"Sunshine Of Your Love" live performance"Sunshine Of Your Love" Clapton solo acoustic performance
If you’re going to form a band and name it Cream, you had better be good and the rock supergroup Cream was better than good, they were unbelievable. Before becoming Mr. “Tears In Heaven,” Eric Clapton had earned a reputation in the 1960s as one of the best blues guitarists alive. His virtuosic playing inspired the graffiti “Clapton is God” on the wall of an underground train station. Formed with Jack Bruce on bass and Ginger Backer on drum critics and musicians alike truly considered these three musicians the cream of the crop.
Cream’s best-selling song in their brief three-years as a band was “Sunshine Of Your Love” a showcase of the skills of all three musicians that set them apart from music at the time and from anything that has produced since.
What was amazing and unique about Cream’s style of rock music was the how grounded the songs were in the blues and jazz tradition. This fusion of these styles influenced bands like Led Zeppelin all the way to Aerosmith adding a dirty primal soul to the rock voice.
Though there are only three musicians playing on “Sunshine Of Your Love,” there are many more musical voices that make up musical landscape of the song. There is Bruce’s voice, Bruce’s bass, Clapton’s guitar, Clapton’s voice and Ginger’s drum set. With many rock groups there are guys playing guitar and singing and really if you just listened to the guitar playing it wouldn’t be that interesting. What is awesome about Cream is that each individual musical voice is a masterpiece in of itself.
The song opens with Bruce’s aggressive blues voice fueled by desperation is answered by Clapton’s more subdued voice filled with regret and heartbreak. When these voices combine in the chorus there is a powerful energy that builds through “I’ve been waiting so long” that reaches a euphoric release on when they moan the words, “sunshine of your love.”
Most of the time in jazz and rock the bass line is the foundation of the groove outlining the strong beats of each measure. Bruce’s descending bass line spends more time on the off-beats than on the beat. Though it may seem simple to play notes on the beat, it takes a years or practice for a bass player to master playing on the beat. Now to have the audacity to create a groove with a bass line that is centered off the beat is insanity. What is unbelievable is not only that he can keep the time playing mostly off the beat but that he plays with the time relaxing the time against the driving drums. This tension creates the truly magical groove in this song.
What is Ginger Backer doing in this song? Nowhere in this song do we hear a regular rock beat, jazz pattern or blues beat on the drum-set. Instead of accenting the off-beats which is typical of rock and jazz drum beats Backer pounds on the on-beats with an almost cave-man like intensity.
In Backer’s hands the drum set becomes much more then a way to keep time but to express emotion. The primal beat pattern he uses may go against convention but as an expressive device is pure genius adding to the dirty torn-down desperate feeling of the song. His fills between phrases which are just plain sick, perfectly in time adding to the line of the melody while keeping the momentum of the song moving forward.
Then there’s Clapton’s guitar solo. It starts with a quote from “Blue Moon” contrasting the idea of the sun and the moon. Like a human voice singing, Clapton creates phrases within his guitar solos. The phrases have breaks like a person taking a breath. The genius of Clapton, it’s not about how fast he can play but how he uses his technique to tell a story through his solos.
What’s inspiring about watching masters artists at work is that everything they do seems effortless. It’s making the difficult seem easy so that we forget how hard something is for a moment and simply enjoy the beauty of what is created. Sometime I listen to “Sunshine Of Your Love” and I’m in awe of the musical virtuosity but more often I’d let it wash over me and feel the primal groove and perfect expression of blues that really is the cream of the crop.
Cream’s best-selling song in their brief three-years as a band was “Sunshine Of Your Love” a showcase of the skills of all three musicians that set them apart from music at the time and from anything that has produced since.
What was amazing and unique about Cream’s style of rock music was the how grounded the songs were in the blues and jazz tradition. This fusion of these styles influenced bands like Led Zeppelin all the way to Aerosmith adding a dirty primal soul to the rock voice.
Though there are only three musicians playing on “Sunshine Of Your Love,” there are many more musical voices that make up musical landscape of the song. There is Bruce’s voice, Bruce’s bass, Clapton’s guitar, Clapton’s voice and Ginger’s drum set. With many rock groups there are guys playing guitar and singing and really if you just listened to the guitar playing it wouldn’t be that interesting. What is awesome about Cream is that each individual musical voice is a masterpiece in of itself.
The song opens with Bruce’s aggressive blues voice fueled by desperation is answered by Clapton’s more subdued voice filled with regret and heartbreak. When these voices combine in the chorus there is a powerful energy that builds through “I’ve been waiting so long” that reaches a euphoric release on when they moan the words, “sunshine of your love.”
Most of the time in jazz and rock the bass line is the foundation of the groove outlining the strong beats of each measure. Bruce’s descending bass line spends more time on the off-beats than on the beat. Though it may seem simple to play notes on the beat, it takes a years or practice for a bass player to master playing on the beat. Now to have the audacity to create a groove with a bass line that is centered off the beat is insanity. What is unbelievable is not only that he can keep the time playing mostly off the beat but that he plays with the time relaxing the time against the driving drums. This tension creates the truly magical groove in this song.
What is Ginger Backer doing in this song? Nowhere in this song do we hear a regular rock beat, jazz pattern or blues beat on the drum-set. Instead of accenting the off-beats which is typical of rock and jazz drum beats Backer pounds on the on-beats with an almost cave-man like intensity.
In Backer’s hands the drum set becomes much more then a way to keep time but to express emotion. The primal beat pattern he uses may go against convention but as an expressive device is pure genius adding to the dirty torn-down desperate feeling of the song. His fills between phrases which are just plain sick, perfectly in time adding to the line of the melody while keeping the momentum of the song moving forward.
Then there’s Clapton’s guitar solo. It starts with a quote from “Blue Moon” contrasting the idea of the sun and the moon. Like a human voice singing, Clapton creates phrases within his guitar solos. The phrases have breaks like a person taking a breath. The genius of Clapton, it’s not about how fast he can play but how he uses his technique to tell a story through his solos.
What’s inspiring about watching masters artists at work is that everything they do seems effortless. It’s making the difficult seem easy so that we forget how hard something is for a moment and simply enjoy the beauty of what is created. Sometime I listen to “Sunshine Of Your Love” and I’m in awe of the musical virtuosity but more often I’d let it wash over me and feel the primal groove and perfect expression of blues that really is the cream of the crop.
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