Cream and the Fillmore
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Bruce: "The place was crammed. I think we played there for ten days... We were blown away by the fact that people knew who we were." Most importantly, the Fillmore "had the best sound system we'd ever used up to that point, which was crucial."
"The Fillmore had a great PA, and a really good guy doing it called Charlie Button who did the sound for the Dead. It was great to hear the wonderful sound. That was when we first started doing the extended improvisations, which was new to the band. We usually played very short three, four, five-minute versions of the songs. Quite simply, we were fed up with doing that, and the audience was so great at the Fillmore. They were all so out of it, so laid-back, and would shout, 'Just play!' They wouldn't let us go. So we just started jamming, and that turned into what we became known for."
"We expected that it would be the same kind of thing [as England]: nobody knowing us or wanting to know us... We were very, very nervous because this was something really big for us, and it was almost the first time we had played to a full house (the others were festivals, with loads of bands, or else they were tiny pubs and clubs). But all these kids had actually come to see us, and it was the first time we'd had our own audience on that scale, and they were just shouting out things like 'play anything, just play, we love you' and stuff, and the whole thing ended with us just playing these incredibly long, improvised things."
"That was the influence San Francisco had on us... When we hit the Fillmore, we started to play those long improvisations... All the audiences were stoned out of their collective bonces. That was what they wanted us to do, they just encouraged us to do that, and it was very successful. It just sort of happened."
Clapton: "We were told by Bill Graham that we could play anything we liked for as long as we liked, even if this meant playing til dawn... We soon realized that no one could see us because they were projecting light shows onto the band, so that we were actually in the light show. It was very liberating. We could just play our hearts out, without inhibition, knowing that the audience was more into whatever scenery was being projected onto the screen behind us. I'm sure a good deal of them were out of their heads...but it didn't matter. They were listening, and that encouraged us to go places we'd never been before. We started doing extended solos, and were soon playing fewer and fewer songs, but for much longer. We'd go off in our own directions, then hit these coincidental points in the music when we would all arrive at the same conclusion...and we would jam on it for a little while and then go back into our own thing. I had never experienced anything like it. It had nothing to do with lyrics or ideas; it was much deeper, purely musical. We were at our peak during that period."
There's an exciting audience tape from their last Fillmore show on September 3 - among other songs, Sweet Wine now has a great freeform jam, and the Spoonful features an incredible droning-raga solo from Clapton (perhaps influenced by Michael Bloomfield's East/West solos).
The whole thing: http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2010/03/cream-and-dead.html
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Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Don Volume
This is from the August run,
This is from the August run, check out the Fenders;
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: An organ grinder’s tune
some interesting reading
some interesting reading there
KOFSKY: Who have you learned from recently?
GARCIA: The Cream.
KOFSKY: What about Jimi Hendrix? I've heard a lot of talk about him.
GARCIA: Nothing like the Cream. I mean, he's also got a three-piece band - similar sound, you know, because of the instrumentation - but the Cream is much heavier. They're much better musicians than Jimi Hendrix... You should have seen [Cream] at the Fillmore...cause they played with a lot of very heavy bands. They played with Gary Burton's band. They played with the Electric Flag. They played with Paul Butterfield's band and with Charlie Musselwhite's band. And they made them all sound pretty old-fashioned...
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CLapton playing a strat at
CLapton playing a strat at the Fillmore? THAT's a rare photo. Musta broke a string on the Fool.
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This is my thread of the day!
This is my thread of the day!
A good read and loved that photo, as I'm a Ginger Baker fan... while still in elementary school, I used to sneak into my older brother's room to play and dance to Cream's Disraeli Gears record, as well as the White Album.
Thank you.
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Couldn't disagree more with
Couldn't disagree more with Jerry. Band sounds like they play kazoos.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Lord Kalvert
No the Dead played kazoos
No -- the Dead played kazoos
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Lance minimum goad Newberry
I've never been much of a
I've never been much of a Cream fan, but then I never saw them so what do I know?
>>>CLapton playing a strat at the Fillmore?<<<
I did see Clapton play a strat at the Fillmore, when he did his all-blues show there in '94.
By FAR the best Clapton show I've ever seen, and the best show I've ever seen at the Fillmore.
And I've seen quite a few amazing shows in that old place over almost 30 years now.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Howard
What year and venue is the
What year and venue is the Cream photo from? Is that the Fillmore, Fillmore West, Winterland, 1966, 1967?
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Funny this thread popped up
Funny this thread popped up just as East-West popped up on random shuffle on my iTunes. It made me read the wiki page about it which also talks about how a visit to San Francisco blew thier minds...
"One result was the inclusion of two all-instrumental extended jams at the instigation of Bloomfield following the group's successful appearance at The Fillmore in San Francisco during March alongside Jefferson Airplane.[5] Both reflected his love of jazz, as the blue note-laden "Work Song" featuring harmonica by Butterfield had become a hard bop standard, and the title track "East-West" used elements of modal jazz as introduced by Miles Davis on his ground-breaking Kind of Blue album. Bloomfield had become enamored of work by John Coltrane in that area, especially his incorporation of ideas from Indian raga music.[6] The album also included Michael Nesmith's song "Mary, Mary," which Nesmith would soon record with his band The Monkees - although original pressings of East-West did not include a songwriter's credit for this track.
Marsh's expansive liner notes observe that the song "East-West" "was an exploration of music that moved modally, rather than through chord changes. As Naftalin explains, "The song was based, like Indian music, on a drone. In Western musical terms, it 'stayed on the one'. The song was tethered to a four-beat bass pattern and structured as a series of sections, each with a different mood, mode and color, always underscored by the drummer, who contributed not only the rhythmic feel but much in the way of tonal shading, using mallets as well as sticks on the various drums and the different regions of the cymbals. In addition to playing beautiful solos, Paul [Butterfield] played important, unifying things [on harmonica] in the background - chords, melodies, counterpoints, counter-rhythms. This was a group improvisation. In its fullest form it lasted over an hour."
In his summation, Marsh points out that "'East-West' can be heard as part of what sparked the West Coast's rock revolution, in which such song structures with extended improvisatory passages became commonplace."
Going on to call the Butterfield Blues Band "one of the greatest bands of the rock era", Marsh concludes that "With 'East-West', above any other extended piece of the mid-Sixties, a rock band finally achieved a version of the musical freedom that free jazz had found a few years earlier."
The album is also credited with spawning the harder acid rock sound.[8] The track "East-West", with its early use of the extended rock solo, has been described as laying "the roots of psychedelic acid rock"[9] and featuring "much of acid-rock's eventual DNA".[10]
The band members appearing on the album were all inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015."
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Lord Kalvert
That photo is August 1967
That photo is August 1967 which is when Cream first appeared in SF for two different weekends that month I believe- with a stop at the Whiskey in Hollywood also.
Lance- we all know Clapton has been a Strat man ever since 1970- but in the latter half of 67 he was rarely seen playing anything but his customized Gibson SG. I never saw a shot of him with a strat ever in those years.
Bloomfield said that after spending a day on Owsley acid he "unlocked" the secret of Indian music and hence wrote East West. It runs about 15 mins on the album- but on stage they used to go almost an hour with it back then.
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: Lord Kalvert
Howard - it's the original
Howard - it's the original Fillmore.
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