The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [104]
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