R.I.P. Jack Bruce

[fred41]

...damn... just read this...had to throw on "Disraeli Gears" when I went out...sad.

[CORVETTEDUDE]

A sad day for Rock 'n' Roll!! Rest Easy, Jack Brice!!

[TempestTS]

Jack was one of the first cats I can remember who treated the bass like a lead instrument - lead the way for the rest of us to follow Im still stealing some of his licks and tricks when I need to do something clever

He will be truly missed

.

[ElectricWoody]

The music from Cream somehow reminds me of Uriah Heep.

[Bobzz]

What a Bringdown

[buttslinger]

R. I. P.

[Prospero]

The musical bedrock of several generations of bands on either side of Cream. He was a remarkable musician.

[Prospero]

[Plaything]

I had the fortune to work with Jack once. A gentleman, smart, funny - and one of the greats. Very sad news.

[Stavros]

To understand Jack Bruce, fully (in a musical sense), you need to try and understand how modern pop and rock morphed out of the blues, rock and roll and other musical idioms in the second half of the 1950s, but how this generated divergent currents in the UK scene particularly in the early 1960s. On one level there were the Elvis imitators such as the early Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, Billy Fury and Marty Wilde; there were the skiffle groups, and the bands like the Beatles and the Stones who came out of that trend.

But what Jack Bruce came through in the early 60s was a more purist attempt by Alexis Korner and John Mayall to play the urban blues whose roots lay in the field blues of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson filtered through its urban variants in Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and (influential in Mayall's case) JB Lenoir. A key difference is that this was music to hear live in clubs or the rooms set aside for music in pubs like the Manor House in Hackney, rather than the record-based and tv oriented performance of Cliff, Marty and Billy, and was much more musical than the crude sound produced by the Beatles in their Cavern and Hamburg days.
Because one was unashamedly commercial, those of us who went to see Mayall's many different line-ups did so because we thought we were in touch with a different kind of -and superior- musical experience to the Elvis line.

Jack came through the portal that was set up by Alexis and John, and became part of a coterie of musicians without whom the live music scene you know today would be inconceivable. Look at the people who came through that process: Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Mick Wood, and the bands -Chicken Shack, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin...

I first saw Cream twice in 1967 before the very long US tours that Robert Stigwood (their manager) sent them on, and for what it's worth had a tangential contact with his organisation and one of his employees, and quite by chance had a close encounter with Eric in the summer that year. It is a curious mix because the three were so different, Ginger being Ginger and coming more from a Jazz background, if indeed he can be characterised, and even though both Jack and Eric were nurtured by John Mayall their backgrounds were quite different.

Looking back, I can only think that this trio succeeded when they did because the three people involved for that brief moment between 1966 and 1968 found a voice and managed to produce a kind of music that was all but unique, as the only comparison you can find is with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Ten Years After tried to do what Cream and Jimi did and their bass player did (tedious) solos but the band was frankly not very good.

What you probably won't read about in the obituaries is the extent to which those two long US tours in 1967-68 and 1968 destroyed the band, even though it produced the live recordings (notably from the Fillmore) that the band's reputation is based on. Stigwood had hours of recorded material he did not release for publication, and as far as I know never has been but I dont know where the tapes are now, if they survived at all. Because the almost absurd fact is that at the time Stigwood had decided that the Bee Gees were his number one act, and was actually stumped when he discovered that Cream were his money makers. It was because of the money they could generate in the US that led Stigwood to organise those tours. Eric hated touring and the demands that were made on him in particular, but as I say, Stigwood needed the revenues from those tours to invest in the Bee Gees. I was in Stigwood's office in Mayfair in 1968 when a guy came in and asked what he should do with all the records of the latest Bee Gees single he had been buying in record shops across London (managers in those days would invest thousands of pounds buying their own records to inflate the sales of their artists and get air time on the radio and on tv). They were in the boot of his car. He was told to chuck them. The Bee Gees did not become commercially successful until they re-invented themselves as a disco band after the success of Saturday Night Fever and by that time Cream had called it a day. I went to both of the two Albert Hall concerts that ended their career as band.
I next saw Jack when he appeared with Pete Brown -a long time collaborator on song writing for Cream- when they put together the ill-fated Poetry Band. My recollection is of a concert in 1969 in the Bandstand of Regent's Park in London, and as far as I can recall it was a flop, and may have been one of the reasons for this all falling apart as referred to in this Wikpedia article:
Pete Brown - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

By this time the kind of live music people wanted to hear was moving away from the blues roots of Cream, and the extended, virtual-Jazz improvisations that Clapton and Hendrix had used to wow audiences -think Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and you can see how changes in taste eclipsed what someone like Jack had to offer.

I don't think Jack ever really adapted to those changes, and was in his personal life consumed (as was Eric for a while) by the drug and alcohol problem, but survived financially from royalties and other appearances. Historically -definitely financially- it appears that Paul McCartney is the most successful ever bass player in rock music though, in purely musical terms there is little to support this.

Jack was a hard-nosed Scot who wrote songs for which he will be remembered because people will sing them. I was lucky enough to see Jack live on several occasions, and here I am so many years later and if I close my eyes I can see him, I can hear him, and try to re-connect to that fantastic energy, that burst of creation which to my now decrepit ears has never been bettered. The thing is, you had to be there to understand.

And for Jack's memory -my own, too- tonight, I will pour myself another generous glass of Malt Whisky- and smile.