The classic Cream song Jack Bruce thought invented punk
Cream never fitted comfortably in any rock genre. If anything, given the interplay between Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker as a rhythm section and the wild tangents they would go on with Eric Clapton whenever they played live, there’s a good argument to be made that they were just a loud jazz band during the first half of their career before going deeper into psychedelic rock. They were always looking ahead, though, and Bruce thought the song ‘NSU’ predicted where the world of hard rock would go with the punk revolution.
Punk may not have been invented as an aesthetic by the mid-1960s, but half of the band could have been considered punks by the day’s standards. Bruce and Baker were never known to be diplomatic towards each other, and the amount of fights that went down sometimes onstage is the kind of behaviour that most would expect out of a hardcore band.
When Cream was first getting started, there was a good chance that Bruce wasn’t even going to be in the band. Clapton and Baker had the idea of putting a group together, but Baker hesitated at even bringing Bruce in, thinking that he was going to be in for another massive blowup the minute they started playing.
While those kinds of blowups most definitely happened, they could at least put their boxing gloves down when it was time to play. Compared to the laughable attempt at making a pop song on ‘Wrapping Paper’, ‘I Feel Free’ was at least closer to what the band were aiming for: a delightful pop song with a bit of a sinister streak behind it.
The album was where they were going to do their real damage, and ‘NSU’ is the sound of them just starting to gel with each other. While there’s hardly any pop song structure, the track relies on sheer force half the time, introducing the world to Bruce’s booming voice as Clapton channels his old Yardbird licks into his new band.
Discussing the construction of the song, Bruce compared the track’s intensity to what punks would be doing years later, saying in Cream: The Legendary Sixties Supergroup, “It was like an early punk song… the title meant ‘non-specific urethritis’. It didn’t mean an NSU Quickly – which was one of those little 1960s mopeds. I used to say it was about a member of the band who had this venereal disease. I can’t tell you which one… except he played guitar”.
Though the real proto-punks wouldn’t come for a few more months with The Stooges and The Velvet Underground making waves, Cream were at least on the cusp of punk rock. They may not have had the neaderthalic approach that most punk acts brought to their instruments, but the idea of making a song for the sake of making the most abrasive noise possible is one of the first commandments in the punk rock bible.
Then again, any punk band could probably never touch what the power trio could do onstage. Outside of their blues roots, the band’s experimentation with every genre under the sun meant that everyone was playing at the top of their game every time they took to the stage. Whereas punk was about playing with as much fury as possible, Cream never sacrificed their musicianship when it came time to kick things into gear.