Disraeli Gears: Cream and the Summer of Love
- Abigail Devoe
- 1 hour ago
- 14 min read
Blues with purple polka dots.
Jack Bruce: lead/co-lead vocals, bass, harmonica
Eric Clapton: guitar, lead vocals on “Strange Brew” and “Outside Woman Blues,” co-lead vocals on “Sunshine Of Your Love,” “World Of Pain,” and “Dance The Night Away”
Ginger Baker: drums, lead vocals on “Blue Condition”
Guest lyricists: Pete Brown, Felix Pappalardi, Gail Collins, and Martin Sharp
Produced by Felix Pappalardi, engineered by Tom Dowd
art by Martin Sharp
Disraeli Gears itself doesn’t “mean” anything. Top to bottom, it’s dada; filtered through the late ’60s psychedelic haze. Note its day-glo cover art, with Albrecht Durer copies and a cross-eyed Botticelli’s Venus. Even the title is nonsense: someone blurted out “Disraeli gears!” in full confidence when he meant to say derailleur gears. But when you set aside its absurdist instructions, Disraeli’s music certainly had meaning to rock-and-roll.
Disraeli Gears was recorded in May of 1967; in a matter of days while Cream was on a (very) short break from tour. Why did they have to rush? The guys’ work visas were set to expire in three days. That’s a pretty hard deadline, if you ask me!!
Producer Felix Pappalardi was an interesting presence through sessions. He was sort of a jack-of-all-trades; he could play both sides of the fence. (Or both sides of the glass, in this case.) He was young enough to relate to the guys, but well-versed enough in music-making to commune with older execs and engineers. Felix was also the one who took Eric to Manny’s 48th Street Special Instruments, where he bought his first wah-wah pedal.
Disraeli was also engineer Tom Dowd’s first project with Clapton. They’d work together for years to come. He engineered Disraeli’s follow-up Wheels of Fire and Clapton’s most famous solo projects. Of himself and Felix, Tom was the real master of sound of the two. He’d recorded Charlie Mingus’s Oh Yeah, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, as well as the likes of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Tito Puente. Sometimes I forget how much older Tom was than the other guys until I read his resume and see he worked on the fucking Manhattan Project.
Despite having done cutting-edge research to be used on the building of a Literal Actual Nuclear Bomb, Tom had no idea how to record Cream at first. He had a very orderly way of working; every amp had its key, and there it would stay. Very old-school. Then you have these guys, playing hundred-watt Marshall stacks. You could hear them three blocks away. Tom had a serious learning curve, and Atlantic exec Ahmet Ertegun cited Cream for his partial deafness!
I very nearly covered Disraeli in late 2023 instead of Wheels of Fire, but it didn’t grab me then. Something about Wheels of Fire’s messiness intrigued me more. But that spring, I went on a VH1’s Classic Albums viewing spree (thank you Tubi for having hosting most of them for free.) I have to say, their feature on Disraeli Gears made just after Cream’s Royal Albert Hall reunion totally changed my perspective on this album.
That being said, I have some notes. Getting my three biggest critiques out of the way now:
1. To a modern listener, Cream might read as "simple." But you have to remember, Jimi Hendrix and Cream were two of the heaviest groups on the mainstream market back then. These guys plus the Yardbirds set the bar; or started a game of “heaviness” capture-the-flag that would really heat up through 1968. You also have to remember this material was heavier live. See “Ulysses” at the Grande Ballroom, “Sunshine Of Your Love,”every single “We’re Going Wrong” ever. It’s like those producers’ notes on LPs used to say: this stuff sounds better played loud.
2. Cream had no ground wire. This came up in my Wheels of Fire review. Cream was three guys all soloing at once. Sometimes it’s awesome, other times it’s a claustrophobic mess.
You can’t rehearse a band into natural chemistry. It’s no secret these guys had tempestuous personal relationships with each other; surely not helped by Stigwood and Ahmet Ertegun inserting themselves into the dynamic, trying to shove Eric into the frontman slot. For a band of only three guys, there sure were a lot of cooks in the kitchen! By the time we get to Wheels of Fire, there’s too many. Everyone’s throwing so many influences into the melting pot. In the words of David Fricke: “(Cream’s) idea of blues was purple. It had some polka dots in it.”
...I just want to be David Fricke, man.
And 3. this album’s production. In the words of the bald one who shall not be named...it’s not good.
