|
Erebus
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1834 Posts |
 Posted - 10/23/2007 : 23:00:49
|
Tonight I was listening to my Cream BBC disc and I remembered just how much Jack Bruce is neglected within the rock tradition. Cream was not just some Clapton stepping stone from the Yardbirds thru Mayall and Blind Faith toward the Dominoes and what has ensued. Cream was a Jack Bruce, not a Clapton, band, and I say that as a guy with twenty Clapton discs on the shelf.
Bruce was one of our rock innovators, from elsewhere, now way overly neglected within the tradition, apparently even more so with the passage of time. All you have to do is listen to “As You Said”, one of the quintessential acid-head, desert-island, tracks. Cream was a bass-driven, power trio, with some Ginger Baker, hardly any slouch, on the side. Almost all of the Cream compositions were either Bruce/Brown pieces or utterly Brucian blues revisitations. Cream was no accident except that it was necessarily of Bruce.
If you look back upon the sixties, with its biggy Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Who, Kinks, .... add whomever you want (I’m mostly gonna be cueing the Monks and Alvin Lee), Bruce brought something completely off the wall, as blues psychedlia. The man was a historical accident of culture and chemistry. He was one of those guys without whom rock might have been complete, except that without him we wouldn’t have had the same Led Zeppelin and the whole ensuing metal. I love Jack Bruce, and I applaud him, if only as one who is too often forgotten. Jack Bruce was a guy who was going sideways when everybody else was calling it top 40. Them were the days.
|
|
Jack Bruce
