The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  Yeah. At a certain point we started getting package tours, with the Ronettes, Billy J. Kramer, the Kinks, the Small Faces, lots of others, and we lost our following in the clubs. We decided to get suits, and I actually designed suits for us all. Then we did the Beatles’ Christmas show, and at that point we really began to feel the lack of a hit. We’d be on for twenty minutes or half an hour, and either you were very entertaining or you did your hits. A lot of times the raveup bit got us through, and a lot of times it didn’t. It became very clear that if the group was going to survive and make money, it would have to be on a popular basis. We couldn’t go back to the clubs, because everyone had got that taste and seen what fun it would be to be famous.

  So a lot of songs were bandied about, and Giorgio [Gromelsky, Yardbirds manager] came up with a song by Otis Redding. I thought that would make a great single because it was still R&B and soul, and we could do it really funky. Then Paul [Samwell-Smith, Yardbirds bassist] got the “For Your Love” demo, and he heard it with harpsichord. Whoa, harpsichord. Where does that leave me? Twelve-string guitar, I suppose. So we went in the studio to do both songs, but we did “For Your Love” first. Everyone was so bowled over by the obvious commerciality of it that we didn’t even get to do the Otis Redding song, and I was very disappointed, disillusioned by that. So my attitude within the group got really sour, and it was kind of hinted that it would be better for me to leave. ’Cause they’d already been to see Jeff Beck play, and at the time he was far more adaptable than I was. I was withdrawing into myself, becoming intolerable, really, dogmatic. So they kind of asked me to leave, and I left and felt a lot better for it.

  Is this the time when you did nothing but practice every day for a year? Or is that story apocryphal?

  Well, it wasn’t a year, it was only a few months. I had never really practiced seriously, just practiced as I worked, until I got edged out of the Yardbirds. Then I went up to Oxford to stay with Ben Palmer, who had played piano in the Roosters and was a close friend, and during that time I began to think seriously about playing blues. And then while I was there, I got a call from John Mayall, who’d heard I was serious, if you like, and not money orientated or popularity orientated, and he asked me to come and audition, or just come around and play. I got the job, and I actually got to feel like I was a key member of that band from the minute I walked in. Right away, I was choosing material for the band to do.

  And Mayall went along with this? He has a reputation for being kind of autocratic.

  Well, I think in me he met a soul mate who liked the same things. With the guitarist he’d had before, he hadn’t been able to do certain numbers he wanted to do—the Otis Rush songs, for example, which I really wanted to do. We were really together on that.

  Otis Rush is very intense. What did you think when you first heard him?

  I always liked the wilder guys. I liked Buddy Guy, Freddie King and Otis Rush because they sounded like they were really on the edge, like they were barely in control and at any time they could hit a really bad note and the whole thing would fall apart—but, of course, they didn’t. I liked that a lot more than B.B. I got into B.B. later, when I realized that polish was something, too.

  You were with Mayall for a while and then, before making the ‘Bluesbreakers’ album, you left to go to Greece. What was that all about?

  I was living in a place with some pretty mad people—great people, really. We were just drinking wine all day long and listening to jazz and blues, and we decided to pool our money, buy an estate wagon and take off round the world. The job with Mayall had become a job, and I wanted to go have some fun as well. So we ended up in Greece, playing blues, a couple of Rolling Stones songs, anything to get by. We met this club proprietor who hired us to open for a Greek band that played Beatles songs.

  I was stuck there, with this Greek band. A couple of weeks of that, and I escaped somehow, headed back up here.

  When I got back with Mayall, Jack Bruce was on bass, and we hit it off really well. Then he left to go with Manfred Mann, and Mayall got John McVie back. I decided that playing with Jack was more exciting. There was something creative there. Most of what we were doing with Mayall was imitating the records we got, but Jack had something else—he had no reverence for what we were doing, and so he was composing new parts as he went along playing. I literally had never heard that before, and it took me someplace else. I thought, well, if he could do that, and I could, and we could get a drummer . . . I could be Buddy Guy with a composing bass player. And that’s how Cream came about.

  But before that happened, you made the ‘Bluesbreakers’ album, which really has become a classic. How do you feel about it now?

  At the time, I just thought it was a record of what we were doing every night in the clubs, with a few contrived tiffs we made up kind of as afterthoughts, to fill out some of the things. It isn’t any great achievement. It wasn’t until I realized that the album was actually turning people on that I began to look at it differently.

  Were you already thinking about starting Cream, or at least starting a band with Jack Bruce?

  Well, after I had the experience of meeting and playing with Jack, the next thing that happened was that Ginger Baker came to this John Mayall gig. We’d worked the same circuits as the band Ginger was in, the Graham Bond Organisation, and I’d liked their music, except it was too jazzy for me—the jazz side of Ray Charles, Cannonball Adderley, that’s what they were playing. But then Ginger came backstage after this Mayall gig and said to me, “We’re thinking of breaking up, and I like the way you play. Would you like to start a band?” I said, “Yeah, but I’d have to have Jack Bruce as well,” and he kind of backed off that. It turned out that he and Jack were really chemically opposite, they were just polarized, always getting into fights. But we talked some more, and then we had a meeting at Ginger’s house, where he and Jack immediately had an argument. I had no foresight whatsoever; I didn’t think it was really serious. I left Mayall pretty soon after that.

