WHEN THE WAGONS LEAVE THE CITY
The legendary bass player JACK BRUCE talks to Spencer Leigh

This is the full transcript of an interview with Jack Bruce broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside’s “On The Beat” in two parts on 31 May and 1 June 2003. This interview coincided with the reissue of several Jack Bruce solo albums on CD with bonus tracks - “Songs For A Tailor” (1969), “Things We Like” (1970), “Harmony Row” (1971), “Out Of The Storm” (1974) and “How’s Tricks” (1976) - although the conversation was wide ranging. Jack’s latest album is “Shadows In The Air” (2001), which includes new versions of “White Room” and “Sunshine Of Your Love” with Eric Clapton. It has been rather overtaken by events, but I thought some of you might like to read it.

It’s fashionable to take old vinyl albums and reissue them with bonus tracks. Do you find you’re buying them yourself when you go into a store? Say, the Miles Davis ones.
Yeah, definitely Miles Davis. It might be fashionable but for me it is quite unusual. I am quite pleased about it. A lot of people have been asking for those records to be rereleased for years and I am very happy that they have finally done it.

You must be pleased that all the session tapes are still around.
Actually, a lot of them are just two-tracks, there are not a lot of multi-tracks around. I am pleased because a lot of stuff was destroyed in a fire in Germany where these things are stored. They have them all and also some things that didn’t make it for reasons for time.

Yes, you could only get 40-odd minutes on an LP.
Yes, especially on my records which had a lot of bass on. As the grooves got closer to the middle, the albums would jump if they were very bass heavy. I am not technically minded in that way, but we always went for 40 minutes maximum.

When you came to hearing the tapes again, were you surprised at some of the things you had recorded?
In some ways. I don’t tend to listen to things from the past because I am always in love with whatever it is I am doing at the time. I love my new band the Cuicoland Express, so it was quite nice to be forced to listen to them, and yeah, some of them were good.

You presumably discover songs that you hadn’t thought about in years.
Yeah absolutely, you forget about those things and you think that you might do them in your act. It is nice.

There is also a CD, “Cream At The BBC”, with introductions by Brian Matthew.
Oh yeah, he was great. I loved Brian a lot, he was fantastic. It only came today and I was doing the photo session with Eamonn McCabe, “The Guardian” sports photographer, so I am over the moon about that. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it. I put on the very beginning and heard Brian say, “The Cream”, which was quite funny. They didn’t really know what to make of us at the Beeb. (Laughs)

They would be all be quick one-off sessions, wouldn’t they?
Pretty much so. Some of the very early ones had to be done live because they only had two tracks, maybe even only one track. I remember doing “Politician” towards the end and they said proudly, “Oh, we’ve got three tracks now, so we were able to overdub.” “Politician” was done with an overdub vocal and that was written in the BBC studio at the time. That is the very first version of it. We came up with that funny riff and we laid it in a blues form and I overdubbed the vocal. Then, when I came to do it live, I realised that it was almost impossible to play and sing it at the same time. I had to go and practice a bit!

I remember going to a poetry reading in Liverpool in 1966 and Pete Brown and Adrian Henri were on the bill, and Pete Brown said, “I am going to read some poems but these are really lyrics for a group called Cream.” I know “Wrapping Paper” was amongst them. I presume that they worked individually as poems and then you put the music to them.
Absolutely not, the music came first for almost all of our songs, and then Pete and I would sit down and hammer the lyrics out over quite long periods of time. I am very particular about what I sing, not the meaning, I don’t care about the meaning, but the actual sound of the words. I regard the actual sound of the words as an instrument and certain words don’t sing very well. “White Room”, for instance, started off as being something about selling fridges to eskimos, something very bizarre, and then we worked it until we got what I wanted. Pete would write the words but I would thrown in lines and words, whatever, that’s the way we worked. With “Wrapping Paper”, definitely the music was written first.

