Peyer Edward ‘Ginger’ Baker was the first drummer who interested, intrigued and enthralled me as a musician. There was Keith who had a similarly busy, yet wilder style of drumming, and Mitch Mitchell who also had a jazz grounding and whose work with the Jimi Hendrix Experience was quite innovative and gave Hendrix a drum groove to work off that was not to many miles distant to what Baker was doing for Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce in Cream, and there was Ian Paice of Deep Purple, who played the first drum solo I ever heard (on Made in Japan), and later there was the ultimate, monolithic heaviness of John Bonham. Somewhere in the mid-Seventies, when I was in high school, a couple of my schoolmates kept insisting that Carl Palmer was the best drummer in the world, apparently simply because he’d won a drum poll in some rock publication. I wasn’t into Emerson, Lake & Palmer or prog rock in general, so I had no idea what Palmer sounded like and could care less. Some writers of the NME thought that the drummer of Chic was god, and of course there were always high praise for the Motown drummers and the best blues backbeat drummers To some, Ringo Starr is the most unsung, underrated rock drummer ever and Charlie Watts the absolute best rock drummer.
The list is probably endless. In every generation and in every genre there has been, are and will be superlative drummers, but there is only one Ginger Baker and he was the guy who made me listen to the drummer instead of just the lead guitarist, or any other instrumentalist for that matter, and showed me that drumming wasn’t just a matter of keeping time and holding a groove, but could be as captivating and rousing as any guitar solo, or as intricate as any other musical part.in a rock arrangement.
This epiphany came very specifically with the CD version of Cream’s Disraeli Gears(1967) album though this was by far not my introduction to the band or its recorded output. I’d read about Cream in The Story of Pop, a book-form publication of a part work and after a couple of years started buying the albums, first a double album version of the two Live Cream albums (which included a very long version of the drum solo feature, “Toad”), then Best of Cream, a German version of the debut album and, finally, the LP of Disraeli Gears.
In the early ‘90’s I began replacing the LPs with the digital versions and Disraeli Gearswas the first. Up to this point, I’d been most impressed by Eric Clapton’s guitar playing, as an obvious focal point for a guy who was into rock and blues guitar but had also taken note of Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker’s contributions as separate but equal building blocks in the Cream sound, but the digitalised, crystal clear mix of the Disraeli Gears CD was a mind blowing revelation when listened to over earphones.
I don’t know whether the Disraeli GearsLP had a mono mix, or whether the analogue mix simply forced the instruments into a denser whole comprised of three parts, but the CD mix provided one with am audibly clear distinction between the three instruments and now I could indeed pay attention to the drumming as an individual component of the ensemble and more or less ignore the guitar and bass while doing so, and this is where I truly appreciated what Ginger Baker was doing.
The style is one of energetic, restless, unfussy, driving polyrhythms that serves as much as an urgent persuasion in any tune as the bass or guitar do, and one can believe the explanation that the group played as three soloists rather than as rhythm section and lead instrument, as is the case in so much of rock. Baker, and I guess this is also true of Charlie Watts who has a completely different style of playing, always saw and described himself as a jazz drummer and approached his playing in Cream with that mindset. Even in the heaviest Cream material, such as “Sunshine of Your Love” or “Politician,” the deft dexterity of the Baker touch serves to mitigate what otherwise, in the hands of a lesser drummer, might have been ponderous, heavy sludge.
Baker’s playing contributes, along with Jack Bruce’s bass, to make the 2005 Cream reunion concerts halfway decent because they are the only members of the band that remain true to what Cream originally sounded like. Clapton’s guitars of choice and style of playing are nothing like what he sounded like with Cream and this drags down the performances to the level of a lead guitarist with a rhythm section. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in my appraisal of these concerts and the live album released in their wake, this version of Cream sounds like a Cream cover band. Because Baker always was, and is, a jazz drummer, his style didn’t change much over time, apart perhaps from constraints on energy caused by age, where Clapton’s approach and style certainly did. Clapton plays as well as ever but how he sounds now and how he plays doesn’t fit Cream anymore; Baker remained true to the initial impulse and spirit of Cream.
