46 yrs ago Today a double album by Cream Wheels of Fire was released. In 2003, the album was ranked number 203 on Rolling Stone magazines list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. When Cream released Wheels of Fire, they had established themselves as the premier blues-rock band due to the success of their first two albums and the extraordinary chemistry between the bands members. As a result of this synergy, Cream also enjoyed a fiery live reputation. This double album represents both sides of Creams musical personality. The first record is a studio job, where the band mixes originals with covers of Howlin Wolf (Sitting on Top of the World) and Albert King (Born Under a Bad Sign). The songs written by the band all contain unique touches. As You Said finds Jack Bruce swapping his bass for a cello, Pressed Rat and Warthog sounds like an English folk tale courtesy of Ginger Bakers clipped recitation and the inclusion of baroque horns, and the classic White Room overflows with waves of Eric Claptons wah-wah-drenched guitar. The second record was recorded over a four-day span at San Franciscos Winterland and Fillmore West. Extended versions of Toad and Willie Dixons Spoonful demonstrate the bands intricate interplay, but most impressive is a blistering reading of Robert Johnsons Crossroads, in which all three members seem to be soloing simultaneously in a jaw-dropping display of fury and bravado. How Cream made Wheels of Fire... by Felix Pappalardi .............. Wheels Of Fire” by Cream was never really a planned album. While Eric, Jack and Ginger talked about ideas in England, I discussed it with Ahmet Ertugen and Jerry Wexier at Atlantic. I wanted a double album right from the beginning and it was my job to sell that idea. Nobody was high on it. When I finally convinced everyone of the double album, Cream told me they had been wanting the same thing. Next step was helping choose material and arranging it for the final stages. With Cream this job is particularly important because most of their songs are never played until they come into the studio. It’s very weird. The music is never discussed. It just happens. We cut the first things for the album in December 1967. We did the instrumental tracks for “White Room,” and “Born Under A Bad Sign.” They had a couple of days off during their U.S. tour so we booked studio time to get something down. Then they came back two months later for ten days and we completed the entire studio album. We liked the track to “White Room” but Jack didn’t like the vocal and Eric didn’t like his guitar playing. I did a rough mix and brought it over to England for them to hear. This is where an important turn occurred. Cream told me that the only time they ever get together for rehearsal is when Im around which is another strange thing. Anyway, while I was in England we met at Jacks house every night at seven oclock. One night I was playing bass, Jack played a baritone horn, Ginger was playing these giant maracas and Eric was playing acoustic guitar. Eric was showing us a new tune he’d just written called Anyone For Tennis. What happened that night went into the ‘Tennis” single and the “Savage Seven” album. It was a new thing for Cream and it just happened. Like “Politician” has a rhythm guitar and two overdubbed floating guitars. They crisscross from right to left in stereo. Eric wanted that and it worked. He wanted it on “Sitting On Top Of The World, too, but it didn t work there, so I changed it. I found it was very annoying. On “As You Said” Jack is recorded five times. On “Pressed Rat and Wart Hog” Jack plays two basses. The second bass comes in at the end and it’s a six string. Eric’s on three times. I’m on twice with trumpet and tonette. When I played tonette, Jack played recorder. There’s a lot of other examples too. All the songs had finished lyrics when they came into the studio except “Pressed Rat.” We changed one line In that on the spur of the moment. Ginger writes a lot of poetry and a lot of it’s like “Pressed Rat and Wart Hog,” really groovy. Ginger wanted to fly his daughter Nettie over to recite that, but we didn’t have time. She knows that whole poem by heart. The whole studio album was completed before we did the live album. The more we got into the studio album the more necessary it became to do the live one. The studio stuff became very electric so I wanted the live Cream right there where you could get at it, Cream as a trio without the arranging and the electronics. I presented it to Atlantic in this exact way. At first it was going to be set up so you could buy one or the other and that led to a whole bunch of things. I stayed with Jack while I was there and we were always playing things to each other. We even purchased some new instruments and Jack picked up a cello. I had a viola and we wrote some pieces for them and played a lot trying to get our chops back. That came out of the clear blue, just an exchange of musicianship and personalities. So, the classical things you hear on the album are not all my doing. Jack has had as much classical training as I have. It’s not so much his cello playing as it is the literature he’s absorbed since his childhood. He is certainly a qualified musician and knows music thoroughly. So this classical influence was a dual effort. I also found that Ginger was into a lot of things I never knew before. He’s very classically oriented. Rhythmically he’s very African but melodically hes very classical. He writes like Vaughn Williams. Usually he collaborates with a