There is a lot of imagery in Pete Brown’s lyrics and from what you’re saying’ it doesn’t matter too much if you don’t know what that imagery is about.
No, it is just sounds really. I never really bothered about whether there was any meaning, which I doubt. (Laughs)

There is a marvellously evocative track on “Songs For A Tailor” called “Theme From An Imaginary Western”. What is the story of that song?
I wrote that when I was very young, probably in the early 60s, so it was a piece of music that I had hanging around for years. It was more like a French ballad, but a lot of things I write start off like that and then end up being rock’n’roll. (Laughs) I thought it would be a great song for Cream but the guys didn’t reckon much to it, they didn’t like it, which is a great pity, because we could have done a fantastic version of it. Nevertheless, it went on my first solo album, “Songs For A Tailor”, the first released one, that is, so it was nice to have that song really.

What about the title because it was so distinctive?
That’s one where the meaning is fairly important. Pete and myself were both very interested in cowboy films, westerns, and we equated going off in a van with being in a covered wagon. We were like the people who were opening up the west. A lot of the bands, especially Graham Bond’s, went around Britain opening up clubs. It was making the idea quite romantic and putting it into song.

Did you like the cover version by Mountain?
I did but they changed a couple of things and I didn’t like that. Felix Pappalardi produced “Songs For A Tailor” so that must have given the idea of doing that song. Felix and me were very close friends, and I liked Mountain, they were very good.

I interviewed Pete Brown a couple of years ago and he said that although he liked Ella Fitzgerald covering “Sunshine Of Your Love”, she got the words wrong.
Yeah, she sang ‘my dull surprise’ instead of “my dawn surprise” and I never understood why. I don’t mind - Ella can sing whatever she wants as far as I’m concerned. (Laughs)

It must be nice when songs have a life of their own and you don’t know where they are going to turn up.
That’s always nice for lots of reasons. “Sunshine Of Your Love” was a hit record for Ella and then Mongo Santamaria did a wonderful Latin version which gave me the idea of doing it with my band, which is a Latin-influenced band. It was on my last solo record, “Shadows In The Air”.

What sort of band have you got now?
I have got the Cuicoland Express which is Vernon Reid on guitar, who is with Living Colours sometimes, Bernie Worrell, who invented funk with George Clinton, and then I have three drummers - the amazing Horacio Hernandez El Negro on drums, Robby Ameen on drums and Richie Flores on congas, and myself. Sometimes I have some other people joining in but that is the basic stripped-down road band.

So it is a bit like Scotland meets World Music.
Well, I don’t believe in world music. All music comes from the world unless it is from the spheres, even bird song is in the world, it is not a term that I agree with. It is a funny idea.

What about touring because I can’t recall you playing Liverpool in years?
Liverpool is a funny place, Liverpool always had its own scene, I remember playing it with Cream, and I’ve played it a couple of times over the years, but it is quite difficult to get in there. We’ve got our own scene going, and good luck. I would love to play there anytime as it is one of my favourite places.

While we’re on the subject of Liverpool, you play the bass and so does Paul McCartney. Am I right in saying that he is not a busy bass player and plays as few notes as possible?
No, Paul is a very melodic bass player, one of the leading bass players of the day. I sometimes tour with Ringo Starr and having to had to sit down and learn his bass parts, like “With A Little Help From My Friends”, I can see that they were very good. “Rain” is a very good one. I have always had a lot of respect for Paul, but all bass players respect what he does. His parts were very melodic in the same way that I hope mine are.

Were you into the Beatles straight away?
I wasn’t, no. When they first happened, I was very much into jazz and a great friend of mine and mentor, Dick Heckstall-Smith, told me that I had to listen to this band. They had these amazing harmonies which were consecutive fourths. I did listen to the Beatles but I wasn’t hooked on the early stuff, simply because I was into other things, but like everyone else I got sucked in there.

And George Harrison had quite a link to Cream as he co-wrote “Badge”.
He did indeed and he also played on it, which gave me the idea of asking him to play on “Songs For A Tailor”. You can hear him on “Never Tell Your Mother She’s Out Of Tune”. The thing that got me when I worked with him on “Badge” was the inversions that he used. That’s why I asked him to play on that track and I remember arriving a bit late and he’d been in there for an hour or two tuning up and getting his sound together. I was very impressed by that professionalism.

Just for uninitiated including me, what are inversions?
Instead of playing the obvious root chords, he would take them up a couple of frets, and play something unexpected. It would be upside down or inside out, an inversion, as opposed to being straight ahead. That was really nice and I think he helped “Badge” a lot.

