Disco de Cream: “Live Cream [Remaster]”

This recording was one of the first I have heard of Eric Clapton. His performance on this recording is exemplary. Although most of us are probably most familiar with his work on "From the Cradle" and the single "Tears in Heaven", Cream is a point in time of Eric's career that any Clapton fan would most likely find enjoyment from listening with an open ear. The music is much heavier than anything he has done since those times(1966-1968). He teams up with Jack Bruceon vocals, bass, and harmonica and Ginger Baker on drums. These gentlemen were highly regarded jazz musicians on the the London Scene in the mid-sixties. When listening to these recordings, done live at various venues in the States in March of 1968, one will see the high energy and explosive inventiveness in Clapton's playing that has not been heard in any of his other groups. Bruce and Baker push him to experiment with tone, phrasing and volume. His solo on "Sleepy Time Time" is especially juicy and "Sweet Wine" is a nearly 17-minute journey into the then-uncharted territory of jazz-rock. Other recommendations for live Cream include "Wheels of Fire" (Crossroads, Spoonful), "Goodbye" (live versions of Sittin on top of the World, Politician and I'm so Glad), and , if available, Live at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit (Oct 1967) is an example of Cream at their highpoint with Clapton experimenting with feedback techniques ala Hendrix.

This is quite simply the greatest live album ever made. Astonishing performances of great songs, wonderfully recorded and mixed. From the opening notes of NSU to the crescendo close of Sweet Wine, the sonic attack never lets up for a second.

Jack, Eric and Ginger were like three racehorses desperate to cut loose from the gate. The nature of their musical relationship has to be unique in music history. All three having huge competitive egos, they were still totally, absolutely in sync at this magical moment in the short life of Cream. The resulting combined firepower is breathtaking; no wonder no other band wanted to be on the same bill. Clapton is simply phenomenal, and he is by far the weakest of the three musically. Bruce and Baker take the creative spirit to another level, completely free of cliche or repetition.

The heart of the matter is Sweet Wine, essentially a throwaway tune from the first album. Here it is the launch pad for the most complex, evolving, intuitive improvisation in the history of electric music. 35 years later, this music continues to shock and awe and astonish. Play it as loud as you can physically stand it.

Cream was at its best live - and it's such a pity that live recording was just emerging from its infancy when these tracks were caught. But even through the murk of my cheap stereo speakers back when I first placed this bit of vinyl on my turntable back in '71, I was astonished. If you are a musician or an instrumentalist, it's hard not to let your jaw drop at the effortless way these three men played together. While every music critic likes to prattle on about the live version of "Crossroads" epitomizing Cream, it's easy to make a case that "Sleepy Time Time" surpasses the old Robert Johnson tune in terms of a performance. Clapton's notes sometimes wait until the last possible moment to sound making you sit on the edge of your seat, his Firebird sounding full and crisp. Jack Bruce plays brilliant counterpoint, when he's not actually taking the lead on passages. And there's Ginger Banker, at times restrained and at times a mad man - but always on point. When I heard that this set had been remasterd for digital audio, I knew I had to have a copy.

This is undoubtedly Cream's best with Volume II a close second. It is also very possibly the best rock album ever. Live rock albums are usually noisy and a bit off key with a lot of screaming fans but this is the exception. Incredible riffs and improvisation with unparalled power and technical mastery, far more satisfying than any of their fine studio albums. Thirty years of enjoying this album and it still gives me goosebumps. Very intense and highly recommended.

Cream's dichotomy boiled down to this: In the studio, they graduated from a blues trio restless with the constrictions of most British blues of their day to a group of equally restless pop and rock experimenters not unlike the Yardbirds. (Irony of ironies: it was that group's move toward both more accesible pop and more post-blues experimentation precisely that prodded Eric Clapton to leave that group in the first place in favour of a career-making term with John Mayall.) In concert, they earned a reputation for freewheeling, collective improvisation still grounded in the blues but approaching free jazz without crossing entirely into that subgenre's frequent chaos. The former at its best created best-selling albums from which a hit single or three was almost entirely incidental; the latter created an impression that, depending upon whom you listened to, was either transcendental or pretentious.