guy named Mike Taylor. Everybody thinks that Ginger is just a drummer, but he’s much more. There are a lot of guys that work with Cream. Like Pete Brown collaborates on almost all of Jack Bruce’s songs. Mike Taylor is an ex- British jazz pianist with a strong classical background. Cream had done a lot of work on songs among themselves, but we made some changes in the studio too. Like on “Passing The Time,” nobody knew what instrumentation to use and it got bogged down. One night Ginger got me out of bed with a long distance phone call from England and played me the melody on an organ. That sound stayed in my head so when I finally saw him in the studio I called up a music shop and ordered a callope. Jack, who is a fantastic keyboard player, did the song on caliope and I played organ pedals. We got very excited over “Passing The Time” and finally completed it. It was beautiful. We had the freedom to do what we wanted without any planning. With incredible Tom Dowd running the tape, we could completely forget about the engineering and just concentrate on the music. The album got bogged down in a lot of places because Cream was working very hard on tour. They were tired and they just wanted to get away. The last thing we did on the studio album was the vocal track for “Those Were The Days.” Jack heard the tune six weeks later and he said, “Wow, what a groovy tune. I don’t think I know that one.” That’s how tired they were, We used every single track we made. We didn’t throw anything away. We approach tunes with a great deal of enthusiasm and thought so there isn’t any waste. There’s a lot of thought behind the tunes but very little chatter. We were thinking of putting brass on “Born Under A Bad Sign” but decided against it. Somebody at Atlantic took the Cream track when I wasn’t there and overdubbed some King Curtis horns. I didn’t like It, but I let Cream hear it and they didn’t like it either. I m glad It didn t work out because there are no studio musicians at all on this album. Id say we worked for a good two weeks on the studio album. Sometimes we’d work till four in the morning if It was cooking. Maybe only one guy was cooking so I’d send Jack and Eric home and just work with Ginger or percussion things. On “Deserted Cities Of The Heart” nobody was in the studio except Jack, his wife Janet, Tommy Dowd, myself and my wife, Call. It was Jack’s tune and he knew what he wanted. We just played cello and viola that night. We did lots of overdubbing which is one of the things that makes a great deal of difference between the art of recording and the art of a live performance. They are two separate things. This is why we wanted the two album set. COVER ART The cover art was created by Australian artist Martin Sharp who lived in the same building as Clapton, The Pheasantry in Chelsea. Sharp would go on to create the artwork to Creams next album Wheels of Fire and co-wrote the songs Tales of Brave Ulysses and the Savage Seven Theme Anyone for Tennis with Eric Clapton. The photography for the album was taken by Bob Whitaker who is known for the photography for several works by The Beatles including the controversial Yesterday and Today. The front cover consists of a psychedelic collage with the albums title centred and the band name below, surrounded by a floral arrangement. Martin Sharp was attempting to capture the sound of the music in the cover, which he describes as a warm florescent sound ______________________________________ ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW Cream is good at a number of things; unfortunately song-writing and recording are not among them. However, they are fantastic performers and excellent musicians. Their latest recording, Wheels of Fire, a two record set inside a silver jacket, proves all this. One record is subtitled In the Studio. The set begins with a Jack Bruce original, White Room, which is practically an exact duplication of Tales of Brave Ulysses from their Disraeli Gears album, including the exact same lines for guitar, bass and drums. The lyrics are not much to speak of and its very difficult to imagine why they would want to do this again, unless of course, they had forgotten that they had done it before. The Sonny Bono-ish production job adds little. Sittin On Top of the World, a Howlin Wolf song, is a fine slow blues, done much closer to the original than the speeded-up version by the Grateful Dead. The song is a good vehicle for Clapton, but thats about it. Wolfs ballad-style singing and melody is far superior to Bruces. (Those interested in comparisons might want to pick up Wolfs Real Folks Blues LP on the Chess label, and compare the two, and then compare that comparison to what the Electric Flag did with Wolfs Killing Floor, also on the same record. The Flag wins.) Passing the Time, a soft sad-circus tune with various instrumental paraphernalia thrown in, is a stone bore. The transition from verse to chorus is absolutely absurd. Ginger Baker stands out on glockenspiel. Of all of Jack Bruces compositions in this release, only one of them is good, As You Said. The structure is thoughtful and pleasant. Clapton is totally absent from this cut; Ginger Baker uses only his high hat and Bruce plays acoustic guitar and cello. The way they play back and forth with each other, each on the melody together, is musicianship worthy of their reputation. Pressed Rat and Warthog, a Ginger Baker poem recited to a good background of drum rolls and Claptons chording, is a track open to individual taste. Its nice, but not