Had he worked that out for himself?
Yes, he was a very thoughtful and serious musician. Eric had become very friendly with George and with the Beatles around that time and he would have influenced George a little, and vice versa. George was a wonderful guy and very serious about what he did.

Can we confirm a story about you from the 60s., that you are on Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo”?
Yes, I was with Manfred Mann for quite a while and that was the one hit single that we did while I was with the band.

Was it difficult to leave as it was very successful band?
No, it was very easy to leave. It was not what I wanted to do. I joined the Manfreds because I was getting married and I was skint. To me, it was like selling out and even the money which was supposed to be great wasn’t that great actually. (Laughs) No, I was very happy to leave, I was tired of playing “Do Wah Diddy Diddy Diddy”, just how many diddys are there?

And you had been offered a job with Marvin Gaye.
Yeah, that was 1965. I played with Marvin Gaye on something for TV. He came to my flat in West Hampstead and we sat up all night talking about music. At the time I was going through a difficult period, I was being criticised because I was trying to find a new direction for the bass, very much under the influence of the great Tamla-Motown player, James Jamerson. Marvin was very encouraging and he also said, “Come back and join my band”, but that was when I was getting married, so my wife wouldn’t let me. (Laughs)

Would you have enjoyed being involved with Tamla-Motown records?
Oh yes, much later in the 70s, I did “Out Of The Storm” mostly in the Record Plant in Los Angeles and in the next studio was John Lennon and in the other studio was Stevie Wonder. James Jamerson was playing on his sessions. I was doing a bass overdub, where the song, coincidentally, was called “Keep On Wondering”, and the door opened and this guy rushed in. He must have heard the music and thought it was the Stevie Wonder session. I was in the control room overdubbing and he grabbed my bass and started playing it and it was James Jamerson. (Laughs) We became very good friends and I was there for seven or eight months. He had too many sessions, and so I did some of the Tamla sessions he couldn’t cover.

Did you and Stevie Wonder and John Lennon meet up?
There was the Jim Keltner fan club and every Saturday or Sunday, everybody got together and we had a big jam session. We did this very long version of “Stand By Me”, it seemed to be John Lennon’s favourite song, and I remember doing that for hours, and when I came back there was some other bass player playing it at a completely different tempo. We did one thing that surfaces from time to time which was a session when Mick Jagger came in and John Lennon was there and it is called “Too Many Cooks”. It’s a funky thing and quite nice.

John Lennon always liked his voice bathed in echo and yet he had a wonderful voice.
That’s true, like a lot of people he was not comfortable with the sound of his own voice. It sounds strange when you’re talking about John Lennon but it was true. Another person like that is Bob Dylan, whose singing I love very much.

Have you thought of reworking any Bob Dylan songs?
Funnily enough, yes, I am toying with the idea of getting Bob to sing one of my songs and then I will sing one of his. I would like to do “I Pity The Poor Immigrant” and I would like to get him to sing “Politician”. I don’t know, I would have to catch him on a good day. (Laughs)

Did you meet Phil Spector at the Record Plant?
No, the first time I met him was at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Induction in 1993, and that was the first time and last time I met him. I was quite lucky!

Cream being in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame sounds a little odd to us as rock’n’roll in the UK refers to Elvis and Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry.
Yes, but that’s only this little country. Rock and roll is what we play, it is a generic term for everything and within the Hall of Fame there are a lot of different kinds of music, which is good. It started with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis but it now includes a wonderful and varied amount of music. It is a valid term. It is an American music and no matter how great some of the British and other nationalities have become, it is still basically American. We call it the Rock Hall for short.

When it came to Cream was it difficult to know who was going to be the lead vocalist, you or Eric?
Not at all. It was very much Ginger’s idea to form that band. He wanted Eric and at the time Ginger and me weren’t the best of friends, but when he asked Eric, Eric said, “Yes, but we will have to have Jack as the lead singer”, so Ginger had to ask me to join the band. It was very much from encouragement from Eric because I used to only sing a couple of songs with Graham Bond and harmonies with Manfred Mann. I wasn’t really a singer but through Eric’s encouragement, I started to sing - well, somebody had to do it - Eric couldn’t do it so it had to be me. I started singing and gradually got confident at it, as did Eric, but it took him a bit longer.

And Eric’s voice has really improved with the years.
He has got better, yes. I always liked his singing but he wasn’t confident. If the band had lasted longer, I am sure he would have sung a lot more and also written a lot more.

