![]() ![]() “If you had said on the day you first heard about Clapton, the first music you heard from Cream, you looked at Clapton and you thought, Well, yeah, some say he’s the greatest, he’s the greatest. ![]() They were faithful to the records, and then they were that much better for being live. ![]() “They were overwhelming, absolutely overwhelming,” he recalls. ![]() That was a big deal.”įox watched the group live from the audience as a fan, and eventually from the side of the stage when the two bands played shows together. He had the full foundation of anyone who had studied those disciplines and was applying it to the music that he was involved with. Or a jazz drummer playing blues, whatever you want. At that point, the stuff he was doing with Cream, you can label it in any way you want to label it, but the bottom line is that he was a jazz drummer playing rock ‘n’ roll. But rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t something that he lived and breathed. “The difference was that he just hit much harder,” he explains. The drummer was distinctive in rock ‘n’ roll, but less so in jazz, as Fox points out. He was and remained one of a kind.”įox calls Baker, Bruce and Clapton an “onslaught of musical sensory things,” adding that “the issue with Cream is that I was completely wrapped up in all three of them.” A song like the instrumental “Toad,” which closed out the second side of 1967’s Fresh Cream and became a sprawling centerpiece in concert, as documented on 1968’s Wheels of Fire, gave fans a chance to focus on what Baker was doing. So I think drummers tuned into Baker as something more aspirational. Whereas, with Moon, that was never possible. I think the reason for that is there’s a delusion that if you just practice for about 60 or 80 years, you could play that stuff. As many guys that wanted to sound like Moon, there were that many at least that wanted to sound like Baker. When it comes to him as a drummer, there was never another like him, that’s for sure. “He found a way to marry that kind of finesse with that kind of thunder,” he says. I certainly didn’t know anything about his background.”įox zeroed in on Baker’s playing and musicality, as well as the way he blended styles and influences. So when the first Cream album came out, I knew who he was. The work that was required of Baker in that band certainly didn’t allow him to stretch to what he became and probably already was. “Graham Bond was a blues band, first and foremost. “There’s no way you could have known from listening to Baker’s prior recorded work exactly what was there,” Fox notes. No one played it like that until he did! It’s that simple!”įox knew of both Baker and Cream bassist and singer Jack Bruce before Cream, having followed their work as members of the Graham Bond Organisation, but when they eventually joined with Clapton, he knew, as a music fan, that he was in for the ride of his life, though he admits now that listening to the Graham Bond albums didn’t adequately prepare him for Cream. “What he was doing was something similar to what Moon did, which was to reinvent the instrument. “But being a drummer, it was impossible to ignore what Baker was doing,” he explains. When it came to the album’s musicianship, Fox remembers the primary focus was on guitarist Eric Clapton at the time. To hear three people play like that, and someone was willing to actually give them time to go into a studio and do it - just incredible.” “It was definitely pushing Beatles stuff, as far as what it meant. “The first Cream album was probably the greatest album I’d ever heard in my life at that time,” he recalls. He just thought that stuff was trash, because those guys were unschooled.”Įven before the James Gang and Cream shared the stage, Fox was enthralled when he first got his hands on a copy of Fresh Cream in 1966. And of course, when Ringo came around, I shifted gears. He had been taught, and he had loved, learned and listened to all of the jazz guys - all the same guys I grew up on. “I don’t mean to say that I played in that stratosphere, I never did. “ had a background that mirrored mine to some extent,” Fox says. “Other than a cursory nod, that was about all I ever got.”įox realized later that perhaps he should have mentioned Art Blakey - “the password,” as he calls it, that may have broken the ice. “It was easier said than done,” he tells UCR. As drummer Jimmy Fox recalls now, he had hoped to spend some time hanging out with Ginger Baker and talk shop with him. In the James Gang‘s early years, they played a number of shows with Cream. ![]()
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