what you want to get the album for. The trumpet solos spoil whatever mood was trying to be evoked by their superfluousness and obviousness. It is unfortunate that the group chose to do Born Under a Bad Sign, that fine blues that Booker T. Jones wrote for Albert King. Kings guitar solo can hardly be improved, although Clapton does do it with his own style. The real mistake is that Jack Bruce doesnt have a good voice for blues, but he chooses to try it out on one that is currently popular in an exceptionally fine original version. His throaty breathing is just plain wrong. Ginger Baker also ought to learn that knocking on a cowbell and woodblock does not make a song funky. There is really only one good side to come out of the studio, and that is Politician, a track which really gets to the heart of Creams very real problem. Because only rarely do they have a good original song to work with, their standard procedure is to put a strong rhythum and chord structure behind it and sort of recite the lyrics, spoken almost rather than sung because there is no melody. The trouble with this studio LP is that confronted with this problem-and their predilection to use miserable originals rather than revive a good blues-they have chosen to add layers of superfluous instrumental work. This is particularly ironic in that Cream is the group that initiated the concept of a trio with only the three essential instruments really commanding a piece. What makes Politician the most successful is that, although it is not a song of much merit, they dont muddy it with a lot of meaningless studio garbage, but use the studio to overdub two more guitar parts. In Those Were the Days, half of it is studio garbage and the other half is the driving drum-bass-guitar combination. Disraeli Gears had this same problem of paucity of material. In that previous release they had three good originals, used a few good blues, and for the rest of it wailed with only three instruments, so that despite the lack of good original material, it was still fine listening. It took only four days to do Disraeli Gears from stem to stern, as their producer, Felix Papalardi, has put it, and several weeks for the studio work in their new release. Disraeli Gears was far better. Fortunately, however, the other record in this set is Live at the Fillmore where it was recorded several months ago. For one thing, it at least proves that you can do an excellent live recording of a rock and roll group (something, amazingly enough, none of the San Francisco groups have yet done, despite the popular belief that their sound is designed for live performances). By and large, the live performance is excellent. Jack Bruce is not very good with a harmonica and it amazes me why he plays it at all. His solo on Traintime is loudly amateurish. If they had dumped this cut and put in three of the studio sides (Sittin On Top of the World, As You Said and Politician), we would have one really fine record instead of a set that is one-3/4 good and two-1/4 mediocre. Toad is a fine number; the live performance is much better than the previously recorded studio version. Here Clapton really displays his superlative chording and rhythm abilities. Ginger Bakers long drum solo is pretty good, on the whole. His tendency to be sloppy is not evident, and he gets moving quickly and sustains the tension well (though he nearly loses it once when he seems to have momentarily choked and come out of it with a few repetitive minutes). The really fine side of this whole business is the one with Crossroads and Spoonful. This is where Cream really shines because it is where they are at: live, without superfluity of any kind, and into the blues. Clapton is a much better blues singer than Bruce, and his vocal on Crossroads is a relief. The tune is Claptons showpiece, and he does it just like hes supposed to. Its far and away the best cut on the album. Spoonful only really gets going about a third of the way into it. The only criticism I have about this cut is that Jack Bruces bass-playing is much too busy when he should be the bottom of the sound. On the other hand, he and Clapton really move. The way they do it as a trio is excellent: Clapton and Bruce get going into their rolling and tumbling groove, making it madly through the record while Ginger Baker is playing vertically, walking along at just as mad a clip. This is the kind of thing that people who have seen Cream perform walk away raving about and its good to at last have it on a record. Anyway, the whole bundle comes in a double-fold packet with this exploding psychedelicized imitation Saul Steinberg (of the New Yorker) cartoon mural on the cover and a totally tasteless Ken Kesey-ism on the inside. The album will be a monster. (RS14) ~ Jann S. Wenner (July 20, 1968) TRACKS: Disc one: In the Studio Side one 1. White Room (Jack Bruce, Pete Brown) – 4:58 2. Sitting on Top of the World – 4:58 3. Passing the Time (Ginger Baker, Mike Taylor) – 4:37 4. As You Said (Bruce, Brown) – 4:20 Side two 1. Pressed Rat and Warthog (Baker, Taylor) – 3:13 2. Politician (Bruce, Brown) – 4:12 3. Those Were the Days (Baker, Taylor) – 2:53 4. Born Under a Bad Sign (Booker T. Jones, Bell) – 3:09 5. Deserted Cities of the Heart (Bruce, Brown) – 3:38 LP two: Side three 1. Crossroads (Robert Johnson, arr. Clapton) – 4:13 2. Spoonful (Willie Dixon) – 16:43 Side four 1. Traintime (Bruce) – 7:01 2. Toad (Baker) – 16:15
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:18:06 +0000
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