As far as the writing goes, leave out the jokey Mother’s Lament and you’re left with ten tracks, an uncompleted piece buffed up and polished by Pappalardi and Collins (Strange Brew) and one that was entirely their own (World of Pain), one Martin Sharp poem set to a tune from Clapton (Tales of Brave Ulysses), an old time blues (Outside Woman Blues), Baker’s contribution (Blue Condition) and Bruce’s We’re Going Wrong as well as four Bruce collaborations with poet Pete Brown that contribute a much more consistent quality rating. It definitely helps to have people who know their way around words on board.
As far as openers go, they don’t come too much better than Strange Brew, the first single off the album and a significant departure from Clapton’s previous blues stylings. Cutting the track in New York with an engineer who knew his way around multitrack recording (the late great Tom Dowd) added a sonic complexity they couldn’t have managed earlier. In places, the guitar work seems to have been triple-tracked (at least), with little riffs that wind their way around, in and out of each other with the whole thing held together at the seams by Baker's drumming.
Driven by one of the all-time great riffs, Sunshine of Your Love, according to Tom Dowd, wasn’t working until he suggested that Ginger Baker try something akin to the war drums in a Western movie as the Indians ominously appear on the sky line, and it’s Baker’s drums that drives and underpins that iconic ten-note riff, allegedly the result of Bruce seeing the Jimi Hendrix Experience for the first time.
Bruce and Clapton share the vocals, with the lyrics stemming from the end of an all-night Bruce/Brown writing session that hadn’t produced much of note (It’s getting near dawn / Where nights close their tired eyes). Throw in a Clapton solo that’s built around Billie Holliday’s Blue Moon and you’ve got the makings of a hugely successful single, and one of the classic tracks of the psychedelic era.
But we’re still looking at an outfit looking to cement a place in the marketplace, and while you could look at the Pappalardi/Collins World of Pain as a lightweight successor to what had preceded it, for mine it’s a fairly classy piece of understated pop, with Clapton’s multi-tracked wah-wah guitar underlining the argument that amid all the fuss about Cream as thundering bluesmeisters, or some such hyperbole, there was a fairly sophisticated experimental pop outfit lurking under the surface.
That’s equally obvious on the soaring 12-string driven Dance the Night Away, which along with the masterful We’re Going Wrong, is one of the best examples of Cream as quality purveyors of power pop. There’s nothing fancy about Pete Brown’s lyrics, just a clear expression of an intent to dance myself to nothing over an instrumental track that invokes both The Byrds and Middle Eastern Sufi mystics.