by Every fibre of my music fandom tells me supergroups shouldn’t work. I am vehemently against the idea of bringing egos together in a bid to make greatness, for it feels like an inherently contradiction to how best music is made: in perfect harmony.
But then, that very word, harmony, was used to perhaps make one of the best in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Once again, it was at the very heart of the Traveling Wilburys, and so in those examples, my staunch belief that competing egos should be kept separate began to erode. But what about Cream, where do they truly fit into this belief?
They were a band whose sonic greatness thrived in the truth of my theory. The ever-present sense of tension between Eric Clapton, but more noticeably the rhythm section of Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, rubbed together to create a beautiful explosion. They were on paper the hallmark of everything I feared in a supergroup, yet somehow that was the fuel that lit the fire.
But unlike the aforementioned bands, their sound was caustic, grungy and almost confrontational. It mirrored the intra-band dynamics, as the instruments almost went to war with each other, wielding note after note as the musical attack on one another got more pointed. It was fractious and volatile, but for the listener, completely compelling. And no song epitomised this any better than ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.
Eric Clapton’s riff comes in like a musical Mike Tyson, bouncing in with enigmatic intimidation before Baker’s drum fills and Bruce’s bassline duck and weave the jabs, like an elegant Muhammad Ali, in a true heavyweight title fight of a track.
Pete Brown, the beat poet who actually penned some lyrics for the band, became the de facto extension of this supergroup. He recalled the writing process of the song, which by Cream’s standards was a relatively simple exercise.
Explaining, “We had very little time to write for Cream, but we happened to have some spare time, and Jack came up with the riff. He was playing a stand-up – he still had his stand-up bass, because he’d been a jazz musician. He was playing stand-up bass, and he said, ‘What about this then?’ and played the famous riff. I looked out the window and wrote down, ‘It’s getting near dawn.’ That’s how it happened. It’s actually all true, really, all real stuff.”
It’s almost as though the trio needed the levity of an external member to unlock the true greatness that lay within this band of interlocked genius. But it was clear, the minute Bruce’s riff played on the track and was echoed by Clapton’s guitar, that this was no ordinary song, it was one for the ages.
“Both Booker T Jones and Otis Redding heard it at Atlantic Studios and told me it was going to be a smash,” Bruce recalled, proving that Cream’s position as a supergroup was fully warranted and confirmed by ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. It had all of the individual greatness that made each member so iconic in their own right, while for a brief moment coming together like a lightning rod, to make something entirely transcendent.