If Ginger invited you into the group and wasn’t getting on with you, isn’t that sowing the seeds of your own destruction?
In a way, but we were the rhythm section at the time. He could have got somebody else, but it wouldn’t have worked as well. Plus I was starting to write songs so they made the right move. (Laughs)

It was rock played by musicians with some jazz background so something very distinctive came from it.
Certainly in the case of Ginger and myself, we were jazz players who applied our way of playing in a free jazz way to rock and blues, which became what Cream was. Not in Eric’s case though, I don’t think that he was into jazz at all at the time. What was happening rhythmically was driving Eric very much in a jazz way.

Cream was only around for two years and yet you had a great output and now, when you consider how long it takes to make an album, what you did in the 60s must astonish you.
In a way, but with Graham Bond we did a whole album in three hours and a lot of jazz records were done very very quickly. We took four or five days to make an album with Cream, and we had ten days once which was a long time for us. A lot of the songs would have been worked up on the road so it was a case of going in and recording them. Cream was two different bands - it was the band in the studio and the live band which was totally different. The approaches were different as we would use the facilities of the studio to overdub. When it was live, you simply went for it.

Which album did you make in three hours with Graham Bond?
It was “The Sound Of ’65”. It was mostly rehearsed, but it includes the first two songs of mine that were ever recorded - and they were recorded with overdubs in 20 minutes!

The “Things We Like” album was recorded, but not released, before “Songs For A Tailor”.
That was done in 1968, I think, towards the end of Cream, and I wrote most of the tunes when I was 11 which is why I called it “Things We Like” because it is a childish name. It is the name of a reading primer. I had some money and I wanted to go into a studio and make a record but shortly after that we decided that Cream would finish, would curdle. (Laughs) I decided not to release that as my first solo record as I felt I wanted to do a more personal, song type album which was “Songs For A Tailor”, and then we released “Things We Like”.

It is amazing that you kept tunes you had written when you were 11.
Composers don’t ever throw anything away as you can recycle things. “White Room”, “I Feel Free”, “Sunshine Of Your Love” and everything else have all written down and arranged on paper, that is the way I work and always have, so it is not unusual. I have the string quartet that I wrote when I was 11 or 12. Those things you don’t throw away. It’s not unusual - ah, Tom Jones - for composers to store things away as they might use them someday.

It was a great advantage for you to be able to write music from an early age.
For me it was. You can also do it by recording things, and now you can just play something into a computer or whatever and it’s very easy. But I always carry music paper with me. If I have an idea I write it down.

Presumably you would have been happy as a classical musician.
In a way, but I went to college and realised that I didn’t always enjoy being the interpreter of other people’s music, great as it is. I love Bach and Mozart but I wanted to do something of my own. If I had been to university and got stuck in like I was supposed to, I guess I could have been a classical composer but that’s not what I wanted to do really.

Were you into rock’n’roll as well as classical music when you were young?
Yes, I was in a skiffle group like everybody else of my age. I was singing and learning piano and it was a very important thing as it meant that everybody could be in a band. I was learning cello and I took my school cello and played it as a bass. (Laughs) I also got a white shirt and dyed it black. I never met Lonnie Donegan but I met Chas McDevitt recently and he has written a fantastic book about skiffle.

Was “Harmony Row” an album of improvisations?
No, one afternoon in my house I sat down and wrote the album. It poured out from beginning to end in the sequence that it was actually recorded. It was not improvisations, the songs came out one after the other in one afternoon. I guess sometimes that that can happen. Mozart was like that all the time, but if you are fortunate and lucky, you might a little gift from God.

And were you on anything at the time?
No comment. (Laughs)

Did it astonish you when that happened?
It pleased me, it was almost like tasting it. It was in the summer and very hot and I opened the windows and Catherine Deneuve lived next door with David Bailey, and I thought, “They’re going to have this.” Nobody complained. (Laughs) It was all written in my front room where the grand piano was and then I put the tape recorder on, played everything and then took it upstairs to my studio and did some demos.

“Victoria Sage” on that album is a lovely haunting song.
Um, I think there are a lot of good songs on that album. I used to do “You Burned The Tables On Me” but I haven’t done it for a while. I have over 400 songs so it is quite difficult to decide what to do.

