1967 at 50: DISRAELI GEARS CREAM

If you learned how to play guitar enough to play along to records in the '70s you knew about blues. Well, you knew about three chords in twelve bars that just kept circling around until the song ended. What you didn't know about were names like Robert Johnson or Howlin' Woolf because no one around you had any records by them because no one else knew about them either. What you played along to was pasty dialled boys from the south of England who did the three chord thang as though they'd come up with it. If you looked at the names in the brackets by the titles you saw a lot of difference and noticed that the few brackets that held names you knew belonged to some of the people on the record sleeve. You also knew that those songs sounded the same as the ones by the strangers. Later, when everything widened out, you might hear the real thing and if you weren't as disappointed with it as you were that wine didn't taste like strong cordial you are lying or you are rare. If you heard that stuff first it would have been different: Led Zeppelin's heavier take, The Stones' more opiod one or Hendrix's interstellar one would have sounded like exploration and Willie Dixon like a pioneer. But it didn't happen that way.

I first knew Cream as a band name only and it took years to finally hear the music. Eric Clapton in the mid-'70s was already a household god and you were meant to speak his name reverently even though at that time he just sounded old and flavourless to you. So when I borrowed Disraeli Gears from my brother Greg to see where the reputation came from I was gobsmacked.

A quick unceremonious titter on the drums and the razor sharp riffs of Clapton's overdriven Gibson with another lead overdubbed from the wailing corner of the fretboard. And it's Clapton's own falsetto that changes everything. I had heard at that stage too many hearty throated shouters sounding like note perfect eisteddfod acts and assumed all white blues was like that. In fact, I thought they all sounded like Jack Bruce from the few Cream songs I had heard on the radio. But Clapton keeps it in the eerie register of his lead licks, howling about a girl possessed by a wicked Strange Brew of forces. For once the coldness of white boy blues finds its purpose as a kind of whimper of fear like a dark ages monk seeing the demon in every village girl. Not siding with the monk but I can hear what he sees.

Sunshine of Your Love thrusts into gear as a distorted riff, scaffolded on the drums and given a banshee wail on the lead guitar. Jack Bruce's clear masculine vocal singing rises about his own dawn approach to the vessel of his lust. Clapton comes in, almost identical except that it becomes easy to tell Bruce's higher skill from his, and the two trade lines, seemingly about the same girl. A little poetry here but really it only has to sound and feel like sex itself. Here enters Ginger Baker's drumming which goes well against the norm by putting great expression on the toms and letting the odd breath through as the "waiting so long" lines tighten their grip. Clapton's howling solo appears from the shadows, not a million notes but a few well chosen and made of indestructible tone.

World of Pain kicks straight in without a riff but with a barely breaking guitar tone playing chords that seem to slowly shimmer. In fact it's a mix of very slight chord picking on the rhythm and restrained twanky wah on the lead, feeling both heavy and buoyant at once. Clapton's vocal in mournful through the lyric about trees in a stifling city and moves through a dirge of isolation in a pitiless world. Jack Bruce comes in for the chorus with a falsetto that has a strange church like sonority. Again the solo, slight and elegant emerges rather than storming in is almost indistinguishable from the vocals. The fade is similarly busy but stately, a procession of subdued wails and a kind of restless march on the tom toms.

Dance the Night Away kind of sounds like a latin seduction song but the words and instrumentation take a more psychedelic turn. For starters Clapton starts with the band on an electric twelve string (in fact a Fender XII) with a gorgeous minor key arpeggio. Jack Bruce joins in with Clapton in a falsetto harmony vocal for the rest of the song. But instead of seduction it's a kind of self-annihilation piece. After love oblivion which rings in with a strange tremolo solo from Clapton that ricochet's off the Byrds more recent outings and seems to soar through the grey heavens the narrator is imagining, like a mandolin possessed by Syd Barrett. Baker's drums again provide a tidal rise and fall without resort to stock fills or too much simple time playing. We lift with the song and if we listen we wonder why we should. But we do.

