Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 104

Record label: Reaction (UK) Atco (US)

Produced: Felix Pappalardi

Recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York; May 8–19, 1967

Released: November 1967

Chart peaks: 5 (UK) 4 (US)

Personnel: Eric Clapton (g, v); Ginger Baker (d); Jack Bruce (b, v); Tom Dowd (e)

Track listing: Strange Brew (S); Sunshine Of Your Love; World Of Pain; Dance The Night Away; Blue Condition; Tales of Brave Ulysses (S); SWLABR; We’re Going Wrong; Outside Woman Blues; Take It Back; Mother’s Lament

Running time: 31.00

Current CD: Polydor 9819312 is a mono version and stereo version of the album plus outtakes, demos and BBC sessions over two discs

Further listening: Fresh Cream (1966); Wheels Of Fire (1968); Goodbye (1969); or the whole shebang on Those Were The Days (1997)

Further reading: Strange Brew (Chris Welch, 1988); Lost In The Blues (Harry Shapiro, 1992); Edge Of Darkness (Chris Sandford, 1994); http://twtd.bluemountains.net.au/cream/contents.htm(fan site); www.cream2005.com (official reunion site)

Download: HMV Digital; iTunes

On March 25, 1967, Cream arrived in New York for their first trip to America, performing I Feel Free and I’m So Glad five times a day for ten days on Murray The K’s pop show. With three days left on their visas, they went into Atlantic Studios to record their follow-up album to Fresh Cream.

Released in December 1966, Fresh Cream was a relatively straight-ahead homage to Eric Clapton’s blues influences, covering the songs of Robert Johnson, Skip James and Muddy Waters. But Disraeli Gears was a very different proposition for three reasons. The first was the flowering of the Bruce/Brown co-writing partnership. Nearly half the album is credited to them, including enduring Cream classics such as Sunshine Of Your Love and Tales Of Brave Ulysses. Of the former, Jack Bruce recalls: ‘Pete and I had been up all night trying to write stuff and getting nowhere. I started playing this riff. Pete was looking out the window and said, “It’s getting near dawn, and lights closed their tired eyes …”’

In addition, in Felix Pappalardi they found a producer who understood Cream in a way their manager and producer of Fresh Cream, Robert Stigwood, never would. Pappalardi’s tasteful production and Tom Dowd’s sensitive engineering brought Clapton’s new Hendrix-inspired tone and effects to the fore. Pappalardi was also an excellent musician and writer himself, credited along with his wife Gail Collins with Strange Brew and World Of Pain (a tragically ironic title, as Collins was to shoot her husband dead in 1983).

Finally, there was the influence of LSD. Songs like She Was Like A Bearded Rainbow (SWLABR) weren’t conceived on cups of tea. During a conversation about racing bikes, instead of saying ‘derailleur gears’, roadie Mick Turner said something else. It became the title of Cream’s landmark excursion into a sometimes whimsical interpretation of psychedelic blues, gift-wrapped in an equally famous riot of day-glo colour by Martin Sharp, encapsulating its acid-drenched mood. Right album, right place, right time.

Disraeli Gears broke the band in the States, with Sunshine Of Your Love (its war-dance rhythm suggested to Ginger Baker by Tom Dowd) becoming Atlantic’s biggest-selling single. The album reveals Cream at their most cohesive: from then on, the pressure of touring, resentments over writing royalties and the resurgence of animosities between Bruce and Baker led to their inevitable break-up just a year after this album’s release.