From covering Mountain’s Climbing LP a few weeks back and speaking to drummer Corky Laing, I learned Felix favored a really dry production style. This stood in firm opposition to the psychedelic sounds of the time; which favored panning, watery effects, and dreamy soundscapes. Disraeli Gears was absolutely a victim of the limits of early stereo technology. For some godforsaken reason, the drums are shoved are all the way in the rightchannel instead of being in the center! It completely degrades the effect of Ginger’s drumming style; with heavy emphasis on toms and cymbals as opposed to the snare. Did Felix hate Ginger? Because I can’t think of any other reason he’d do this! For the most part, I can forgive these hiccups (and Felix if he secretly hated Ginger. Beware Mr. Baker!) Stereo technology was still in its infancy in the Summer of Love. Recording technology on both sides of the pond hadn’t quite caught up to what groups like Cream or the Experience were doing.
In typical Clapton fashion, a blues standard became one of Cream's signature songs, Strange Brew. It started as a cover of the Junior Wells/Buddy Miles arrangement of "Hey Lawdy Mama," combined with a Muddy Waters tune. On top of that, the solo is literally Albert King’s “Oh Pretty Woman.”
As you can hear, the tune was pretty far along before Felix presented a new set of lyrics. Thus, “Lawdy Mama” wasn’t “Lawdy Mama” anymore. It was hardly “Lawdy Mama” to begin with, if we’re being honest!
Disraeli Gears comes out swinging with this strong, assertive choice of opener. “Strange Brew” says, “Cream has arrived, and the Americans will love us.” This guitar tone, especially the fact that it’s called the “woman tone,” doesn’t help my theory that guitarists subconsciously craft their licks after that one nagging girlfriend they had.
It was a bold choice to kick off the album with an Eric-sung cut as opposed to one performed by Jack. I think Eric was the right choice to sing “Strange Brew.” “She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue/In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you” have to be some of my favorite song lyrics hands-down. Felix’s vibrant lyrics come to life with Eric’s cool, smooth delivery. For a relative newbie at the mic, his falsetto is easy on the ears. Jack’s solobehind Eric’s modest Albert King tribute is rubbery; with a trampoline-like valence to it. For all the clashing solos Cream was prone to, this duo exacts some restraint. I hate that Ginger was figuratively – and literally – sat in the corner of this mix. His favor of the toms peppers “Strange Brew” with the hollow texture needed to balance the song’s hot, humid, swampy feel. This mood was used to expert effect in Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 adaptation of Snowpiercer; it’s one of the best needle drops I’ve seen to date.
Sunshine Of Your Love was the last song written for Disraeli Gears. The guys needed just one more song to fill out the length of a standard LP. Pete and Jack elected to stay up all night to write. As the story goes, Jack’s noodling around on a double-bass, and Pete says “...it’s getting near dawn…” In their sleep-deprived delirium, they worked out the bones of Cream’s greatest hit! Still, it didn’t fully come together until the guys got in the studio. No one could quite get the feel down.
“...there just wasn’t this common ground like they had on so many of the other songs. And I was listening to what they were playing, and I said, ‘You know, have you ever seen any American westerns? The – the Indian beat, where the downbeat is the beat?’”
quoted from: Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (dir. Mark Moorman, 2003)
File that under “Great Rock-and-Roll Tunes Saved By the Spaghetti Western.” Ginger takes credit for this in Beware of Mr. Baker. I’m not so sure. Wherever it came from, it inspires; it’s since been covered by the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Santana, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, and the Fifth Dimension.
On to the recording itself: does anyone know what that faint intermittent rattling is? Am I going crazy? It sounds like someone’s necklace, or maybe beads on the door. There’s also some ghost vocals of somebody shouting through the last verse. One of the biggest criticisms Cream gets to this day is, “Jack didn’t have the voice for blues.” They’re right. He didn’t. But that’s part of why Cream is so intriguing to listen to. Jack had a really tight vibrato. Hear how he belts, “I’ll stay with you til my seas are dried up.” (...I think it’s pretty obvious what this song is about.) Jack had fabulous control over that falsetto and possessed an androgynous tone. I associate none of that with the blues, it’s more of a folk sound, but Jack’s voice was one of the ways Cream broke the mold.
The “Sunshine” riff is just ridiculous. Shoutout to Jack for coming up with this bassline so that it could become the riff; I really dig Eric’s slight variations on it. It’s a subtle harmony which honors and highlights this stupidly good core motif. No sense trying to compete with it. And the fact that one of the greatest solos Eric ever put to tape is goddamn “Blue Moon” is so funny to me. He couldn’t think of anything else to play!
If anything, I feel the guys might’ve held back on their recording. If Jimi’s renditions were any indication, “Sunshine” has the potential to be gritty, sludgy, and bossy. It nearly gets there with the sustained chord and Ginger happily battering away at his kit.
