So Baker, looking for a better earner, approaches Clapton, who is coming off seeing Buddy Guy in a trio setting and learns, yes, Eric’s interested, but he’d like to see Jack Bruce on bass. That was a complication Baker wasn’t ready for. He’d worked with Bruce in the Graham Bond Organisation and the pair, regardless of how well they worked as a rhythm section, loathed and detested each other.
There was the odd rehearsal/jam here and there through 1966, basically, one gathers, when everyone was in the same London neighbourhood, but each of the trio had a gig elsewhere until Baker let the cat out of the bag in a newspaper interview. At that point Clapton got the bullet from Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (though he seems to have been ready for a change and looking for a way out) and Bruce was ejected from Manfred Mann, so the trio had little choice but to see whether they could actually make a go of it.
Which, in turn brings us to Fresh Cream and the two singles that preceded the band’s second album, Disraeli Gears. The first thing to note here is the importance of the Top 40 when it came to getting exposure in a market where there weren’t many outlets. We’re talking the pirate radio era here, with very limited avenues to get your music heard on the official broadcaster, so Wrapping Paper and I Feel Free were important elements in getting the name out there and spreading the word, even if they weren’t particularly representative of what the band was actually doing.
Released the same day as Fresh Cream, Wrapping Paper could possibly have been less like what you’d expect from an electric blues-based power trio, but it’s hard to think how. Lightweight jazzy piano rather than heavy electric guitar, Beatles rather than Blues, a Jack Bruce vocal with accompanying harmonies, the song started as a four way co-operative effort but the published version is credited to Bruce/Brown (that’s Pete Brown, as in Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments) much to Ginger Baker’s continuing disgust.
The highly poppy I Feel Free, once the bom bom vocal introduction is out of the way, is a bit more like what you’d expect from a blues-based outfit, though it’s sitting in the realm of pop music innovation rather than the maintenance and continuation of tradition. It is, to me at least, catchy as hell, a classic piece of hook- and harmony-laden pop-rock psychedelia complete with concise Clapton solo. On that basis, even tacked on to the front of Fresh Cream as it was on the American version of the album, it works pretty well.