Cream - "Passing the Time" from the album Wheels of Fire

First off, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. May you each get the EP, LP, CD, DVD or iStore gift card you've been coveting.

Next, let me be frank: while I've certainly tried to get in the spirit of the season with the snowy roof I've installed up top, with the little snowstorm I've brewed up, and with a really evocative wintry tune, "Passing the Time," is not, technically, a Christmas song.

But I think and I hope you'll find it's OK, if only because I'm not, technically, a Christian . . . .

But I like givin' gifts and gettin' gifts and I like pretty colored lights, so nobody call me a Scrooge, OK? I'll even cop to having a Christmas tree in my living room. We always insist on the Fraser firs, and like 'em around five foot high.

I was raised Jewish, and was even bar-mitzvahed, but at some point shortly before the big event, I realized that I wasn't buying any of it.

Of course, Christmas envy wasn't my reason for having left the Jewish religion: the reasons, I assure you, were a lot larger than the varying methods of celebrating some Solstice-celebration analogue. I didn't just leave Judaism; I left organized religion.

But now that I can be impartial in comparing religious holidays, I will tell you what: Christmas kicks Chanukkah's ass.

It's not even close. The menorah candles are the best thing about Chanukkah, and if they were included with Christmas, they'd be in the lower teens on any ordered list.

If Chanukkah had been better, I'd have probably stayed with that as the excuse to get happy and festive and drunk each December. But it wasn't, so I've got a Christmas tree in my living room.

But a winter-song on my blog. Ah well, call it striking a blow for the secular, I suppose.

But let's get to the music, shall we?

There's not much to be truthful that's Christmasy about the center section of the song, where Baker Bruce and Clapton * simply start wailing to the best of their jaw-dropping abilities, but I will ask--since I'm being reminded--how people can call some Grateful Dead-worshipping band like Phish or Dave Matthews a "jam band" when Cream so clearly sets the example for what jamming should do, and when Phish and Dave Matthews play so very differently what Cream is doing here.

Cream is jamming; I don't know what it is you call what those other guys do. Maybe an adaptation of the term that I use for boring postrock bands ("noodling") describes it as well as any.

Regardless as to what it is these pretenders do, listening to Cream take flight into their best improvisations, whether in the studio as here, or live (as on "I'm So Glad" from Goodbye), is still thrilling for me, even after having known the material for years and years. Their ideas were just that good.

What's kind of interesting here is how Clapton is the guy in the background during the instrumental workout. Baker--still the only drummer I've ever cared to hear a drum solo from--and Bruce--who may not be my favorite bassist of all time, but would be in any top five list I might make--are both in the forefront, while Clapton sounds like he's comping, supplying the rhythm as his rhythm section goes free-form.

The song is credited to drummer Ginger Baker and to Mike Taylor, and it is to be supposed that Baker handled much of the lyrics, while Taylor handled most of the music. Taylor--a pianist--had played with Baker in trad jazz bands in the early '60's, and had, by the time Wheels of Fire was released in 1968, put out two albums of his own that had become semi-legendary in the annals of British jazz.

He was also by 1968 homeless, a complete schizophrenic, and an acid-gobbler of tremendous consumption. Within a year, Wheels would ship 500,000 copies, and Taylor would be dead. His bloated, partially decomposed body was fished from an outlet bay to the Thames River in January of '69. The coroner noted that the body was at least two weeks old, but declined to cite a cause of death.

Whoah. Sorry to harsh your Christmas, there. Sometimes I get carried away with the twists and turns of things, if you hadn't noticed. Anyway, what's important here is that Taylor (who also co-wrote the amazing "Pressed Rat and Warthog" with Baker) had been known as an inspired composer; Ginger, not so much.

But, boy, the Cream drummer could write himself some lyrics. "Pressed Rat's" were psychedelia at its absurd finest, and the calliope and glockenspiel section of the song under consideration today features concrete, evocative language that transports the listener into the lonely woman's wintry world.

Hearing Jack Bruce warble on about the roof being a white blanket or about the icicles on the windowpanes truly puts a picture in the mind's eye. I picture an isolated house on a snowy hilltop. A few evergreens dot the hillside and a pebbly path from which the snow has been cleared winds lazily up the hill.

White smoke issues forth from a brick chimney into a clear blue sky. Wreaths dotted with berries and pinecones have been placed above the doorways, and candles twinkle through the iced windows.

There are worse places to pass the time, for sure. I've lived in South Florida my entire life, so a white Christmas has always been something of an abstraction to me. It's something other people, living in more normal places, might have. Well, I'm still stuck here, but here's wishing you a Christmas that looks (if not feels) like the calliope and glockenspiel portions of "Passing the Time."



Cream - Wheels of Fire - 03 - Passing The Time.mp3

This file was removed May 22, 2010. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Supergroup Rock, Merry Christmas!

