There was a time when Jack Bruce was synonymous with the bass guitar in rock
history, when he was widely revered as the best there was on four strings.
It is the instrument that nobody really glorifies, the invisible foundation of
the groove, the low notes that underpin and hold things together, the liquid
heart of the rhythm section.
Rock tends to choose its heroes from the flamboyant top line of guitars and
vocals. The bass was always basic, rock bottom, the instrument you played if
you weren’t quite proficient enough for six strings. As Paul McCartney (the
first world famous bassist in pop, but a very reluctant convert to the
instrument) admitted: “nobody wanted to play bass.”
But Jack did. He once told me he fell in love with the first one he ever saw,
an old double bass in his school orchestra. The first time he touched it, he
knew it was for him, so tactile and sensual, and, just as importantly, it
was free to play (his working class parents couldn’t afford to buy him an
instrument).
But at 11 years old, his hands weren’t big enough to handle the strings, so he
practised on a cello instead. A young musical wizard, he learned to play
guitar and piano, and mastered composition for strings. But he always came
back to the bass. It was the instrument for him. And Jack Bruce unleashed
its potential.
A product of a tough, poor, Scottish background, Bruce was a young gun on the
Glasgow scene in the late fifties, playing every night, trad jazz, blues,
cover versions.
By the time he was sixteen, he was making so much money he dropped out of
school. He was a consummate musician. He could play any style, classical,
jazz, latin, blues, but what he became famous for was playing the fluid,
expressive, wildly melodic and highly charged basslines in rock’s first
supergroup, Cream.
A power trio formed in 1966 by Eric Clapton, Cream was a showcase for three of
the hottest virtuoso musicians on the London rock scene, Clapton, Bruce and
wild drummer Ginger Baker. They were an immediate multi-million selling
sensation, a gladiatorial outfit who seemed to be doing musical battle on
stage, producing a heavy form of psychedelic blues that heralded the birth
of hard rock.They were a famously volatile band. Bruce's love hate relationship with
drummer Ginger Baker erred more on the hate side. They loved to play
together because each thought the other a musical genius, but they argued
all the time, offstage and on, frequently coming to blows (also offstage and
on).
It became too much for Clapton, who split the band in 1968. As their pin up
guitarist, Clapton was undoubtedly their star, and both Bruce and Baker’s
careers flagged without him. But it was actually Bruce who sang most of the
lead vocals and wrote the band’s hit singles (with lyricist Pete Brown).
Sunshine of Your Love, White Room and I Feel Free are all Jack Bruce
compositions. He was, even by the high standards of Sixties rock, a
remarkable talent.
So what happened? Bruce slowly disappears from rock history over the following
decades. He made a lot of music in a lot of different set ups, but none of
it made much of a commercial impact.
There were esoteric singer-songwriter albums and forays into jazz, funk, heavy
rock and fusions of all three. He was probably too esoteric for his own
good, shifting his musical attention too often, never really pinning his
flag to any particular post.
In a way, he was too famous and too restlessly creative just to become a bit
player in another band, but too musically complex for the mainstream. His
relationship with the usual self-destructive rock star vices didn’t help.
When journalist Harry Shapiro told friends he was collaborating with Bruce
on his autobiography a few years ago, the most common reaction was surprise
that Bruce was still alive. Given his lifestyle, Bruce sometimes expressed
surprise about that himself.
But what he never expressed was regret. I spent an evening with him in 2010 at
the launch of his book, Jack Bruce: Composing Himself, and he was fantastic
company, addressing all my questions with an air of fierce candour, then
carrying on the conversation for hours afterwards.
He told me off the record rock and roll stories that made my ears melt but
insisted that the only thing he really cared about was the music. The music
he had made all his life, and the music he still intended to make. For him,
Cream was only a small part of a big picture.
They came, they played, they conquered, and then he went on playing for the
rest of his days, whether anyone was paying attention or not. Perhaps his
epitaph should be his song Cream, from the very first Cream album. “I’ve
been in and I’ve been out, I’ve been up and I’ve been down / I don’t want to
go til I’ve been all around.”
By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
