Monday, 6 May 2013
When you go Googling for dates, details and other snippets of information that might come in useful you'll find the odd snippet that's too good not to purloin for your own purposes. In this case it's: Fresh Cream. It all changed here - for better or worse. Your choice, which I borrowed from here (always give credit where credit's due).
Looking back from a twenty-first century perspective, of course, it mightn’t sound all that new or radically groundbreaking, but much of that comes from the fact that it was the first of the acknowledged mid- to late-sixties guitar hero albums. Of those notional peers, Are You Experienced? came out in the U.K. on 12 May 1967, Jeff Beck’s Truth in August 1968, Led Zeppelin I on 12 January 1969.
Released on manager Robert Stigwood’s independent Reaction label, Fresh Cream, along with the band’s first single (I Feel Free) hit the market place on 9 December 1966. on that basis, if you want to go all comparative, I’d suggest giving Fresh Cream a listen alongside other expressions of the blues boom scene they were emerging from - John Mayall’s Crusade or A Hard Road or, perhaps the original Fleetwood Mac line-up’s Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.
A couple of general observations first.
For a start, given the fact that we’re talking a notional supergroup coming out of a rather small but quite fanatical scene, Cream’s debut album was surprisingly successful, peaking at #6 on the British album charts, which is rather impressive until you note that Mayall’s A Hard Road and Crusade both went as high as #8 and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, released in February 1968, reached #4 and stayed on the charts 37 weeks.