Cream

Clapton was still a teenager when he first put Robert Johnson's records on a turntable, and by his own account the encounter never resolved into ordinary listening. "Robert Johnson wasn't entertainment," he said of that first hearing. "When I first heard him I had a very hard time listening to him, because it demanded something of me." What it demanded, years later, was tribute: Cream built their live sets toward "Crossroads," Johnson's own song about a bargain struck at a rural intersection, turned into the showcase for the very guitar playing Johnson had first taught Clapton to fear.

listen: upstream & heresource: MusicRadar — Eric Clapton on Robert Johnson (formative shock of first hearing him) ↗share

1936

Cross Road BluesRobert Johnson

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1968

CrossroadsCream

listen forJohnson's original is one voice and one guitar trading lines with no drummer to referee — the guitar answers every vocal phrase like a second speaker arguing back. Cream's live "Crossroads" keeps that same call-and-response shape and Johnson's turnaround riff intact, but triples the tempo and lets Bruce's bass and Baker's cymbals push underneath while Clapton's answering phrase swells into the extended solo the recording is famous for — the same conversation Johnson started, now played at rock-and-roll volume.

Clapton named him among the handful of things he'd later call sacred: describing his years before sobriety, he wrote that he "found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter." The debt showed up on record well before it showed up in prose — the first song Cream ever cut for Fresh Cream was Wolf's "Spoonful," the Willie Dixon number Wolf had turned into a slow, hypnotic obsession, stretched by the trio until it barely resembled a three-minute single.

listen: upstream & heresource: Guvna Guitars — Eric Clapton quotes (Clapton ↗share

1960

SpoonfulHowlin' Wolf

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1966

SpoonfulCream

listen forWolf's "Spoonful" is patient to the point of menace: one riff repeated under a vocal that never raises its volume, daring the listener to lose interest first. Cream keep that same riff and its obsessive repetition, but push Bruce's harmonica and vocal harder while Clapton answers every line with fuzzed, echoing guitar — one critic later wrote that the results pointed "strongly toward the guitar worship of heavy metal," the same hypnotic groove, now brought to a boil.

Jack Bruce was eighteen, working at an American air base in Italy, when a fellow serviceman pulled a record off the shelf and told him he had to hear it: Charles Mingus. "That changed the direction of my thinking," Bruce said, "because he became the person that I wanted to emulate" — not just as a bass player but as a composer who worked through the instrument. When Cream formed around Clapton's blues devotion, Bruce carried that lesson in with him: "He played the bass in the same way that I see the bass in my hands: as an adjunct of myself, not as an instrument."

listen: upstream & hereshare

1959

Better Git It in Your SoulCharles Mingus

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1967

Sunshine of Your LoveCream

listen forOn "Better Git It in Your Soul," Mingus's bass doesn't sit under the horns keeping time — it walks, shouts, and talks back, a second lead voice inside a gospel-shout arrangement. "Sunshine of Your Love" asks a rock trio to do the same thing: the song's whole hook is Bruce's descending bass riff, doubled by Clapton's guitar, carrying the melody a rhythm section would usually leave to somebody else. Notice which instrument you're still humming afterward — on both tracks, it's the bass.