Next up is, we have to admit it, is the Ringo song. Blue Condition is a hardworking electric blues track that even I would happily hear  rather than just leave on but there's something in the way. Ginger Baker's vocal drags the entire exercise down through the floorboards. It's not his Lunnon accen'. You want to hear that working listen to the Kinks or the Small Faces. It's that he sounds as though he could'n care less about what always sounds like a well considered lyric. And he was the writer. He can't even sing his own blues. One of the extended releases of this album includes Clapton's vocal but while it is much more engaging it still falls. Maybe Ginger sang it at a practice, suggested it to Eric who didn't want to overdo it so perpetuated the absent mood of the vocal for evermore. Perhaps it's also how anyone who ever covers it also performs it. I suppose there are valid arguments for why it should be such an affectless drone but all I hear is a powerful electric blues betrayed by what sounds like indifference.

The old side two begins with restless wah wah chords  an ominous bass figure and a snakepit swirl of ride cymbals. Jack Bruce's dramatic room temperature vocal starts us off with images of legend and epic. Trhen the band kicks the door down with a weaponised wah wah descent from Clapton in unison with the bass. Over this ground Bruce's huge manly vocal lifts an octave as the band drives hard below. Repeat. That might seem dismissive given the classic status of this track but really with a band at such a peak repeating really means doing it more intensely on the next go. That's what happens here, artist Martin Sharp's Homeric lyric about Odysseus and the sirens, and travel and the epic of a life led boldly. Sharp designed the cover for the album, a psychedelic collage of mugshots, wings and fantastic creatures whose looks border between legendary and sinister. Sharp had the lyric which he showed to Clapton at the pub. Clapton folded it up, took it home and this song came forth. Still one of my favourites from the era with its urgent wah wah, big vocal and Bakers unconventional drumming.

SWLABR crashes to life with a riff made of bass in unison with an extremely distorted guitar. The tight riffing and rhythm and Bruce's wailing vocal charge to the stop/starts where he brings the psychedelic sexuality of the verses to a head with the dadaist image of a painting with a moustache or a rainbow with a beard. Is it sex? Is it tripping on acid? Is it sex while tripping on acid? With all the edibly crunchy guitar sounds and tongue-out vocal, do you care? Just turn it up.

We're Going Wrong begins with a slightly distorted electric 12 string playing a four chord sequence of immediate solemnity as Baker plays something between a funeral march and a medieval basse dance on the toms. Bruce comes in shifting from head voice to falsetto with a lament so plainly stated it feels like raw experience. Near the halfway mark Clapton enters with a banshee wail solo with his famous woman tone, a distorted guitar sound played high on the fretboard in emulation of a woman singing, in this case a woman singing a funeral dirge. It continues when Bruce's vocal returns, even more plaintive and hurt in full falsetto, answering his cries with its own pain until it seems too intense to continue and the song is brought to an end with a oddly out of place blues riff played in unison by bass and guitar as Baker puts the track to bed with some whispering cymbals.

Outside Woman Blues is a Clapton-penned blues in emulation of his influences. The lordy woman lyric is elevated by some judgement of the possessive and adulterous man at the centre. Otherwise, it's really a showcase for Clapton's layered guitars, heavily distorted but playing unison thirds and fifths in soloing and the strong riff of the piece. The song ends with a deftly rendered groan that could have come off any of the records he was so inspired by. Is it Clapton himself? Jack Bruce? It's Eric's vocal for the rest of the song but the styling is so studied and precise it's hard to say.

Take it Back is standard runkachunkasplunka boogie with harmonica and Clapton's wailing tone (and more electric 12 playing rhythm). An audience makes itself heard but sounds like it's in the studio. The rollicking gait of the piece obscures its anti conscription  message. Musically unloved by me but I'll leave it on.

Mother's Lament rounds off one of the most innovative electric blues records of its era with a throwaway joke song with wincabley forced Cockney accents, barber shop harmonies, carefully sloppy and pub piano playing. When I was a kid I loved this bit and would often play it again. These days I'll only leave it playing if I'm doing the washing up or something that would make it difficult to switch it off.

This was a peak for the power trio and the result of a timeline of decision and indesicion, and trial and error, that managed to find them concentrating on providing a record of their strengths as a musical unit aside from their spectacular live shows. Instead of following the culture by insisting on writing everything themselves they collaborated with anyone who brought good things to the table and fashioned songs that could exist without their playing and arrangements. Jimi Hendrix's debut album suffered from shortcomings in composition that, while absent from subsequent releases, makes Are You Experienced a lesser beast today than Electric Ladyland. But Cream found their own path in a kind of open architecture and an appreciation of the difference between what makes a good show and a good album. This record still sounds very, very fresh.