Sitting in even a moderate-sized venue today, you can stare at a stage backed by a solid line of Marshall stacks in front of a custom backdrop, a forest of microphones surrounding the elaborate kit on the drum riser, a row of wedge monitors stage-front and then on either side a P.A. system the size of a block of apartments, a complex studio-style mixing desk out in the audience seating area, overhung by a lighting rig big enough to guide in jumbo jets at Heathrow, the whole lot needing a road crew in double numbers to operate it, break it down and shift it all someplace else. It seems almost inconceivable a band with the status of Cream could carry all their equipment in the back of one 6-wheel Transit. But they could. And did.
The first time Cream played the Redcar Jazz Club on 14th November 1966, their equipment comprised one Gibson Les Paul sunburst for Eric, a Fender 6-string bass for Jack, one grey 100 watt Marshall stack each, Ginger's trademark silver double-bass drum Ludwig kit and a Marshall 200 watt (yes, 200 watt) P.A. amp through one 4x12 speaker column on each side of the stage. No drum microphones, only what bled of Ginger's pile-driving rhythms into the vocal mics at the front of the stage. No monitors - they hadn't been invented. No mixing desk - even studios then didn't have comprehensive ones - the musicians balanced the sound themselves from the stage. It was the first Marshall P.A. I had seen and I swear the system cranked enough volume to howl like a hurricane when one of the roadies walked past a live microphone.
And Cream were deafening. There were no mood-setting lights, just a couple of hard white bulbs aimed at the stage while the rest of the hall was almost plunged into darkness. Not a small venue compared to those Cream had cut their teeth in, London clubs like Klook's Kleek, the Flamingo or the Marquee, in reality usually damp cellars where they earned some £40 for a night's work; instead the Windsor Ballroom in the Coatham Hotel held some 8-900, Cream's first fee of £75 making the 250 mile journey from London worthwhile (two months later Spencer Davis Group with a juvenile Steve Winwood on vocals pulled £400). The ticket price was about 10 shillings (50p), quite hefty in those days when a local steelworker earned about £12 a week, but you could get lucky. Really lucky. Not many chances in the North-East to see a band the calibre of Cream before they'd even released their first album, only the misleading 45 rpm single Wrapping Paper on the market in the hope of getting a hit to boost their pulling power. Only the B-side Cat's Squirrel gave any indication to ticket buyers what lay in store. It was a conundrum that was to dog Cream's short, meteoric career.
In 1966 the record buying market in the UK was singles led, albums considered unimportant by the record companies, often regarded as merely another way to squeeze more income from songs already released on singles. So albums were either best-ofs, or songs from a band's stage act that weren't individually strong enough to release as singles, or even worse, cobbled-together collections of a few covers filled out with tunes that had been potential singles' material but hadn't quite worked in the studio. The companies swore it was impossible to break an act without hit singles. They needed radio airplay and TV exposure. Cream conformed, compounding the problem by cutting their first tracks with an embryo label, Reaction, who needed a few quick hits to generate enough revenue to stay in business. Yet Cream revealed their real tastes in performance, rarely if ever, playing those chart-aimed singles live.
Chris Scott Wilson          Writer                      Â
©2010 C.J.S.Wilson
Cream : Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce & Ginger Baker
Stepping Out at Redcar Jazz Club
Redcar Jazz Club. No better magnet on England's North-east coast during the 1960s on a Saturday (dance night) or Sunday (sit-down audience night) than The Coatham Hotel on Redcar's seafront where the Jazz Club promoted the finest bands England had produced. There was one golden rule before joining the queue to buy your ticket: Always check the alley behind the hotel to ensure a Ford Transit 6-wheeler was parked there. If there was, then you knew the band had arrived.
A 6-wheeler Tranny screamed BIG TIME. Not a 4-wheeler, box-shaped, good enough to do the job, or maybe good enough for the support band. Nah, it had to be 6 wheels. Bull-nosed with wheel spats at the back where the twin wheels on either side oozed mile-devouring power. A bench seat from a scrapped Jaguar bolted facing forward behind the driver's seat, back against a wooden partition to seal off the cab from the cargo bay. Or airline seats if you really had enough cash. And if you knew what you were doing, the very expensive jigsaw of amps, speaker cabinets, drum cases and guitars would fit tightly in the back. You think bands only care about their image on stage? Wrong. A 6-wheeler was, well, cool, and it had to be white or black. And dirty. The dirtier the better. It showed you had put in the miles. A dirty white 6-wheeler had been around.
And it just about knew the way home.
Parts of this article were quoted by Melody Maker journalist Chris Welch in his book CREAM : the Legendary 60s Supergroup, published by Balafon Books 2000
above : The day after Cream played the Jazz Club. Those 100 watt Marshalls are loud!