World of Pain is one of a handful of terribly underrated cuts on Disraeli Gears. I didn’t fully appreciate it until researching the Fool episode; when I came across this scene of Cream playing the song in Danish film On A Saturday Night.
I love that Ginger shifts the beginning of the phrase each time he plays the fill; it’s a nice, thoughtful touch that keeps an otherwise understated song moving. 1967 was the year guitar effects exploded onto the scene. Fuzz boxes, wah-wahs, Leslie cabinets and Octavia pedals and all that crazy stuff Jimi used. I know “Ulysses” gets all the love for its use of the wah-wah pedal, but Eric uses it to manipulate a really cool watery sound on “World of Pain.” He cuts that with a sharp, angular rhythm line that gives the song a little umph. There’s a lot of duality happening on “World of Pain;” soft and hard, smooth and rough, double-tracked solos and a duet. For the longest time I thought it was just Jack’s vocals double-tracked, but Eric's singing too. “World of Pain” is an A+ use of Jack’s very theatrical falsetto. “I can hear all the cries of the city” is goofy, but charming.
Back when Cream had just started recording their debut, Fresh Cream, the Byrds dropped Fifth Dimension. It made waves on both sides of the pond; becoming one of the earliest albums you could file under the psych category. Pete Brown wrote the lyrics for Dance The Night Away as an expression of unreality after he quit the ’cid, but Jack turned it into a nod to “Eight Miles High.” “Dance The Night Away”’s got a totally mid-’60s groove. Those exotic trills are one of my favorite artifacts of this era. This song isn’t my favorite thing here, but it’s not bad at all. I really like the jangly sound the Byrds pioneered. It was great when the Beatles did it on Rubber Soul, it was still great when Cream did it here. I love hearing artifacts of cross-pollination between big pop groups of the ’60s. This tonal brightness and snappy, intricate manner of playing doesn’t feel like Cream or Eric Clapton at all. The man’s nickname was Slowhand. These chords in this style weren’t his go-tos, butdifferent is good, Eric. (Don’t you just want to grab his shoulders and tell him that when you listen to his post-Layla output?)
Blue Condition...it’s here. Good job, Ginger!
Moving on to the reason I wrote this episode in the first place, Tales of Brave Ulysses. Here’s how this psychedelic telling of the epic of Ulysses came to be:
“One night down at the Speak, we” (Eric and then-girlfriend Charlotte Martin) “were sitting with some friends at a table when we were joined by an Australian friend of hers, an artist named Martin Sharp. When he heard I was a musician, he told me he had written a poem that he thought would make good lyrics for a song...I asked him to show me the words. He wrote them down on a napkin and gave them to me...These became the lyrics of the song ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses.’ It was the start of a long friendship and very fruitful collaboration.”
quoted from: Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (2007)
“Ulysses” does atmosphere like no other on Disraeli. It starts with a bright burst of a chord, then descends into the murky waters through the first verse. “You thought the leaden winter would lead you down forever/But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun.”
It’s one hell of an opening line, lifting the gates of a neon-bright tale. Crimson, the colors of the sea, purple fishes, white-laced lips, a girl’s brown body. You can see this song as you hear it. Just look at the album art! I love how visual and colorful the '60s were. See the guitar that produced Clapton's "woman tone," the fabled Fool SG.
Martin wrote “Ulysses” around Judy Collins’s cover of “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen, but Eric wrote the riff as an approximation of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City.” It’s a good thing the guys put some muscle in this “Suzanne”/Lovin’ Spoonful nod! Clearly they favored this chord progression; they used it again for “White Room.” The music of “Ulysses” itself does as good a job of storytelling as the lyrics do; snapping you in and out of the haze with wailing guitar lines. Ginger’s cascading rolls are razor-sharp. Eric makes every note count, he was a crazy perfectionist player at this time. Again, this song was better the heavier it got. I find myself craving derailment, a la “Deserted Cities of the Heart," but the Grande Ballroom performance will do.
When asked about “SWLABR,” Jack simply said, “Umm. Drugs?”
It’s an absurdist description of a breakup; the girl is Mona Lisa and you’re drawing a mustache on her. “The rainbow has a beard.” Very dada. Describing puppy-dog eyes in such a manner as, “You’re coming to me with that soulful look on your face/You come in looking like you never ever done one wrong thing” sticks in my head; but I can’t help but chuckle at the sheer conviction with which Jack hollers, “fAAAAce!” Of all the guitar solos on this album, “SWLABR”’s is the one I feel doesn’t get enough attention. The double-tracked solo clambers all over itself.
