The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [105]
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