HP: Have you been looking forward to
this tour?
HP: Do you think that this will
be the last time that you personally will have to go through this?
EC: No, it won't really be the last time. But I don't
think that I want to work that much. If I tour it will be small tours,
better spaced apart.
HP: I'm told that you play on the
Jackie Lomax record ("Sour Milk Sea" backed with "The Eagle Laughs at You,"
one of the first releases on the Beatles' Apple record label). Did the
Beatles ask you to?
EC: Yeah. We did favors for one another. I guess George
(Harrison) liked working with me 'cause first of all I worked on "Wonderwall,"
the sound track music he was doing, and he liked that so he used me on
the session. Paul, Ringo, George and me.
HP: They do quite a bit of over-dubbing,
don't they?
EC: No. Nothing at all, except the voice and except for
a small part of the guitar solo, the last part of the guitar solo.
HP: Have you started working on
any further Cream albums?
EC: I've learned that they're going to be recording us
live on tour.
HP: Are you going to do any more
studio work as a group?
EC: No.
HP: Are you writing at all now?
EC: Oh, bits and pieces, yeah. For whatever I might do
next. Writing for the Cream is very hard to do because it's a trio. Jack
could do that but I can't.
HP: Do you have any clear ideas
about what you will be doing after the Cream has split?
EC: Yeah. Probably record an album.
HP: By yourself?
EC: After a break. Not completely by myself. With lots
of other people, not a formal group. The whole group thing started with
people imagining that they could just form a group and it would naturally
work. It really isn't at all easy because you need a local honest origin
thing to start it all off. You have to think the same way on the basic
things.
HP: Where would you like to move?
EC: It's just another concept, really. It's not playing
pop for pop's sake. Doing what is naturally you, and I've always supposed
that I was a blues guitarist. People always told me. Playing things that
are simple and easy and sound good and are nice to play. Rock 'n' Roll
is about the nearest name you can get to it.
HP: Do you enjoy writing songs?
EC: I have to have other people tell me whether they
are good or not because I completely criticize everything I think of.
HP: Would you write if there weren't
some sort of compulsion that good musicians are expected to write?
EC: That's a strange pressure to have on you. It can
make it twice as hard. Like if I were going to release a single and I was
writing it, it would have to be the best thing I ever did to justify me
doing it.
HP: Do you think you would like
to work with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in the future, under different
circumstances?
EC: Yeah. I think that it is very likely as long as there
are no pressures on us as a group to manufacture something. If I were running
the session I would be only too glad to have them because they're still
great musicians. But if it's that group thing, it holds you back.
HP: You met Jack in John Mayall's
group. Where did you meet Ginger?
EC: I saw him play with Graham Bond many times.
HP: Did Bond precede Mayall as sort
of the Great Preserver of the Blues?
EC: He was more into a sort of mainstream thing. It was
jazz blues with saxes and things.
HP: Do you like Mayall still?
EC: I don't think he's as good as he has been. It went
very strange quite recently, into long numbers.
HP: Are you talking about "Bare
Wires"?
EC: Yeah. There were a lot of things on there that I
just couldn't see the logic behind.
HP: Did he have a great deal of
influence on you when you were with him?
EC: Maybe, but very subconsciously, I suppose. That was
the only group I had been in that had a leader.
HP: Did the Cream have a leader
at all?
EC: No. Never had. Impossible.
HP: What were you doing just before
the Cream was formed?
EC: I was with John Mayall immediately before the Cream.
I split straight out of John Mayall to the Cream, about three or four days
in between the two groups. There was the enthusiasm, we just had to do
it right away.
HP: Did you have any original concept
of what the group would do?
EC: I had a concept, yeah. It was ridiculous at the time.
It was a throw-over from my art school scene. Dada. It was originally going
to be a stage presentation as well as the music. It was going to have like
happenings on stage. The first gig we did we had a gorilla on stage, a
stuffed one. We had a lot of strange little things happening like this
and it didn't work. Nothing happened. 'Cause we were so involved in music
that we just forgot about all these things.
