Eric Clapton on the moment Cream began to split: “It was the beginning of the end”
Looking back, Eric Clapton didn’t really need to Cream to succeed. He had already become one of the most in-demand rock guitarists of all time, and putting him next to equally powerful musicians like Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce was just confirming to the rock world what they already knew. There was still room to grow in a power trio, but Clapton knew that once the band left the road, they were bound to disintegrate.
Then again, it’s not like the band were the best of friends once they started, either. Considering Baker and Bruce had already gotten into more than a few scuffles when working in The Graham Bond Organisation, they weren’t exactly going to be hanging out backstage having a smoke break with each other.
When they put down the boxing gloves, though, no one had heard anything like what the band were doing. There were blues bands around England, to be sure, but the psychedelic sounds of songs like ‘Strange Brew’ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ completely changed how people thought about volume in the clubs.
Together with a young guitarist from America named Jimi Hendrix, the band represented both what the psychedelic movement was going to look like. Clapton wasn’t just looking for an excuse to play as loud as he could. He wanted to be in a band that could sustain something bigger than just a trio, and by the end of their American tour for Disraeli Gears, they may as well have hung everything up.
When talking about that time in his autobiography, Clapton singled out this tour and the cause of the band’s demise, saying, “Musically, we were flying high, but once we stopped touring in America, it was the beginning of the end for Cream. Because once we started working in such an intense way, it became impossible to keep the music afloat, and we began to drown”.
For a band that seemed to be in their dying stages, though, you wouldn’t know for their next release, Wheels of Fire. Compared to Clapton’s comments, the band were in fine form from the minute they got into the studio, putting together songs that went beyond rock and roll altogether on ‘Pressed Rat and Warthog’ while also getting a boost from George Harrison on the single ‘Badge’.
This is also right before the band hit their stride on their cover of ‘Crossroads’, which may be one of the best blues covers ever. After the band recorded what they needed for their final album, Goodbye, it looked like Clapton got his wish in the next few years, slowly growing larger based on what band he was in.
If you notice how he changed in that short a timeframe, both Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes featured more people being added into the mix, finally giving Clapton the number of musicians to support the music he heard in his head. The power trio may have been one facet of what he could do, but Clapton wanted to build the equivalent of a rock and roll orchestra when he got onstage.