Classic Albums: Cream - Disraeli Gears

David Fricke:
To hear Cream on the radio in 1967 was an amazing shock. Because for all of the innovation in popular music at that time, you had the Beatles, you had the Stones, you had Dylan, there was... there was no other band, and certainly no other English band, that sounded that muscular and funky.

David Fricke:
"We're Going Wrong" is one of the great Cream songs. Not a single, not a big hit, but it actually captures everything that was powerful about them, in a very... unconventional way.

Jack Bruce:
I had a fight with my wife, when I lived in Bracknell Gardens in Hampstead. And I came out of the flat and I walked down the road, and it just came into my... my head. Um... it's just like the kind of... what you say, what you think when you've had a fight with your wife.

David Fricke:
It goes in circles and it climbs, but it never seems to reach anywhere. And Eric doesn't do a whole lot. He plays this chord progression which is actually very... kind of chunky, and again, it's very funky in its way. But Jack's vocal is very powerful, very operatic. And, again, climbing. You know, it's as if he's trying to reach something and not quite getting there. The secret power of "We're Going Wrong" is Ginger's drumming. Because all of the action in the song is underneath Jack and Eric. It's in the tom rolls.

David Fricke:
The impact of that sound on radio, that very fat guitar that, you know, Clapton had at that point, Jack's bass was actually very rubbery, very... very elastic, it almost ping-ponged, it bounced, inside the performances. And Ginger's drumming was not... he wasn't playing straight 4/4s. You know, a lot of the action in his drumming was on the toms. It was on the cymbals, it was on everything around the snare. He was all over the kit, but he was all over the kit with incredible discipline.

Joel Dorn:
That was the loudest group I had ever heard. Like, when Aretha recorded there, everybody was smoking. I mean, it was... they were kicking. But you couldn't hear it three blocks away. Cream was in there, I mean, man, they had all kinds of gobos and everything set up, and stacks of Marshalls.