Besides “World of Pain,” We’re Going Wrong is the other underrated Disraeli Gears track. Jack was on kind of a roll in 1967. He wrote this song about a fight with his then-wife, half-protest song half-parody “Take It Back,” and “Weird of Hermiston” and “The Clearout.” The latter two were shelved for his solo debut, Songs For A Tailor.
Again, “We’re Going Wrong” sounded so much better when it was allowed to be louder and heavier. See the Royal Albert Hall recording; as Jack gets shouty, it bears a certain intensity I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This is the one song where Disraeli’s wonky mix actually works. Eric and Jack play sparse, open chords, while Ginger’s off to the side giving this song its momentum. He’s playing the centrifugal force; an endless spiraling motion downward, like a marriage spiraling out of control in wake of a particularly nasty fight. Is it the calm before the storm, or the barren wasteland after? It’s an uneasy, stomach-churning tune.
“If you lose your money, great god don’t lose your mind/And if you lose your woman, please don’t fool with mine.” Eric, I gotta say, it’s pretty bold of you to bring Blind Joe Reynolds’s Outside Woman Blues to the table when you yourself had such little respect for the institution of marriage. Or rather, your best friend’s marriage.
(Abby don’t bring up Eric stealing his best friend’s wife every single time George or Eric are mentioned on Vinyl Monday challenge. Impossible, apparently!)
Blatant hypocrisy aside, “Outside Woman” is the most overtly blues cut here. Eric has a feel for which blues tunes will translate best as blues rock. He did it with “Crossroads,” he did it with “Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out) and “Have You Ever Loved A Woman” later on, and he did it with “Outside Woman.” He chose this to record specifically for the lick; thinking it’d sound good on his Marshall stacks.
This shuffle and that lick just work, the solo is precise and articulated well. But his vocals aren’t quite up to the bar he set on this album’s previous cuts. He wouldn’t get the soul in his voice until he was under the tutelage of Delaney Bramlett a couple years later.
Take It Back is a goofy faux-live vamp about wanting to rip up your draft card. “Take that thing right outta hEAAAHre!” (Who’s gonna tell him that the draft didn’t apply to him?) Both make “Take It Back” very much an artifact of its time. Jack’s swinging through this thing on the axe, his harmonica playing doesn’t totally suck for once, and he delivers this song with the humor needed. “Don’t let them take me ’cause I’m easily scared.” Me too, Jack! Eric does a percussive keyboard-like thing through the prechoruses; I would’ve loved to have known how he got this particular, plucky sound.
We cap off Disraeli Gears with one of the most baffling closers in rock-and-roll history. There is no goddamnway Mother’s Lament was recorded sober, that is some Drunk British Man Behavior. I can hear the jazz hands. This is some shit you’d hear playing over a cartoon that looks like this. That’s all I have to say about “Mother’s Lament”!
To the white boy blues scene in Britain, Cream were a supergroup. Two Bluesbreakers, one of them dubbed God, and a jazz drummer. They had pedigree. Clout, if you will. If you ask me, the Clapton “supergroup” didn’t come around until Blind Faith: Traffic’s singer, Family’s bassist, and two guys from Cream. Forgive me if this is too cutesy: Disraeli Gears, though, is the album of a super group. They cut out a lot of the improvisation, and cut out the blues in favor of three to four-minute tunes. While I feel the lack of straight blues was an overcorrection from Fresh Cream, this album is packed to the gills with memorable riffs, a balanced rhythm section, and some of the most quintessentially 1967 lyrics you’ve ever heard. It’s just as day-glo as its cover. Formulaic as it can be, my interest doesn’t slip. These were capable musicians who could take this format they drafted – blues with purple polka dots – to its maximum potential. They did so very quickly. Though this harmony wouldn’t last for more than a few months, with Disraeli, Cream found their voice as a group.
In that all-too-brief sweet spot, they churned out some of the fattest, funkiest, greatest tunes of the psych rock canon. Disraeli Gears is all killer...with filler.
Personal favorites: “Strange Brew,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “World of Pain,” “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” “Outside Woman Blues”
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Watch the full episode above!
Clapton, Eric. Clapton: The Autobiography. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.
Koger, Marijke. “9. THE FOOL SG.” marijkekogerart.com, 7/13/2021. https://marijkekogerart.com/WP/memoir/9-the-fool-sg/
Longfellow, Matthew, dir. Classic Albums: Cream – Disraeli Gears. VH1: Isis Productions, 2006.
Moorman, Mark, dir. Tom Dowd and the Language of Music. Palm Pictures, 2003.
Zanuck, Lili Fini, dir. Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars. Showtime Documentary Films: Passion Pictures, 2017.
“Sleevenotes – the inside story of a classic album cover” Classic Rock no. 56, 8/2003.
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