Slowhand by Philip Norman

Author:Philip Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

14

MILLION-DOLLAR TIMEBOMB

Blind Faith made their performing debut on 7 June at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park attended by 120,000 people, the first in a series of huge alfresco musical happenings that would try to hold back the end of the Sixties–and almost seem to have succeeded.

Among the backstage VIPs on that gloriously sunny afternoon were Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull. It would be no coincidence that, a month later, the Rolling Stones gave their own free concert in the park, to introduce Mick Taylor and as a memorial to Brian Jones, who’d been found dead in his swimming-pool a few days earlier.

That day in June should have been a moment of supreme triumph for Eric, topping an impressive supporting bill of Donovan, Richie Havens, Edgar Broughton and the Third Ear Band; surveying a huge, basking, pot-hazed multitude agog to see his new beyond-supergroup and hear how they might evoke an unclothed young girl holding a silver motor-accessory.

But his day had been poisoned when the band met at Robert Stigwood’s office before going to Hyde Park. He looked into Ginger Baker’s eyes and–expert drug-diagnostician that he had become–realised that Baker was back on heroin. He would later recall that ‘I felt… I was stepping back into the nightmare that had been part of Cream.’

In truth, Cream cast a shadow over the whole performance, for the Marshall amplifiers still bore their white-stencilled name and spasmodic cries of ‘Bring back Cream!’ and ‘Where’s Jack?’ floated through the warm, multi-scented air.

Though Blind Faith were all seasoned performers, none of them had ever faced an audience on this scale, stretching to the westward horizon, standing on car roofs, overloading rowboats on the Serpentine and perched in trees like schools of spaced-out monkeys. It was as if even the mighty Marshalls were suffering from stage-fright and unable to give out their accustomed roar.

But the real problem was one that Jimmy Miller had already faced with Blind Faith the album. In the headlong rush to launch, they had not written enough new songs to differentiate them either from Cream or Traffic. Stevie Winwood had made the largest contribution with ‘Sea of Joy’, ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ and ‘Had To Cry Today’. Eric had offered only ‘Presence Of The Lord’ and a radically new arrangement of Buddy Holly’s ‘Well… All Right’.

Winwood was, as Eric had promised, the focal point, taking lead vocal even for ‘Presence Of The Lord’. As a result, the predominant tone was not of rock but somewhat meandering jazz-funk. Eric, using a Fender Telecaster, chose the least visible place, behind Ginger Baker’s drums, and remained unsmiling and motionless but for the occasional girlish shake of his hair off his forehead. ‘He’d been doing amazing stuff in rehearsal and recording,’ Baker recalls. ‘But in Hyde Park, I kept wondering when he was going to start playing.’

In the retreat from Cream’s improvisational style, every song had a set arrangement from which no one departed; even Baker’s solos lasted nothing like as long as their former hundred years.

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