No, seriously, this is Redcar's Coatham Hotel ballroom dressed to be a burnt-out Dunkerque café in the 2007 movie Atonement,
starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy
You can read the full story of Redcar Jazz Club in the book. Click HERE for more information
Ironically, Cream were one of the first bands to break down the barriers and prove albums could provide many times the income of singles, often without much promotion, and swung the balance so far that for several years 45s were almost relegated into becoming album trailers. Later, Led Zeppelin turned refusing their company, Atlantic, permission to release singles into an art form, and it never hurt them any. The crucial years were '67-'70, abetted of course by The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and its clones, and the fact that radio stations became more amenable to expanding the three-minute formula and gave needletime to album tracks, for which DJ John Peel must take a good share of the credit. Besides, the public was fast learning you could bung an LP on the turntable, lie back and enjoy a cohesive collection of tunes without the necessity of jumping up every few minutes to change 45s.
And that first Cream concert at Redcar Jazz Club previewed their future set lists. Stepping Out, Spoonful, Train Time, Toad, I'm So Glad and more, all following the blitzkrieg thunder of Ginger's tom-toms on the opening N.S.U. We didn't know what N.S.U. meant. We didn't care. Hit square between the ears by unheard of power and volume, we watched amazed as Cream, released from the cage of the three-minute pop song, flew like hawks, wild and free as they picked us up in the claws of their music to carry us along on an exhilarating ride that became a magical free flight. Only after one and a half hours did they release us, leaving us limp, ears ringing when they pulled out the jackplugs and abandoned the stage with a shared smile. It was the biggest surprise of my life.
Other nights at the Jazz Club brought surprises that only bore fruit in the months ahead, like a double bill with King Crimson supported by Free, neither with albums to their credit, but only a few minutes after they'd started you knew they might be giants. The Jazz Club's committee was almost infallible, often presenting acts just before they hit big. It wasn't unknown for a little-known band to be booked and by the time the gig arrived, the Gods had smiled. On one such occasion Joe Cocker & the Grease Band had been contracted months before, yet the week they appeared at Redcar With A Little Help From My Friends had hit #1 in the charts, and such was the club's reputation that groups would honour their contracts when they could easily have cancelled to accept a much-inflated fee elsewhere. Cocker certainly played a storming set that night. No-shows were rare, and so conscientious were bands when circumstances prevented them from appearing they would reschedule for the same fee even if in the meantime their pulling power had increased dramatically. Once, The Edgar Broughton Band phoned to stay they were delayed by fog on the motorway but pushed on to arrive about ten minutes before curfew and walked on stage to prove they had tried their best to make the show.
The Jazz Club's records read like The 60s Hall of Fame. As the popularity of trad jazz faded (the club's original recipe in the late 50s and early 60s), R&B, Blues and then Rock took over. Who could imagine a small out-of-the-way seaside town could present Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker or John Lee Hooker and then move on to offer Freddie King, Deep Purple, Rory Gallagher, The Who, Thin Lizzy, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Derek & The Dominos, Robert Plant's Band Of Joy, Humble Pie, The James Gang, Spooky Tooth and Traffic among many others. Bands often remarked in the national press how much they enjoyed playing the club, and the club's M.C. Roger Barker was sometimes consulted when name bands were seeking replacements. One such recommendation led to a big break for local Scarborough singer Robert Palmer of the Mandrakes, who joined The Alan Bown when Jess Roden departed to form Bronco. Robert's subsequent multi-platinum solo career is common knowledge. Another example was Roger helping David Coverdale apply to replace Ian Gillan in Deep Purple, and even accompanying him to the audition at London's Scorpio Studios. His faith has been justified by David's continuing success with Whitesnake, twenty-five years later still releasing albums and touring the world to packed houses.
Not only were the Jazz Club's concerts both musically enlightening and enjoyable to the spotty Northern youths who scraped their pennies together in order to make the weekly pilgrimage to the Coatham Hotel, they showed a side to big-name artists rarely seen today. Often the headliners would wander about among the audience or sit down and drink at one of the tables during the support band's set, or stand at the bar to order their own drinks - no personal roadies, guitar techs or security men then. I remember John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, including Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie drinking in the ballroom and only leaving their table a few minutes before they were due on stage. And nobody bothered them at all.
The second time I saw Cream at Redcar they had already toured the States (and were due to fly back there the day after this concert) and their experiences at venues like Winterland and the Fillmore in San Francisco had given them far greater confidence. Their stage presence had developed, each wearing an almost visible aura - now they looked like stars - and a showmanship which matched the exuberance of their startling music. The fee was up too - £285. Clapton was sporting what the Press called his "Greek God" hairdo, permed into a white approximation of Hendrix's afro, a satin shirt that shimmered in the lights and the
first pair of white bell-bottoms I ever saw, and so tight he struggled to climb onto the stage with dignity. His Les Paul had been left at home and instead he coaxed the famous "woman tone" and controlled feedback from a psychedelic custom-painted Gibson SG Special. Like Jack, he had begun using two Marshall stacks and a split lead, and he was taking no prisoners. While his fingering remained delicate, he had taken to sawing across the strings with his right hand in grand gestures as he pumped out power chords, and instead of standing immobile during his solos, guitar at a seemingly precise 45 degree angle, now he was hunching and pushing back against his Marshalls, face contorted while behind him a roadie strained to keep the cabinets upright.
Ginger, wearing a multi-coloured silk-lined cape had abandoned his skull badge fur hat, hair flying wild, grinning manically as he pounded his tom-toms, flourishing flams and triplets with almost casual flicks of the wrist, dropping beats and switching rhythms to goad his partners into fresh explorations. Jack? He turned in his usual flamboyant performance, defying belief that he could howl such vocals while playing contradictory bass lines. Each of the three pulled stuff out of the hat, and took so many risks that to any other musician was almost unthinkable. Clapton even broke his top E string, but without a spare guitar, still ripped into a tour-de-force version of Stepping Out played on five strings that almost left you breathless with his speed and daring.
But the cracks were already beginning to show. Clapton would announce the next song only to sigh as he was contradicted by Jack who would start something else. Then Ginger, annoyed, would pull sticks from his bass drum hoop and fire them like darts at Jack's back, only to have Jack retaliate by swinging round to kick the nearest bass drum skin, provoking a cackle from Ginger. After a startling, thrilling set that took them out to the edge, held them teetering over the drop before hauling them back to the roots where they had begun, Jack collapsed at the end of the last song and Eric and Ginger walked off, leaving their bass player prostrate over his feeding-back instrument.
But Cream wasn't the only thing that was changing. As the 60s died the logistics changed. It became impossible to play every gig offered and still drive home the same night only to face another 200 mile drive the next day. There was suddenly so much more to organize; more equipment, huge P.A. systems and then lighting rigs, all of which took longer to set up, break down and move. In turn, bigger vehicles and more road crew were necessary and unable to travel home between gigs meant hotel bills for all. As the finances had to honed, tours really became tours then, not just a series of one-night stands, but planned precisely, organized to cover as much ground as possible in the shortest time.
And bands had grown sick of spending every day on the road, arrive at the gig, soundcheck (and hopefully fit in some rehearsal to write and try out new songs), a quick meal, perform, back out on the road, and if they were lucky in bed by 6 a.m. And with pressure to deliver fresh material to the record companies, trying to squeeze in recording time, a day here and a day there, in whichever country they happened to be at the time. Management began to rethink the traditional rock music "take the money and run" tactics, which were shortening what could actually prove to be long-term, lucrative careers instead of worrying that if bands
were out of the limelight for a couple of months the fans would shift their affections elsewhere. Too many bands had been burnt out on the road: Hendrix, The Small Faces, Yardbirds, even the Beatles and Cream themselves were casualties of non-stop work. Those left standing began to formulate new strategies. Now that albums had become big business, shifting emphasis from the singles' market, bands could take time off to write new tunes, block-book recording sessions to reduce disorientation and maintain focus, then release an album and tour to promote it, the tours suddenly acquiring names, often just that of the newest album (although tour names have grown a little more elaborate since).
But by then the average listener had upgraded his home stereo from a mono Dansette player to a proper two-speaker set up and was used to clearer sound, so expectations were higher. Rapid advances in stage equipment and mixing facilities were all necessary to replicate studio-quality sound, and so limited bands to playing those venues where access and stage areas could handle growing mountains of equipment. The up-side was the bands sounded better and the fans saw a better concert, but the down-side was the added expense had to be passed on to the customer. All of which cut the throats of those venues where the bands had cut their teeth and performed within an arm's reach of the audience that had nurtured them and bought the records and elevated them to the status they now enjoyed. Those small venues just couldn't pack in enough punters to raise the cash necessary to meet skyrocketing fees.
One such venue was The Redcar Jazz Club in the Coatham Hotel. By the early 70s the heady days had gone forever, but the names still drift on the wind . . . John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Free, Blodwyn Pig, Lindisfarne, Uriah Heep, Yes, Flash and of course the band that contained the man whose name had become legend, scrawled on London's subway walls - Clapton is God.
And to an eighteen year old northern kid, on both occasions I saw him at The Jazz Club with Cream, he very nearly was.
- THE END –
©2000 C.J.S.Wilson
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** There were two publications about the club. The first : Redcar Jazz Club published by Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council ©1996 was followed by Backstage Pass: Redcar Jazz Club © 2014 by Dennis Weller, Chris Scott Wilson & Graham Lowe. More info can be found HERE
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