Happy 55th Anniversary to Cream’s second studio album Disraeli Gears, originally released November 2, 1967.
Most people associate 1967 with The Summer of Love or The Monterey Pop Festival. It was also the year of great album releases like The Rolling Stones’ Between the Buttons, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced, just to name a few. Included in the expansive list is Disraeli Gears, the second album by Cream.
Dubbed the world’s first supergroup, bassist Jack Bruce, guitarist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker were all members of other successful bands before they pooled their talents in 1966. Cream started working on Disraeli Gears seven months after they finished recording their first album Fresh Cream (1966), which took four months to complete. The band recorded Disraeli Gears at New York’s Atlantic Studios in a little less than four days. Producer Tom Dowd was chosen to engineer the sessions and he had not yet met the band. When they arrived, accompanying them were three roadies, stacks of Marshall amps, and a double bass drum kit. To make matters worse, Dowd was informed that Cream’s work visas were set to expire in three days.
Working on a tight deadline, the band ripped through their songs with great ease. “They came in and were very no-nonsense,” Dowd told Dan Daley of Mix Magazine. “They went through the first few songs like greased lightning.”
The track that gave them the most trouble in studio is the arguably their best-known song, “Sunshine of Your Love.” If you’ve spent any amount of time listening to any classic rock station in the last forty years, then the chances are good that you’ve heard the song. The famous riff at the beginning of the song was Bruce’s idea, which was inspired by watching Jimi Hendrix.
In a 1988 interview with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, Clapton elaborated, “We’d been to see Hendrix about two nights before at the Saville Theatre, in London. He’d been here for about six months, and he played this gig that was just blinding. I don’t think Jack had really taken him in before; I knew what the guy was capable of from the minute I met him. It was the complete embodiment of the different aspects of rock & roll guitar rolled up into one. I could sense in coming off the guy. Jack took a little longer to realize what was happening. And when he did see it that night after the gig he went home and came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi. And then we wrote a song on top of it.”
Listen to the Album:
Clapton and Bruce knew the riff inside and out, but Baker struggled to find the right beat for it and became frustrated. Dowd came up with a solution that would help him. “[H]ave you ever seen any American Westerns [that have] the [Native American] Indian beat, where the downbeat is the beat?’” Dowd recalled asking the band in the studio. “And when [Baker] started playing it that way, all of the parts came together and right away they were elated.” It was the last song they recorded before they had to head back to England.
All three members of Cream were previously in bands with heavy blues roots, and it was a heavy influence on their individual styles. Disraeli Gears took that music and infused it with a psychedelic sound that created the blueprint for bands like Led Zeppelin and Mountain.
Cream disbanded a year later, in between the release of their final two studio albums (1968’s Wheels of Fire and 1969’s Goodbye). Despite being together only two years, their impact on music is invaluable. If you ever find yourself wondering how heavy metal got started, the trail of musical breadcrumbs will lead you back to Disraeli Gears.
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