There are certain songs you have to do.
Yes, I will always include some of the hits. When I first worked with Ringo Starr five years ago, I asked him what he wanted me to do and he said, “Just do the Number 1’s, Jack”. The band that I had in 1969/70 was with Mitch Mitchell and Larry Coryell and I didn’t do any of the material that I wrote for Cream. I wanted to move on. I went to see Bob Dylan shortly after that and he was going through a period when he wouldn’t do any of his famous songs and I felt cheated because he didn’t do “Like A Rolling Stone” or “All Along The Watchtower”. It made me think, and since then I became friendly with Albert Collins, the great great blues guitar player, and he used to say, “Jack, never forget that you are just an entertainer.” That is great advice. Ringo also taught me a lot in that way, you tend to get a little bit high-flown with your ideas, you think that you have got to do this or that, but basically you are an entertainer.

And you often do the old songs differently.
“Sunshine Of Your Love”, “White Room” and “I Feel Free” have a life of their own now. I feel quite honoured to do them, it is almost as if I didn’t write them as they have been going for so long. I still approach them with a lot of respect, apart from the fact that they have paid the rent for so many years. (Laughs) I have no problem in doing them, but I don’t often do them the way that we did them in Cream. I have my six piece band, sometimes a nine piece band if I can afford it, and so we do a modern version of those things. My drummer Horacio is from Cuba and he knows all of my material, often better than I do myself. He was growing up in Communist Cuba, not really supposed to be playing that sort of music. He had an illicit band in Cuba where they would play Hendrix and Cream and one time they were rehearsing, the police came in like it was a drug bust and they got arrested, and he said, “Hey, Jack, we were playing ‘White Room’ and I spent a month in prison for playing ‘White Room’”, so when I did my first album with those guys I had to do “White Room” for Horacio. It is a completely different version on that record, it has Eric on it, but it doesn’t have any backbeat. It is not like a rock song at all, it is completely African and it is wonderful.

“How’s Tricks” came out on RSO in 1977. I presume that this was an unfortunate label to be on as the Bee Gees had pretty well taken it over.
It was hard, but I don’t think it was the Bee Gees’ fault. The Robert Stigwood Organisation never really understood what I was about. (Laughs) They were business people who were interested in shifting units. I think of myself as a lucky guy who always has an idea of what he wants to do musically but was never into being a star, although Cream gave me the opportunity to follow my own little path and have my own musical language.

Did you know Jimi Hendrix well?
Quite well, I don’t think many people could claim to know Jimi well but I certainly spent quite a lot of time with him. He was in the studio when I recorded “White Room”, and he was very encouraging, because it wasn’t that easy for me to get the powers-that-be to recognise the quality of those songs in a commercial sense. They didn’t really see them, but I was always very lucky. When we were doing “Sunshine Of Your Love”, Booker T and Otis Redding were in the studio and they both said to Ahmet Ertegun, “Yeah, this is good stuff”, and it didn’t hurt to have Jimi around when I was doing “White Room”. He said, “I wish I could write a song like that” and I said, “Come on, give me a break, man”.

I’m surprised to hear that because Ahmet Ertegun had a jazz background.
He did, but they didn’t see them as commercial pop songs and I was trying to write commercial pop songs, very influenced by the later Beatles. Songs that would be striking and say a lot in three minutes, which is what they managed to do supremely well. By emulating that, I didn’t see why you had to have very straightforward, rigid ideas about pop songs - you know, eight bars, eight bars and then a bridge and then eight bars. You could do anything you wanted and that is what the Beatles did and that is what I was trying to do, but it was difficult to get Ahmet to see that, but I was lucky in that there were people around who saw the quality of them.

On “Cream At The BBC”, there is a track called “Lawdy Mama”, which I think developed into “Strange Brew”.
That was during the time that I was having problems with the people at Atlantic and they had decided that Eric should be the front man of the band, and I should retreat to being just the bass player. The first thing they did was to take “Lawdy Mama” and change it to “Strange Brew”. Felix went away and came back the next day with the words for “Strange Brew”. The “Lawdy Mama” bass part is slightly different from what “Strange Brew” is. That annoyed me and it still does, but it is all water under the bridge. (Laughs)

Jack Bruce, thank you very much.
My pleasure.