Cream Live Royal Albert Hall 1968
Hedvige Ransonet
Farewell Concert is the live recording of the band Cream's final concert at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 November 1968. Aside from the band's reunion concert in 2005 it is Cream's only official full concert release on video. It was originally broadcast by the BBC on 5 January 1969. It was not released on video in the US until 1977. The opening acts for the concert were future progressive rock stars Yes, who were just starting out, and Taste, an Irish trio led by Rory Gallagher.
In 2005, a special extended edition of the concert appeared featuring full versions of all songs separated from the narration and interviews. Lasting 80 minutes, it was released on the official DVD reissue. The new version featured digitally remastered sound and video including three bonus songs. A short clip of White Room from the second set (the film used the version from the first show), together with D.J. John Peel introducing the band onstage, was shown on the BBC1 programme "The Rock And Roll Years" in the late 1980s.[1]
Album releaseIn March 2020, the concert was released as part of the live album Goodbye Tour - Live 1968, being the first time the Royal Albert Hall concert was officially released via audio format.[2]Sadly the sound of this Royal Albert hall concert is much worse than the sound of the other 3 shows of this box set.
The audio is a turgid sonic sludge. The visuals are even worse, with director Tony Palmer jerking the camera around as if this were an episode of NYPD Blue, layering the picture with dated and distracting psychedelic light effects, and providing far too many close-ups of Bruce's teeth (and almost no wide shots of the entire band).[3]
Ginger Baker himself has lashed out in an interview against the Farewell Concert video, stating: "Cream was so much better than that." Nonetheless, most Cream fans regard the actual performance with great enthusiasm, disregarding the poor quality of the video.
"Apart from the money, that band tends to get overlooked these days," said Bruce at the time. Led Zeppelin, for instance, has gotten a lot of recognition, and quite rightly so. But, it seems to be forgotten that Cream and [Jimi] Hendrix really created that audience. A reunion would help clarify that."
This interview has been published in various parts over the years, but here, below, for the first time the chat is exhibited in its entirety, with light edits. I found Bruce to be charming, witty, and with a great, self-deprecating sense of humor.
Jack Bruce: We did a seven-month tour of America, playing places like Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, I think it was - just every little club. That's how we did it, physically by going on the road. We actually created that so- called underground audience. When we got to the Fillmore in '67 was when the band really began to happen.
But it all tends to get overlooked now, maybe not necessarily in a musical way, but in the fact of being a catalyst to make other [musical] things happen. We got to be very good. Sometimes there was so much power from that band that it was incredible. There were only two groups I've been in that had a similar kind of energy: Cream, and the one with Tony Williams, John McLaughlin and Larry Young [Tony Williams Lifetime].
Bruce: We were in my flat in Hempstead [England], Pete Brown and myself. We had been working all night trying to come up with material for the next album, Disraeli Gears I think. Normally, I would just play on acoustic guitar or piano and get ideas that way, but we hadn't really got anywhere.
I just picked up my string bass and played the riff. We kind of both looked out the window, and the sun was just coming up. Pete wrote, "It's getting near dawn." It's one of those things where it actually happened that way [laughs]. Once we had the riff and a bunch of lyrics, we didn't have a way of ending the sequence. That was Eric's [Clapton] contribution - to come up with chords, very important.
Bruce: That was really exaggerated. The '60s for me wasn't a time of heavy hard drug use. In my experience, people got into that more in the '70s. But there was a lot of pot around, especially when we got to San Francisco, but it was kind of light- hearted.
I can only speak for myself, not for Ginger [Baker] or Eric, obviously. But there was no [collective] band hard drug use, no getting-down- together sort of thing. I hate to use the word professional, but I think we took it too seriously to be out of it on stage. Don't get me wrong, there were a couple of times we experimented with some acid [LSD]. With that band [Cream] as far as I remember, I only played once under the influence of that, and it was impossible.
Bruce: I do. It was at Liverpool University. I don't remember why, but we were traveling from somewhere to there, and we dropped acid together. I had a really interesting journey, very hallucinogenic. We were in a car, and I remember it kind of rubbery going around this bend, like a cartoon car.