HP: Have you been surprised at the
amount of commercial acceptance you have received?
EC: Yeah, in this country. I think a lot of it is probably
quite shallow but it's still amazing. I don't think we deserve it, for
one thing. That's why it seems shallow, I suppose. If we weren't British
it would be a different thing, to start.
HP: Have you been tempted to concentrate
on any instrument besides guitar?
EC: I'd like to try the piano, but I don't think that
I could do it very well.
HP: Do you find any limitations
to the guitar?
EC: I am now finding limitations. I never had until now.
HP: Are you tempted by any Indian
instruments?
EC: No, because I've tried my hand and it's just an impossible
thing. It's too late for me to do that in this life.
HP: Have you been happy about the
way the Cream was going?
EC: No. I have a lot of regrets about it, about not sticking
my neck out, which I should have done many times. We could have accomplished
more.
HP: It seems to me that the group,
more so that any other group, made people conscious of rock musicians.
EC: I think the aura about it, the image and everything,
did as much as the music itself.
HP: Are you happy with the way "Wheels
of Fire" was recorded?
EC: Some of it. Not all of it. It took me a long time
to get to like the album.
HP: Has that been true of the past
records?
EC: Yeah. Very much so.
HP: Do you have trouble listening
to yourself play guitar?
EC: No ... Yes, when it's bad. When it's mediocre, I
can't stand it. I feel horrified. But when I'm doing my best and it's my
all-time best, then obviously I can happily listen to it. But that doesn't
happen as many times as one would want it to.
HP: Could you produce yourself,
do you think?
EC: Yeah.
HP: Why haven't you in the past?
EC: Because I've never been the leader of a group or
leader of anything I was doing. Up until now what has been happening
is I've been getting into groups and hiding because I'm so scared in so
many ways of sticking my neck out and saying something which is solely
mine, which can succeed or fail and take the consequences. So I've
been getting into groups where the group would take it if it didn't do
well. Psychological scene, you know. I can always say, if I
want to, "Well, it wasn't like I would have had it." Which is true
in may ways. If I'd stuck my neck out... Now what I'm prepared to
do, at long last, is do whatever I'm going to do off my own back and if
it succeeds or fails, I get the blame for a change.
HP: Wasn't the idea of forming a
trio rather an innovation thing when you came up with it, in terms of rock
music? Had Hendrix already been surfaced?
EC: No, he hadn't. Yeah, it was, but I'll tell
you why it wasn't so original. I've been interested in blues and
I used to go and see people perform in concert. Blues musicians would
come to England from America and they would form a big bill and certain
members of certain bands would play with other people who didn't have a
band like Sonny Boy Williamson would come and he would be backed by Fred
Below on drums and Willie Dixon on bass and that was it. It just
seemed a completely natural thing. I'd never considered whether you
could do it or not in rock 'n' roll. I just assumed that we weren't
going to be doing that much rock 'n' roll anyway. When I originally
thought of the group, I thought of it in blues terms.
HP: Do you think that the group's
music is blues?
EC: The Cream? No, it's rock 'n' roll more than that.
Pop music.
HP: Have you become aware of
limitations to the trio structure in terms of what you would like to be
doing?
EC: Yeah. Because every time I did a recording with the
Cream I would make a backing track of me playing guitar, as you've read
in Rolling Stone, and then I would overdub lead on top of that.
So obviously I was from the start, discontented with the line-up.
Did you read, by the way, that article in Rolling Stone, the one
where they interviewed me and then put the whole band down on the next
page? That was an event in my life. I can't believe it to this
day. I was reading that in Boston. I opened it, I read the
thing and it was all ego, ego in the interview, coming on real strong.
And I turned the page and looked at the interview and at that particular
moment I just completely crashed inside, everything I believed fell to
bits and I passed out later that evening in a restaurant and was taken
home. A nervous breakdown scene.
