DVD Reviews

Cream: Disraeli Gears

While dubbed “the world’s first supergroup”, Cream are still unable to escape the stigma of being the band that introduced Eric Clapton to an international audience, diminishing bandmates Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker to the sidelines. Atlantic Records founder and chairman Ahmet Ertegun has contributed largely to this unfair reputation. When Cream first visited America to record their breakthrough album Disraeli Gears, Ertugen planned to make Clapton the star of the band and reduce Bruce and Baker to being his sidemen. 

Cream wasn’t just a vehicle for Eric Clapton. All three band members were instrumental virtuosos. The phenomenal chemistry within this power trio has been unsurpassed. In fact, it was Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker’s fiery playing styles that pushed Clapton beyond what he thought his limits were, thus expanding the palette of his playing, which, in my opinion, hasn’t been as good since the demise of the band. Cream’s collective talents and their relationship to each other was at their peak on Disraeli Gears, a masterpiece of an album in a year fraught with masterpiece rock albums: 1967.

The Classic Albums series does its usual in depth exploration with use of archival footage and new interviews featuring all involved, including Baker, Bruce and Clapton, Ertegun, lyricist Pete Brown, cover artist Martin Sharp and rock journalist Chris Welch. Each of the band members also contribute solo performances of various tracks and explain the construction of the songs. The best of these is Baker’s performance of the drum pattern for Cream’s signature song Sunshine of Your Love, Bruce’s haunting vocal and piano performance of We’re Going Wrong on the DVD’s bonus features and Clapton’s vocal and acoustic guitar performance of Outside Woman Blues.

The episode would have also greatly benefited from interviews with late producer Felix Pappalardi and engineer Tom Dowd, as both men were also quite instrumental in the production of Disraeli Gears. Pappalardi had been a fixture of the folk scene in Greenwich Village and had produced mainly folk acts. He helped refine Cream’s heavy blues-based rock sound and introduced them to American acts, such as the Lovin’ Spoonful and Buffalo Springfield, which were hugely influential to the album. Dowd, one of the greatest recording engineers ever, had mainly engineered R&B acts like Ray Charles and had never encountered anything like Cream before. The band recorded with Marshall stack amplifiers turned up full blast. Dowd had the challenge of capturing this loud, distorted heavy rock on magnetic tape, which he accomplished beautifully. Clapton would later work with Dowd on Derek and the Dominoes and his early solo albums. 

It is rather unfortunate that just a year after the release of Disraeli Gears, Cream would be no more. Though the band’s existence was like the blink of an eye, their influence on rock music in all its incarnations still resounds to this day and Disraeli Gears is proof why.         

Review By Thomas Marchese