  What were your original ideas for Cream? You became known for those long jams, but on your first album, ‘Fresh Cream,’ there was a lot of country blues and other songs, all of them pretty compact.

  I think our ideas about what we were supposed to be were pretty abstract. At first, I was throwing in Skip James and Robert Johnson songs, Jack was composing and Ginger was composing. The American thing with “flower power” was filtering over, and I started seeing us as the London version of all that. I had an idea of how we could look good as well as be a good band. We were just scrambling for the forefront, and we didn’t get much feedback until we played in front of an audience. That was when we realized that they actually wanted to go off somewhere. And we had the power to take them.

  I heard Cream play one night at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, on your first trip over to the U.S. It was really loud—big stacks of amps in this little room! And you’d go off into these twenty-minute jams. I wasn’t really aware that Jack and Ginger had such strong jazz backgrounds, but it did seem like they were going off into a much freer thing and sort of playing around your blues, which was like the music’s backbone. Were you comfortable in that role?

  Very occasionally, when my purist side got the better of me, I might get a little insecure. But if you think about it, if I had formed a trio, say, with a blues drummer and a blues bass player, we would have gone on imitating, as I had been doing with John Mayall. I would never have learned how to play anything of my own. In Cream, I was forced to try and improvise; whether I made a good job of it a lot of the time is debatable.

  The three of us were on the road all the time, trusting one another, living in one another’s hearts, and I found I was giving, you know, more than I had ever done before, and having faith in them. Jack is such a musical genius, there was no way he could be wrong about anything. I had to trust these people, so I did, I went with it. Of course, when we got back to our hotel rooms, we would all be listening to something different. And then I would
sometimes have doubts, because a part of me still wanted to duplicate. That’s the fear, you know, the fear of actually expressing and being naked.

  There seems to have been a change in your listening tastes between the recording of ‘Fresh Cream’ and the second album, ‘Disraeli Gears.’ You started using some effects, like wah-wah, and you must have been very impressed by Albert King, because your solos on “Strange Brew” and several other songs were really pure Albert.

  The big change was that Hendrix had arrived. Cream was playing at London Polytechnic, a college, and a friend brought this guy who was dressed up really freaky. This was Jimi. He spent a lot of time combing his hair in the mirror. Very cute but at the same time very genuine and very shy. I took to him straightaway, just as a man. Then he asked if he could jam, and he came up and did “Killing Floor,” the Howlin’ Wolf tune. And it blew me away. I was floored by his technique and his choice of notes, of sounds. Ginger and Jack didn’t take to it kindly. They thought he was trying to upstage me. But I fell in love, straightaway. He became a soul mate for me and, musically, what I wanted to hear.

  We were hanging out in some London clubs not long after that, and we started listening to the singles Stax was putting out by Albert King. We were both very, very attracted by that.

  Even after you’d been hanging out with Hendrix, your playing and his were still really different.

  He was the leader of his band, and that was that. What I felt with Cream was that I owed it to the other two not to try and dominate too much, even though I did. Apart from that, I didn’t—and still don’t—like to rely on effects that I can’t create myself. It’s what you’re going to play that matters.

  This was the period when you ascended to godhood.

  All during Cream I was riding high on the “Clapton is God” myth that had been started up. I was flying high on an ego trip; I was pretty sure I was the best thing happening that was popular. Then we got our first kind of bad review, which, funnily enough, was in Rolling Stone [RS 10, May 11, 1968, by Jon Landau]. The magazine ran an interview with us in which we were really praising ourselves, and it was followed by a review that said how boring and repetitious our performance had been. And it was true! The ring of truth just knocked me backward; I was in a restaurant and I fainted. And after I woke up, I immediately decided that that was the end of the band.

  There toward the end, we’d been flying with blinkers for so long, we weren’t aware of the changes that were taking place musically. New people were coming up and growing, and we were repeating ourselves, living on legend, a year or two years out of date.

  We didn’t really have a band with Cream. We rarely played as an ensemble; we were three virtuosos, all of us soloing all the time.

  You must have been in an acid phase toward the end of Cream. Some of the playing had that sort of . . . flavor.

  Yeah, we did a lot of acid, took a lot of trips, in our spare time. And we did play on acid a couple of times.

  There are still plenty of people around who think Cream was rock’s absolute zenith. A lot of what’s now called heavy metal came out of stuff you were doing, by way of Led Zeppelin. What can you say to those people?

  You have to move on.

  I know you haven’t had much good to say about Blind Faith, but I actually think the album holds up really well.

  Well, there was a lack of direction in Blind Faith, or a reticence to actually declare among ourselves where we were going. Because it seemed to be enough just to be making the money, and that wasn’t good; the record company and the management had taken over. I felt that it was too soon for Steve [Winwood]. He was feeling uncomfortable, and since it had originally been my idea, I was uncomfortable. I started looking for somewhere else to go, an alternative, and I found that Delaney and Bonnie [Bramlett] were a godsend. After the Blind Faith tour, I lived with Delaney for a while.

  The first night we met, we were in New York, and we went down to Steve Paul’s club, the Scene, and we took acid. From there we went to see Mac Rebennack [Dr. John] and hung out in his hotel room, and then we went back to our hotel, to one of the rooms, his or mine. And Delaney looked straight into my eyes and told me I had a gift to sing and that if I didn’t sing, God would take it away. I said, “No, man, I can’t sing.” But he said, “Yes, you can. Hit this note: Ahhhh . . .” And it was suddenly like the most impossible thing I could do was to hit that note, because of the acid. So it quavered, but I did hit it, and I started to feel that if I was to gain his respect, I ought to really pursue this. That night we started talking about me making a solo album, with his band.

  Didn’t you sing back when you were playing folk blues for the beatniks?

  Yeah, I started singing in the pubs, but I had a very weak voice. I still have a small voice, ’cause I have no diaphragm to speak of. Then I sang a couple of backup things with the Yardbirds, but that was it. Most of the time, I concentrated on the guitar. Which is a shame, ’cause maybe I’d have been better if I’d managed to balance out the singing and playing at an earlier stage of my career.

  Sounds like Delaney, being from Mississippi, got into a Baptist-preacher bit to get you singing again. So what happened after the Blind Faith tour? Did you start working on the solo album?

  No, first of all we did a tour of England and Europe, as Delaney and Bonnie and Friends with Eric Clapton. And having got me to sing, Delaney started trying to get me to compose, as well. So we were writing a lot. And that was great. He’d start something off, and when I came up with the next bit, he’d say, “Look what you can do.” Some of the time I think it was so he could get fifty percent of the songwriting, but it was also inspiring me. By the end of that tour, I was ready to make the album and felt very sure of myself.

  Why did you go to Miami to record ‘Layla’?

  The attraction was Tom Dowd. I’d worked with him in Cream, and he was to me—and still is—the ideal recording man.

  Yeah, he engineered all those great early Atlantic R&B and soul sessions and practically invented stereo.

  Right. And he can guide you in a very constructive way. So we got there, we were doing a lot of dope and drinking a lot and just partying. It was great times. After about a week of jamming, I wanted to go hear the Allman Brothers, who were playing nearby, because I’d heard Duane Allman on Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude,” and he blew me away with that. After the concert I invited him back to the studio, and he stayed. We fell in love, and the album took off from there.

  The first time I ran into you was during those sessions at Criteria Recording Studios. There was a lot of dope around, especially heroin, and when I showed up, everyone was just spread out on the carpet, nodded out. Then you appeared in the doorway in an old brown leather jacket, with your hair slicked back like a greaser’s, looking like you hadn’t slept in days. You just looked around at the wreckage and said, to nobody in particular, “The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled.” And then you split.

  Yeah. We were staying in this hotel on the beach, and whatever drug you wanted, you could get it at the newsstand; the girl would just take your orders. We were on the up and the down, the girl and the boy, and the drink was usually Ripple or Gallo. Very heavy stuff. I remember Ahmet [Ertegun, chairman of Atlantic Records] arriving at some point, taking me aside and crying, saying he’d been through this shit with Ray [Charles], and he knew where this was gonna end, and could I stop now. I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. This is no problem.” And, of course, he was dead right.

  I guess you have to work that stuff out for yourself.

  I don’t know about that. When I started using [heroin], George [Harrison] and Leon [Russell] asked me, “What are you doing? What is your intention?” And I said, “I want to make a journey through the dark, on my own, to find out what it’s like in there. And then come out the other end.” But that was easy for me to say, because I had a craft, music, that I could turn to. For people who don’t have that, there’s a lot of danger; if y
ou haven’t got something to hold on to, you’re gone. It’s no good just saying, “Well, that person is gonna go through it, no matter what.” You’ve actually got to stop them and try to make them think.

  The music you and Duane got into on ‘Layla’ was really special, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Did you tour after you finished recording?

  Not with Duane, of course, but the Dominos did a very big tour of America. We copped a lot of dope in Miami—a lot of dope—and that went with us. Then I met up with this preacher from New York who was married to one of the Ronettes, and he asked if he could come along on part of the tour. The spiritual part of me was attracted to this man, but he immediately started giving me a very hard time about the dope. I felt very bad about this, and after the first week on the road I put everything I had in a sack and flushed it down the loo. Then, of course, I was going to the other guys, trying to score off them.

  By the end of the tour, the band was getting very, very loaded, doing way too much. Then we went back to England, tried to make a second album, and it broke down halfway through because of the paranoia and the tension. And the band just . . . dissolved. I remember to this day being in my house, feeling totally lost and hearing Bobby Whitlock pull up in the driveway outside and scream for me to come out. He sat in his car outside all day, and I hid. And that’s when I went on my journey into the smack. I basically stayed in the house with my girlfriend for about two and a half years, and although we weren’t using any needles, we got very strung out. All that time, though, I was running a cassette machine and playing; I had that to hold on to. At the end of that period I found I had boxes full of playing, as if there was something struggling to survive.