"Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings/Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes...."

"... he wrote for the song White Room, editing the lyric down to three stanzas and a chorus from what was originally an eight-page poem. Other songs such as Sunshine of Your Love were more spontaneous. At about 5am at the end of a long night’s writing session, Bruce had picked out the now familiar 11-note descending bass pattern and said, 'Well, what about this then?' Brown looked out of the window and said: 'It’s getting near dawn when lights close their tired eyes...."

From "Pete Brown obituary/Long-haired poet who wrote the lyrics for the Sixties supergroup Cream, including White Room and Sunshine of Your Love" (London Times).

"Ginger Baker, one of the most innovative and influential drummers in rock music, has died at the age of 80."

"His style combined the lyricism of jazz with the crude power of rock. One critic said watching him was like witnessing 'a human combineharvester.'... Nicknamed Ginger for his flaming red hair, the musician was born Peter Edward Baker in Lewisham, south London, shortly before World War Two. His bricklayer father was killed in action in 1943, and he was brought up in near poverty by his mother, step-father and aunt. A troubled student, he joined a local gang in his teens and became involved in petty theft. When he tried to quit, gang-members attacked him with a razor. His early ambition was to ride in the Tour de France but was forced to quit the sport when, aged 16, his bicycle got 'caught up' with a taxi. Instead, he took up drumming. 'I was always banging on the desks at school,' he recalled. 'So all the kids kept saying, "Go on, go and play the drums," and I just sat down and I could play. It's a gift from God. You've either got it or you haven't. And I've got it: time. Natural time'" (BBC).

His natural time with us is now over. Goodbye to Ginger Baker.



ADDED: My son John blogs a commemoration of Ginger Baker — with a clip from Blind Faith's first concert and the comment "Ginger Baker's drumming added so much to this — it's hard to imagine it with a typical rock drummer":

Playing the wrong song.

On December 16, 1977, Elvis Costello was on "Saturday Night Live, and he was supposed to play "Less Than Zero." He gets started, then starts waving his hands and saying "Stop! Stop!"...



and "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here" — it was about some British political situation — and switches to "Radio Radio."

Later, Costello said he got his inspiration from Jimi Hendrix, who was on Lulu's BBC TV show back in January 1969 and supposed to play "Hey Joe." Hendrix starts the song, then stops and says: "We'd like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream regardless of what kind of group they might be. I'd like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce." Cream had broken up a couple months before.

Jimi then switches to "Sunshine of Your Love" and goes on and on until "We're being pulled off the air":

"'Wrapping Paper' is the most appalling piece of shit I've ever heard in my life! I was totally against it, right from the start... Eric and I didn't like it."

Said Ginger Baker.



Listen. That's Jack Bruce, composer of the music (not the lyrics), singing the lead vocals and playing bass guitar, piano, cello.

"A few decades ago, left wing politics meant getting your skull cracked by company goons rushing a picket line..."

"... not listening to Disraeli Gears while doing bong hits. It meant getting millions of people to cast their presidential votes for a man who the U.S. government feared enough to put in prison, not for a former bomber pilot whose leftism consists of being more liberal than Richard Nixon (No offense to McGovern . . . BUT COME ON PEOPLE!)... Forty years from now today’s kids will have become the biggest pain in the ass generation of old people ever. If only because there’s so many of them! Their kids (and grandchildren) will never stop hearing about the good old days, when 'we' 'stopped the War' and a bunch of other equally preposterous claims. Through sheer demographic force, they’ll probably ensure that some kid born in 1995 can sing along to Beatles and Stones songs, if not Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad!"

Wrote The Last True Leftist, August 8, 1974.

Goodbye to Jack Bruce.

The Cream bassist has died, at the age of 71.

Here's an hour of him showing you how to play the bass: