Ginger Baker Interview in Forbes

[keric]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2015/06/12/creams-ginger-baker-opines-on-heavy-metal-led-zeppelin-beatles/

 

Some interesting observations and opinions from Mr. Baker.

[1001gear]

Man that was a short interview.

 

 

[keric]

Man that was a short interview.

 

 

There are three or four links over to additional pages from the interview. I don't know if you saw them all or why Forbes made it so cumbersome to navigate through.

[1001gear]

This is what I got.

(In future installments, Baker discusses his strained relationship with Cream bassist Jack Bruce, his time as an olive farmer in Italy and the best days of Cream and Blind Faith. Stay tuned to the Forbes channel.)

 

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[keric]

I think this is all of what they have posted for now....

 

The Rock And Roll Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas, NV, has just announced that drummer icon Ginger Baker will participate in its student sessions from November 5 – 8. Baker, now 75 and frailer than in his wild days, will certainly be a big draw. "I’m looking forward to seeing you all in November, folks!" laughs Baker. "Don’t forget, it’s not how you play but what you say!"

 

Baker, of course, is one of the virtuosos from rock super-groups Blind Faith and Cream. In the latter he, with late bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton, produced 1960s classics like Sunshine Of Your Love, White Room and Tales Of Brave Ulysses. Baker’s live polyrhythmic drum solos in Toad are the stuff of legend, and are still standards by which other drummers measure their mettle.

I had the pleasure some years back of interviewing the elite drummer. Beforehand, though, I had reservations. Baker has a reputation for being difficult, a bit of a tough guy. Witness the recent "Beware Of Mr. Baker" documentary where, in a fit of rage, he broke director Jay Bulger’s nose with his crutch. In 2005 after a 37-year hiatus, Cream reunited briefly, only to have infighting between Baker and Bruce erupt like in the old days, and prevent any future shows beyond London’s Royal Albert Hall and New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Rather than prickly, though, I found Baker sensitive and funny. At one point, he teared up discussing an old friend, drummer Tony Williams. At other times, he demonstrated a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor. Following are edited excerpts from our conversation, which feature some of Baker’s lighter side.

 

Jim Clash: I’ve heard that you’re a real stickler about tea – the drink.

 

Ginger Baker: One thing that really bothers me in America is the inability of restaurants to make a good cup of tea. The instructions printed on the bag say, "Pour boiling water over the tea." How simple is that? No, they bring you an empty cup with an unopened tea bag beside it – how nice – and a pot of water that may be hot, but boiling it isn’t. So tea you have not. It’s boiling water that brings out tea’s flavor, and perhaps a dash of milk. But the brown liquid you end up with here looks like gnat’s pee, and has nothing to do with a really good cup of tea.

 

JC: When I first thought to look you up, people told me not to bother – you were dead!

 

GB: A lot of people think I’m dead. I’ve been dead at least two times. One classic was when I was driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a Shelby Cobra with three gorgeous young girls. The radio program was interrupted to say I’d just been found dead in my hotel room from an overdose of heroin. That was 1968. I must be in heaven, I thought. I’m out on Route 101, the sun’s shining, the birds are in the trees [laughs]. Then, in the early 1970s, Playboy featured a "dead" band, with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix – everybody who was dead – and I was playing the drums!

 

JC: As a lapsed drummer, I’ve always found the beat on Sunshine Of Your Love interesting. It is far from the simple way it first sounds.

 

GB: If you notice on Sunshine, the writing is credited to Jack Bruce, Pete Brown and Eric Clapton. And yet it was my drum part, which made the thing. I slowed it down – Jack had originally brought it in as quite a quick tune – and then did a backwards drum beat. Nobody even said, "thank you." I also played a little behind the beat – that’s the way I play. Too many drummers play in front of it, and the tempo speeds up. With Cream, I was often holding Jack and Eric’s tempo down, and consciously doing so. Eric once tried Sunshine with Phil Collins. The write-up in the newspaper said they needed Ginger Baker [laughs].

 

JC: What do you think of marginal show bands, like Kiss, which seem to reunite from time to time, making hundreds of millions of dollars doing so?

 

GB: They credited us [Cream] with the birth of that sort of thing. Well, if that’s the case, there should be an immediate abortion. When songs like that come on the radio, they immediately go off.

 

 

[keric]

JC: Cream did great stuff from 1966-68. What do you remember about the abrupt end of the group?

 

GB: Looking back on the last tour, Eric [Clapton] came to me and said, "I’m fed up with this." And I said, "So am I." And that was it. Finished. It wasn’t enjoyable anymore. We’d walk on stage and get a standing ovation before we played a note. Even if the gig was bad – if we thought it was f’ing awful – all these people were screaming and going crazy saying, "This is wonderful!" That [1968 farewell] concert at the [Royal] Albert Hall is not anywhere near Cream at its best. It was an enormous relief, but also a feeling of "all that for nothing." It has stayed with me to this day. Some wonderful music, some wonderful times, but also some of the most horrendous for me personally. I can remember at the recording studio going down to the bar and drinking Bacardi and Coke, Bacardi and Coke, doing eight or nine of them in order to be able to go back into the studio and not punch people. That’s how pissed off I had become. I could see what was happening. In the end, I couldn’t take it anymore and Eric was the same.

 

JC: How was the experience in 1993 when you, Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame?

 

GB: The rehearsals were magic. But at the actual thing, we had to listen to a lot of bozos making these extraordinarily mundane speeches. It was virtually the same one, over and over again. "I’d like to thank my mum and my dad, the uncle that lent me 50 bucks, my cat, my kids, the horse." You know, this long list. These diatribes went on while we sat at a table for eight hours! Then, finally, you go on stage. We did okay, but it wasn’t anywhere near the same as rehearsals. [During those] it was like the 25 years [since our Royal Albert farewell concert] had not gone by.

 

JC: During the height of Cream, were you guys wealthy?

 

GB: We thought we were [laughs]. But we were being ripped off just about everywhere. I was the one responsible for that. They would ask me to sign this contact, and I would. It was standard back then and we were getting like 4½% of 90% for the first three Cream records. Later, we got it up to 8% of 90%. When CDs first came out, we got a letter saying they were going to pay us the same royalty because it was so expensive to produce them. The 90% [instead of 100%] was supposed to be because of breakage [with records], but you don’t get breakage with CDs [laughs]. The record companies, unfortunately, had you by the balls. They had the distribution network. And they took the majority of the money.

 

JC: How about royalties from radio stations each time your song was played?

 

GB: There was so much money Cream made that went by the boards because it was never claimed. Every country virtually had its own performing rights society. They collected the money from the radio stations when the records were played. Unless you go to them and say, "Can I have my money, please?" you won’t get it. We were finding money for years after with stuff like this.

 

[keric]

JC: You’re a big fan of polo.

 

GB: Polo in America is the sport of Wall Street kings. They take their attitudes into the sport. Winning is everything in America, and they win by hook or by crook. Polo, to me, is an honorable game played by honorable gentlemen. If I had a good game and played well, I don’t really care whether I win or lose. It’s about having fun. I’m not greedy. I don’t understand the point of having more money than you know what to do with. Money is the root of all evils. The happiest times in my life were when I’ve had nothing to do with money.

 

Jim Clash: You and Jack Bruce originally played together in the Graham Bond Organisation. You fired him, right?

 

Ginger Baker: Graham Bond was an extremely popular band. We were working 320 gigs a year, earning good money for those days. Sometimes Jack would get really pissed off on stage and start screaming at me. Jack’s personality was Jekyll and Hyde. If you said the wrong thing, he would suddenly turn on you. One day during my drum solo, Jack began playing a bass thing with me. I was really getting off on it, phrasing with him on the bass drum. Suddenly he turned around and said, "You’re playing too f**king loud." The result was that I nearly killed him. A bouncer had to pull me off. After the gig, he was okay for a while, but then he’d yell again. It wasn’t my decision [to fire him], it was the band’s. Graham had tried to talk to him one night about it, and Jack just got pissed off. When he drove the band bus from Ipswich, he nearly killed us all. Graham got out and said, "He’s got to go." Of course, I was the heavy, so I had the job of doing it. But it was a band decision.

 

JC: How did you go from that group to Cream?

 

GB: Eric [Clapton] used to turn up at Graham Bond gigs and sit in. I didn’t realize who he was. To me, he was this young guy I got on extremely well with from the first time we met, and one hell of a guitar player. I was totally unaware that he had this huge following [from The Yardbirds]. He was with John Mayall at the time. I found out where John was working, and went to a gig. Originally Cream was my idea. I told Eric I was getting a band together, and would he be interested? I was getting fed up with Graham Bond. Eric said yeah, but asked about bass. He really wanted Jack, the best bass player around, so we agreed Jack was the one.

 

JC; Was Cream an instant success in Britain?

 

GB: [Robert] Stigwood was our manager, who also had managed Graham Bond. In the beginning, we were going out for £40 a gig at the clubs, £70-80 at universities. But it took off quickly because Eric was extremely popular – and so was Graham Bond. All three of us had our own followings. Whereas we had been getting 800 people with Graham Bond, we suddenly were getting 1,500 with Cream – we couldn’t get them all in! There were as many outside the gigs as inside [laughs]. They used to open the windows so people could hear. It just went crazy, much to Stigwood’s surprise. He was also trying to sell the Bee Gees with full-page adverts in Melody Maker, and they were bombing. When our album [Fresh Cream] came out in the [united] States, it went straight up the charts. We had a meeting, and Stigwood said he wanted to take Cream to America for $3,000 a gig, with the idea of exposing us. So we agreed.

 

JC: Were you ready?

 

GB: Big mistake, really, because we did six months of solid touring, five or six nights a week. We didn’t have a holiday, we just worked. Where it all went wrong for me was when Marshall decided to produce these big speakers. Originally Eric had one and Jack had one – the drums weren’t mic’d. Then they had two, and then four. People used to come up and say the only time they heard me was during the drum solo. It got stupid. It was so loud that my hearing was damaged. Jack’s was damaged worse. Pete Townshend has had problems, [the late] Gary Moore, too, from playing so loud. I finally started complaining about it. I asked Jack to turn down, but he didn’t like that at all. And, of course, that caused a big problem

 

[keric]

Jim Clash: What is your take on heavy metal?

 

GB: These people that dress up in spandex trousers with all the extraordinary makeup – I find it incredibly repulsive, always have. I’ve seen where Cream is sort of held responsible for the birth of heavy metal. Well, I would definitely go for aborting [laughs]. I loathe and detest heavy metal. I think it is an abortion. A lot of these guys come up and say, "Man, you were my influence, the way you thrashed the drums." They don’t seem to understand I was thrashing in order to hear what I was playing. It was anger, not enjoyment – and painful. I suffered on stage because of that [high amplifier] volume crap. I didn’t like it then, and like it even less now. That whole Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame thing – at least half the people in there don’t have a place in any kind of hall of fame anywhere, in my opinion.

 

JC: Anybody you want to name in particular?

 

GB: I don’t want to cause any more trouble.

 

JC: Are there bands that came from Cream’s influence you consider to be good, maybe Led Zeppelin?

 

GB: Jimmy’s [Page] a good player. I don’t think Led Zeppelin filled the void that Cream left, but they made a lot of money. I probably like about 5% of what they did – a couple of things were really cool. What I don’t like is the heavy bish-bash, jing-bap, jing-bash bull{censored}.

 

JC: What do you think of Zeppelin’s late drummer, John Bonham?

 

GB: Years ago, John said, "There are two drummers in rock and roll, Ginger Baker and me." There’s no way John was anywhere near what I am. He wasn’t a musician. A lot of people don’t realize I studied. I can write music. I used to write big band parts in 1960, ‘61. I felt that if I was a drummer, I needed to learn to read drum music. I was so good at sight reading, a guy in one of the big bands told me to get two books. I studied them at the same time. One was about the rules of basic harmony, the other how to break them all [laughs].

 

JC: Are you proud of your accomplishments as a musician?

 

GB: Very much so. I had to play all kinds of music in order to work early on. They would stick a part in front of me, and I would have to play it. And I would have to do a bloody good job, better than any other drummer, so they wanted me the next week. We used to go down to [London’s] Archer Street, where all the musicians went [to get work]. It was part of being a musician to me, to make straight bloody dance music sound good. That is something those heavy metal guys lack. All they can do is go bish-bosh diddy-bop, bish-bosh diddy-bop. They can’t read music. Even Paul McCartney needs someone to write it down for him. And he thinks that’s good. There was an article where he said that if he learned to read music, he might not be able to write as well. We used to say about the Beatles in 1963: "They don’t know a hatchet from a crotchet." A crotchet is what we call a quarter note.

[Dendy Jarrett]

Ginger is as known for being outspoken as much as he is for his great contribution to drumming. I like the guy and love his drumming.

 

D

[1001gear]

Thanks for posting that. I guess you need to be a subscriber

 

Couple things stuck. Eric was not included on the hearing casualty list.

 

Mr. Baker has an understandably big ego but an unfounded musical self esteem.