Sunshine of Your Love

Sunshine of Your Love

Cream was a famous trio of English musicians who liked to play real loud. The Marshall Stack was a new addition to the arsenal of hard rock. Two cabinets stacked up towering over the player at eight feet tall. Ginger Baker the drummer and creator of the band used two big bass drums and a phalanx of tom toms and cymbals to match the lethal volume of Eric Clapton on lead guitar and Jack Bruce on thundering bass and lead vocals. When Jack Bruce was much younger studying bass, his professor gave him a discouraging prognosis stating that Jack would never amount to anything in the world of music. Best to give it up and sell fish on the wharf, but Jack persisted and ended up writing some great songs; “It’s getting near dawn when night close its tired eyes. I’ll soon be with you my love and give you my dose of pride.” Some of my favorite lyrics from mid 60’s. I drove a carful of high school friends down to Miami to witness
Cream live and it was spectacular. Eric admitted later that during his guitar solos he would switch on a couple of extra Marshall speaker cabinets to give him more volume. Jack composed the song growing out of a phrase he came up with on upright bass. Which was sacrilegious back then. But when I spied a sweet picture of Jack with his smiling wife my autoload jukebox brain faithfully brought up Cream to drive me crazy like a pile driver on too much coffee. Ginger turned the beat around accenting the One beat and the Three beat instead of the usual rock two and four beat pattern. It gave the song a Neanderthal presence. This was the middle of the psychedelic era of human consciousness. Timothy Leary was active and LSD was becoming available and abused. Thank science for injecting it into the bloodstream of America and the world. Although it did kick start what Robert Heinlin called a “False Renaisance”