*I don't see anywhere that Cream ever considered calling themselves "The BBC," but they totally should have. (Return)

Skip James - "I'm So Glad" and Cream - "I'm So Glad" from the Album Goodbye

Funny how people get when presented with obscure music. While I would hope that most approach the stuff with the clear and open mind with which I try to engage it, most times, it seems two other attitudes apply. Some poor souls are spooked by the unfamiliar music with the unfamiliar name, and sadly resist building a familiarity with something that could possibly enrich them.

But another type is even more misguided, I think. These are the ones who embrace the obscurity, who in fact value the obscurity more than the other salient characteristics of the music.

I sound pedantic, shit, that's no good. Let's go to Terry Zwigoff, let me illustrate.

Zwigoff is an accomplished film director with whom I am familiar because of the two excellent films of his that I have seen: Crumb and Ghost World. Ghost World, on which I'd like to focus here, is based on the comics of Daniel Clowes, and tells the tale of a pair of disaffected young girls, and how their friendship wanes in the months after their high school graduation.

A major theme of the movie is how consumer culture stultifies us. Enid (the more troubled one, and the one who, as played by Thora Birch, gets most of the screen time) in several instances refuses to play nicely with the consumption infrastructure.

Along with her object of disaffection Seymour, she rejects the prepackaged bar band music of "Blues Hammer" and takes up with the music of Skip James. James, who first recorded his finger-picked Mississippi Blues at the onset of the Great Depression, becomes a symbol of individuality through his tune "Devil Got My Woman," the keening refrain of which can be heard throughout Zwigoff's film.

All well and good. But, as I had said, let's go to Zwigoff, to illustrate. The following is from Zwigoff's liner notes to the movie's soundtrack CD:

I tried a lot of my favorite 78s with different scenes and it was very satisfying when they worked. Skip James I knew would work, and it was a great privilege to be able to use his music as part of this film. "Devil Got My Woman" was the first old 78 I ever heard that stopped me dead in my tracks.

[ . . . . . . . . . . . ]
One further note about Skip James. His "I'm So Glad" was part of a huge hit rock LP by The Cream during the 60's. When I was in college it was impossible to escape that damn LP - it was playing in every house, apartment, and coffee house, or so it seemed.

Although aided by the blasting volume of electric guitar, bass, and drums, The Cream's version was vastly inferior in every way to James' intense, frenzied masterpiece which was no doubt fueled by the immense inner anger he clearly possessed. Although The Cream's version sold over a million copies, and James' probably sold less than one hundred, it is James' version that will be remembered (while Bjork and The Cream records are rotting in some New Jersey landfill).

While I'm all for seeking out and finding the music that moves you, by the second paragraph, Zwigoff's notes seem to have devolved from In Praise Of into a Screed Against.

Looked at a certain way, Zwigoff's caterwauling seems to be trying to reignite a battle that's long since ended. It's like, get over it, dude: Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan both fought as footsoldiers in the war that was won by electrically amplified instruments.

Too loud? How very charming.

And, of course, we as readers of Zwigoff's liner notes don't particularly care WHAT kind of music it was that the kids who used to beat him up once listened to.

But as I suggested uptop, I think there's more going on here. I think there's an illustrative trap that Zwigoff falls into, a trap that we need to be careful of as, ahem, consumers, of music. Basically, we need to understand that obscurity is no guarantee of superiority, nor is primitivism, nor poorly-defined notions of "authenticity."

None of us, of course, want to become collector scum. The Misfits on CD are no more or no less authentic than the same fucking songs on the limited edition singles, and Cream is no more or no less "real" than the man they covered shortly before his death in 1969.

Once I get past the hiss, I quite like the Skip James version of "I'm So Glad." The man could clearly play some guitar. And of course he wrote the tune, or at least he wrote it as much as anyone did.

James was a pioneer of the fingerpicked delta blues, it's true. But Cream were pioneers, too, playing the heavily amplified blues as if they were jazz, stretching boundaries and stretching time. And just as their popularity was not their fault, neither was it that their imitators were for the most part not as good as they.

The idea that Cream's interpretations of Skip James songs are in any way inferior to the originals--simply because they are (relatively) newer and louder and more popular--is absurd. To play at the sort of pretention that would hold otherwise sort of reveals some insecurities, no? Because in the end, things like your distribution and your amplification are irrelevant to the music at hand.

Anyway, I thought you the reader might like to compare at least one of Cream's two versions with the earliest known version of Skip James' original. I'm sure any of you who do prefer the James version will at the least not have silly reasons for doing so.

Skip James - The Complete Early Recordings 1930 - 16 - I'm So Glad.mp3

128 kbps mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)


File Under: Delta Blues


This file was removed April 7, 2009. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

194 kbps VBR mp3, up for six weeks (Right click and save as target)

File Under: Supergroup Rock