated, and while Bruce really does kick out the jams, outshining Clapton for the most part, “I’m So Glad” remains a long-winded reminder of those days of yore when bands like Canned Heat played songs that lasted three days and nights and included 9-hour drum solos. Does anyone really want to go back to that time, when bands engaged in endless noodling? If so, give me the Minutemen.
The album’s low point is a live version of “Politician,” which in my opinion is one of the worst songs ever written by a major hard rock band. Clapton’s guitar riff is chunky and dumb, and there’s no discernible melody, and this is far more intolerable than Clapton’s typical boring blooz fare, which means it’s terrible indeed. Even his solo sounds enervated, like a fat man climbing a steep hill, and if this is what a supergroup sounds like, I’ll pass thank you very much. I’ve never liked Deep Purple, hate ‘em in fact, but Deep Purple could produce a better song than this in their sleep, as could any number of other late sixties’ hard rock outfits.
The live “Sitting on Top of the World” isn’t much better: another blues tune that mucks slowly along like a man slogging his cumbersome way across a shoe-sucking bog, it does have two positive attributes that “Politician” lacks. One, Clapton sings like he means it, and even shouts at points. And two, his guitar solo actually goes places, although I’m not certain I’d want to visit any of the places it goes. In any event it’s more proof that the blues, without a pinch of something exotic tossed in, are the dullest music form in the history of the world.
I found “Doing That Scrapyard Thing” off-putting at first, but it has grown on me for the simple reason that it’s one weird tune. It opens with a piano that reminds me more or Traffic than Cream, and then an organ comes in followed by the vocalist, who sounds like a member of Supertramp gone mad. His mad vocals are complemented by some equally mad lyrics, which run surreally along the lines of, “When I was young they gave me a mongrel piano/Spent all my time inventing the cup of tea/Writing your name in the sea/Banging my fav’rite head.” The piano comes plinking in and out, while the organ takes over all the duties that Clapton’s guitar would have normally handled, and this baby sounds better every time I listen to it.
The same is true of “What a Bringdown,” which lopes along like a gazelle with Baker playing some great drums while Clapton sings yet more surreal lyrics until the chorus, which is followed by the strangest-sounding guitar solo I’ve ever heard. Clapton is using a high-pitched wah-wah pedal or something, and his guitar sounds like a duck with laryngitis. As for the chorus it’s every bit as lyrically weird (“Will you? Won’t you? Do you?/Don’t you know when a head’s dead?/What a bringdown!”) as it is catchy. Incidentally that’s Felix Pappalardi playing bass for some inexplicable reason, because why would anyone replace the greatest bassist in the world for someone else? Perhaps Bruce was in the crapper.
In any event there you have it, Goodbye in a nutshell. Overall the live cuts are disappointing, or just plain awful in the case of “Politician,” while the recorded tracks aren’t bad, strange but interesting. And defiantly uncommercial, except in the case of “Badge,” which is a good thing in my book. Thanks to the LP Cream definitely went out with its freak flag flying, and that’s a good thing too.
That said, nothing on Goodbye changes my opinion of Cream, which I still think is the most overrated and over-hyped “supergroup” this side of CSN&Y, which is a terrible charge to level at anyone. I still love the silver suits, though. I wish I had me one of them. I would wear it to court dates and the like. But they don’t make suits like that anymore, or bands like Cream anymore for that matter, and that’s a good thing.
Four Cream albums is at least three Cream LPs too many, and as bad a hype as successor supergroup Blind Faith got, at least they put out a couple of truly great songs like “Can’t Find My Way Home” and “Well All Right” and “Presence of the Lord.” Which is more than I can say about Cream, which could play like gangbusters but hadn’t a clue as to how to turn their virtuosity into great songs, and all I can say in closing is Goodbye, Cream, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C+
