The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [106]
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 New people were coming up and growing, and we were repeating ourselves, living on legend, a year or two years out of date.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