The motivation behind
it seems to be very destructive...He (Jann Wenner) said that I am the master
of the cliché. That's what he called me...That was one of
the reasons I thought, "I'm getting out of all this." I just thought
of quitting. The bang is gone, forget the band, forget it all.
Because you don't have to go through all that. You can happily make
stained glass windows or something where you don't have to run the gauntlet
of being popular and unpopular. Something you just get pleasure out
of doing. I'd gotten very sick of it. But then you go back
into being a recluse and you go out and buy the magazines every week so
you can get back into it. There's no cure. It's too late now.
HP: You have a problem, too, because
no matter what you do, people are going to be paying attention.
EC: So that's where I get to the point about sticking
out my neck. It's really my moment of truth. Because I've convinced
myself that I'm better than people think I am, that I'm actually a better
guitarist than it gets to be known. I'm never ever satisfied with
the things that I've done with the Cream, for instance.
HP: Do you know what musicians you
will be working with?
EC: I'll probably want a basic line-up of people.
Say if I make an album, I'd probably want just a basic line-up of piano
or organ, rhythm guitar and lead guitar, and bass and drums. Just
a rock 'n' roll sort of format. But there are so many different ways
of doing things, so many different ways of recording them.
HP: Would you like to play with
other people whose reputations are on a par with yours?
EC: Of course. Of course, it depends on how
much competition they've derived from that, you know, popularity.
But it's the people. If I can find musicians that I dig and sit and
happily have good times as well, great. Why not? Then I'll
do it again. But, you see, you don't know that until you've experienced
it and I don't want the obligation of being in a group with someone and
having to find out about him at the same time. I want to find out
about him and then see whether I want to form a group.
HP: How old are you?
EC: Twenty three. Have you seen the film "Wild
in the Streets"? It's old. Twenty three is too old.
HP: Do you like any groups now,
any artists?
EC: I've been back in England so I haven't noticed too
much of what's going on over here, but I've liked a lot of groups in England.
I like the way the Stones are going and I like the way the Beatles are
going. There's a group called Fairport Convention which is ridiculous,
frighteningly good. There are lots of new groups, so many of them
that it's unbelievable that London could hold so many bands.
HP: Are you seeing more good musicians
in rock groups than you did two years ago?
EC: Yeah. The cross-section of people in pop music
is vast. There are some really intelligent and talented people in
pop music, and they will carry it through. That's where it's going
to get better and better. It's growing. As long as there are
that many groovy people, you are doing something new and innovative.
It will become more sophisticated. With guitar playing it's already
gone that way. It's already started out on its road. Every
day now you meet someone or see someone in a club who is playing better
guitar than you'll ever play. It frightens the living daylights out
of you. You walk into a club and someone is taking it to another
extreme you didn't believe was possible. And, you never know who
they are.
This is leading to a fantastic refinement
in guitar. It's got few possibilities left to it. All from
that blues-rock 'n' roll thing. There's a great deal of Eastern music
in that. It's very close. The fact that you bend a note came
from the blues. No other guitarists ever did that. And that
came somehow from Eastern music, because no other music has it.
I think that you can get a happy buzz
or a sad buzz or a very deep joyous or meditative, or whatever, buzz out
of any kind of music. It's good that rock 'n' roll has lived up to
that, because it never was that way before. Before, classical music,
in the Western Hemisphere, was the only kind of music you could get really
heavy about. And now you can do that with rock 'n' roll.
Eastern music is something else because rock 'n' roll hasn't even reached
the limits of what they use as a foundation. Rock is still a conglomeration,
still a melting pot. Sooner or later, it will get to a fantastic
sophisticated thing where all the guitarists will play exactly the same
way. It will be a sophisticated conglomerate sort of refinement of
all the styles. END (c) copyright 1969 Charlton Publications, Inc.