As songwriter, Beker’s contribution to Cream is much less successful or essential. Only `’Sweet Wine” (Fresh Cream) (1966) and “Pressed Rat and Warthog” (Wheels of Fire) (1968) have any merit. His other compositions on the Cream albums may be brilliant as jazz tunes but don’t work as rock songs because they lack the musical dynamism of the rest of the material, are rather boring and lyrically poor. Especially in the interviews conducted for the DVD release of the 2005 Royal `Albert Hall shows, Baker comes across as a truculent old curmudgeon, who still intensely dislikes Jack Bruce, and who is still hugely dissatisfied with his share of song writing royalties from the Cream period, partly because his practical contributions to popular tunes, in arrangements or riffs, aren’t recognised as being part of the song writing, and hence no song writing credits or royalties, and partly because Bruce (according to Baker) unfairly hogged the song writing, giving him, and Clapton to a degree, no chance contribute material and therefore making a ton of money and screwing Baker out of the opportunity to do the same.
However the income from Cream was divided, I believe that the split on song writing royalties, or Baker’s lack thereof, is probably about right going on the evidence of the tunes Baker did manage to get on the records. One would think these were the best and if they were the best, we’re far better off for having far more Bruce / Brown compositions (and the odd Clapton song) than Baker tunes. Even “Do What You Like” off Blind Faith(1969) is just a long, tedious dirge of a jam that doesn’t seem to have inspired the other guys in the band to put their backs into it.
Baker’s motto, in drum talk, seems to be “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” and he should just let his drums do the talking. Then there can be no challenging him.
I haven’t heard much of Baker’s work post Cream though I know of it, such as the big band Ginger Baker’s Air Force (of which I’ve viewed a couple of clips on YouTube), the work with Fela Anikulapo Kuti (I have the “live” album and the Felaalbum on which Baker plays), Baker-Gurvitz Army (of which I’ve viewed a couple of clips on YouTube), BBM, any of the jazz albums, or anything else for that matter, mostly because the other stuff represents music I don’t care for or seems no more than money making projects, much like the much vaunted Cream reunion of 2005, designed to provide Baker and Bruce with nest eggs, rather than Clapton whose career has ticked over nicely since Cream broke up.
I’m in two minds whether Ginger Baker is refreshingly forthright and honest about the good and bad in life, especially the bad, or whether he’s just a bitter old guy who, despite his undeniable talent, was incapable of fostering and nurturing a successful career in music, such as Clapton did, or being seen as a creative genius such as is the view of Bruce. Having said that, Baker’s views are entertaining and not necessarily wrong if not always PC.
After having lived in Nigeria for a couple of years, and floating around in the world after that, he settled on a farm outside Tulbagh in South Africa where he breeds (or bred) polo ponies and it’s a rather odd destination but there are worse places in the world to leave your hat. I should have made an effort, seeing as ow Tulbagh is not so far from Cape Town, to go see him and at least shake his hand or something, but I’d imagine there is no shortage of fan pilgrimages and he might not be keen on meeting the likes of me who cannot speak authoritatively about his life’s work, or just jazz in general, and is simply stuck on his work with Cream, which represents three years out of his life more than 50 years ago.
Those three years are arguably, in rock terms, the high point of his career and the source of fame on which the rest relied at least to certain extent, but for a progressive, creative musician that must be an albatross. Many “classic rock” bands make a lucrative living on the live circuit, playing their well-known hits to fans who don’t want to hear anything else. Though Clapton plays some Cream material and Jack Bruce seems to have enjoyed playing “Politician” with all and sundry, if the various YouTube clips are anything to go by, the blessing of Cream is that the group never did this, apart from the cash grab of the 2005 reunion, and Ginger Baker recorded enough material with other bands and collaborators to ensure that his musical memory should survive for many years, if of lesser interest than the more commercial work of Clapton. A “best of Baker: compilation, if it doesn’t feature Cream or Blind Faith, will no doubt be of selective interest, probably only to die hard aficionados.
Be that as it may, I will probably never meet Ginger Baker, much as I probably will never meet Wilko Johnson, the Big `Figure or John B Sparks , and will definitely never meet the late Lee Brilleaux, the four founding members of Dr Feelgood, the more contemporary band I discovered at about the same time as I started listening to Cream, and who represents the other side of the blues rocking coin to Cream: workmanlike pub rock with flashes of genius versus gloriously inventive stadium rock. Most of our rock heroes come from our teenage years and these seven guys, the members of Cream and Dr Feelgood, are my rock gods, not necessarily and not only because of technical virtuosity or creative brilliance but because of the visceral excitement the music had for me.
And that is the bottom line to Ginger Baker too. I don’t care whether he is technically the best drummer ever, or even whether he is considered as such; what I do care about is that intense thrill of listening to him doing what he does best when he pushes Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce on to the greatest, exhilarating heights of rock improvisation and, as I’ve mentioned, he’s an excellent, exciting studio drummer too.
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