Bruce: There had always been problems between Ginger and myself. We're kind of like brothers. When it's nice it's great, but then sometimes, as with siblings, it can go really wrong. He took it upon himself to fire me from the Graham Bond Organisation, although he wasn't the band leader [laughs].
He said I was playing, "too busy." I think I was just finding myself and a style very much influenced by James Jamerson, people like that who played melodically. I was interested in trying to take the bass guitar out of the rhythm section. I was also influenced by jazz: Scott LaFaro, Charlie Mingus, the sort of people I looked up to. So yeah, I probably was playing a lot of notes. He [Baker] didn't quite agree with that [laughs].
Bruce: It was this seven-month [American] tour that sowed the seeds of destruction. I think everybody in the band would agree that we were very unfortunate to have [Robert] Stigwood as manager. He might have been successful in some ways, but he wasn't good in the sense that he knew how to encourage a band to continue.
There was never any, "You want to do a record, why don't you take two or three months and go somewhere and write some material." It was on the road, then straight into the studio, then straight on the road again. Let's milk this thing for what it's worth while it lasts, which is very shortsighted.
The band probably would have gone on longer. What we could have done was split up, done our own projects, then come together as a band every now and again and do something. But because of the way it ended, a kind of bitter ending, it didn't.
Bruce: Well, the touring was too much, but there was quite a lot of bad feeling about the fact that most of the material was mine and Pete Brown's. That wasn't a deliberate thing, me going in and insisting we do my material. It's just that's what it was.
When we went into the studio, I would have maybe 20 songs, Eric might have one song and Ginger might have one idea. That would be the proportion. Eric started to write more things towards the end. Again, what we should have done was gone away, I don't know to Jamaica or somewhere, and been together in a more social way. We could have written things together. Very few songs were written by the three of us.
Bruce: I think that band couldn't have happened if it had been any other drummer, another bass player, singer, guitarist. I think with all successful musical groups, it's the individual personalities. It's like Duke Ellington and his great bands - you can't imagine Cootie Williams not being there, or Sam Woodyard. I couldn't imagine anyone else being in Cream.
But I would have to own up that it was Eric really who made the band as commercial as it was. I've never been a commercially-minded person - I'm not pushy, I'm not ambitious in that way for huge success. Eric made those kinds of things happen.
Bruce: He was very fashion-conscious. Because of that, we started the hairstyles and flared trousers. We actually went to an Army-Navy store and bought U.S. Navy whites with huge bellbottoms. There are some black-and-white publicity pictures of us on the Thames [River] wearing those [laughs].
I had problems with the hair. I have such fine hair that when it got long it just went into big knots, and I'd find things living in it [laughs]. I remember Eric saying after we met Jimi [Hendrix] that one of us had to have that kind of afro. I said, "It ain't going to be me, mate." So Eric got the perm. Things happened in that band by default.
Bruce: I started off singing in church choirs, then solo'd with Benjamin Britten conducting, things like this. But then I became a musician, and musicians, particularly jazz musicians, have this kind of snobbishness where they look down on singers. I sang some songs with Graham Bond, a couple of blues things, but I didn't really find the range in my voice. That came later.
Bruce: My mother was a great folk singer. My father worked in a factory all of his life. He was quite a remarkable man, very intelligent, and won a scholarship to the best high school in Glasgow [Scotland]. But he wasn't able to go because he was the oldest of a family of 12 and had to work at age 14.
That was a real pity, I think. He could have done a lot. He wrote very well and was a musician, too. He was a big fan of Fats Waller, so I grew up with a lot of jazz in the house. My brother was a bee-bop fan, and there would be physical fights between my father and brother about jazz. My brother was eight-years-old, and I'd be listening to these amazing battles with my father saying, "The saxophone is the death knell in jazz," and all this kind of stuff [laughs]. I guess I picked up on all of that.
Bruce: Very early on, there was no piano in the house, so I started singing in church choirs and also in the opposite of church choirs, the socialist Sunday school. Both of my parents were pretty left-wing. They grew up in the Great Depression and, like a lot of people, saw the unfairness that was going on and wanted to do something about it. So yeah, I grew up with this socialist ethos, and here I am at the Savoy [laughs].
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