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the column. He had a huge knowledge of music, which gave us a lot in common, and he was very funny, with his humor usually directed toward himself. I remember walking with him once in the Kings Road and making some comment about the shirt he was wearing. “Oh, this fucking thing?” he said, and he ripped it off from under his jacket. We would sit in the local café, the Picasso, and he would character-assassinate everybody who came in. He’d go up to people he’d never met before and launch into a diatribe about them, pointing a finger in their face and telling them what they did, where they’d come from, and where they were going wrong. Then somehow he’d turn the whole thing back on himself, as if to redeem the person he’d been attacking. He was absolutely extraordinary, and I loved him to bits.

One day I happened to mention to Litvinoff that my favorite play was The Caretaker, and that I’d seen the film hundreds of times. When he heard this, he hinted that he knew the man on whom Pinter had based the character of the tramp, Davies. The next thing I knew, he turned up with this guy, whose name was John Ivor Golding. He was a full-blown tramp, wearing pinstriped trousers and a sort of worn-out frock coat over layers and layers of clothing. He was very eloquent but quite mad, and, just like Davies did in the play, he moved in and took over, manipulating us with his charm. Then we couldn’t get rid of him, and as far as I can remember, he was still there after I moved out.

The Pheasantry was a fantastic place to live in 1967. Being right in the middle of the Kings Road, there was always a lot of street activity, and it was within strolling distance of all the places where I used to hang out. I was dressing in a mixture of antique and secondhand clothes and also new stuff, bought from places like the Chelsea Antique Market, Hung on You, and Granny Takes a Trip. Often accompanied by Litvinoff, I would work my way down to the World’s End from the Picasso, look in at Granny’s, and then wander back up to the Pheasantry, where people would drop in for a cup of tea and a joint. The number of different faces that would drop by throughout the course of the afternoon was astonishing, and our “tea parties” invariably evolved into whole evenings listening to music. Whether it was the first pirated disc of Dylan’s Basement Tapes, which I remember Litvinoff once playing, or an acetate of a new Beatles song, or just me sitting in the corner playing guitar, there was always something going on.

When Cream played the seventh Windsor Jazz Festival at the beginning of the third week of August, just over a year to the day of our debut, it did not escape our attention how little we had really progressed. In terms of record sales we were still way behind the Beatles and the Stones, and even below Hendrix. Our touring around the same old circuit had been patchy, and we felt disappointed that Stigwood had not allowed us to play the Monterey Pop Festival, especially having seen the incredible success that Hendrix and the Who had had there.

Even though we had been champing at the bit to go there, Stigwood, in his wisdom, had decided that if we were going to conquer America, then we should do it by going in the back door, not by performing at a huge outdoor event at which we would be lost among the hundreds of other performers. We bowed to what we assumed was his experience. Now at least our spirits were raised by the fact that, with the release of Disraeli Gears set for November, we were leaving for California within a week.

I was actually pretty contemptuous of the West Coast rock ’n’ roll scene as exemplified by the new bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead. At the time, I just didn’t understand what they were doing and thought they sounded pretty second-rate. I liked the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, and I had heard a great album by a San Francisco band called Moby Grape, but I had never seen them play live. Basically, I thought most of the so-called psychedelic stuff that people were talking about