Revisionist critics---including, occasionally, the members of Cream themselves---fault the trio for excess and self-indulgence in their improvisational extensions, and it's easy to understand why: three virtuosi giving reign to the fullest of their imaginations, under the pressure of one-night-stand touring that isn't always conducive to genuine inspiration, collding with the pressure of a pair of clashing egos and personalities (bassist Jack Bruce, drummer Ginger Baker) roiling a third personality (guitarist Eric Clapton) who ended up becoming a kind of referee between the two while coming to terms with his musical inclinations versus his unexpected international elevation. (It was one thing to be called God, as he was during his days with the Mayall group, but it was something else to be treated like one.) But at their absolute best, Cream accomplished what a lot of their contemporaries merely stabbed at doing on stage, earning intense adulation merely for showing up and playing their instruments (showmen they were not), and if they could be guilty of self-indulgent jamming at the expense of genuine musical expression, they at least had popular music's best interest at heart and, on their best nights, presented genuine possibilities for reimagining the blues and rock (they were the no-questions-asked inventors of the power trio, for one thing, a distinction they may not have sought overtly) that less worthy successors would turn into hamburger.

On the first of two live collections assembled after their split in late 1968, drawn almost entirely from selections that were part of their first studio album, it's the best of what earned their concert reputation for the most part. This is so especially for "Sweet Wine," an almost nondescript selection from their first studio album that becomes, here, as textbook a case as you'd want for what was so overwhelmingly impressive about the trio's improvisational style in the first place. You had to wait until side two on the original vinyl release to get there, but there's an ebb and flow in which the three players' dynamics, melodic sense, harmonic dextrousness, and synchronicity never flag, even in the more restrained passages, so much so that you almost forget there was an ensemble vocal verse to open and close. Baker here is as colouristic a percussionist as his reputation long suggested, Bruce is a second lead instrument without leaving the bottom to sink out of hearing, and Clapton draws on practically his entire store of the blues to spin a series of fluid, melodious lines that float and soar with striking passion and lyricism. (In other words, Cream achieves here what they merely tried to reach in the extension of "Spoonful" that highlighted the live half of "Wheels of Fire.") "Sleepy Time Time," from the same studio premiere, is as luminous a pure blues expression as the trio ever delivered, from the playful laziness of the lyric to the gripping thrust and cry of the playing. The early Muddy Waters highlight "Rollin' and Tumblin'" in their studio hands amounted to a tank gone berserk, with Baker particularly as the big gunner; here, before a concert audience, the tank isn't going berserk so much as it's cutting a deliberate swath. Clapton's shape-shifting rhythm guitar playing (as on the studio cut, Bruce dispenses with his bass entirely, while Clapton exercises variations on the core riff as though he's a second percussionist as well as a guitarist) and Baker's polyrhythmic rumbling clear, not bludgeon Bruce's route for a round of crisp if occasionally exhausted-sounding harmonica and a particularly fiery vocal.

"NSU," which kicks the set off, is probably the only genuinely weak point---it launches at full power and tries to stay there, but about four minutes in you begin to sense the trio trying to prime the pump a little too anxiously; it's as though they fired their guns furiously and forgot to account for replenishment ammunition, going from there mostly to survival mode and seeming relieved when they come away in one piece. If you want recorded evidence of Clapton's eventual recollection that inspiration isn't easy to come by night after night after night, you'd be hard pressed to find more acute evidence than this.

Anomalously, the set includes a studio cut, Clapton's rework of an ancient blues, "Lawdy Mama," into the foundation that ended up becoming the superior "Strange Brew" with a little help from Felix Pappalardi and Gail Collins. As a foundation it's not half bad, but archival and bootleg recordings since have suggested it developed away from the shuffle the guitarist originally devised for the song. As the gestation of one of Cream's most enduring studio recordings, it's an interesting listen (especially for the very different bass line, if not for Clapton's almost hesitant guitar break), but on a live album it's something along the line of fitting a sports car with a taxicab engine.