Live 1

Cream | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Polygram Records
• ASIN: B000001FGF
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #151,201 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. N.S.U.

2. Sleepy Time Time

3. Sweet Wine

4. Rollin' and Tumblin'

5. Lawdy Mama

Editorial Reviews

Japanese-only SHM-CD (Super High Material CD) paper sleeve pressing of this classic 1970 album. SHM-CDs can be played on any audio player and delivers unbelievably high-quality sound. You won't believe it's the same CD! Universal. 2008. --This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The cream of the crop., September 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Live 1 (Audio CD)

This is undoubtedly Cream's best with Volume II a close second. It is also very possibly the best rock album ever. Live rock albums are usually noisy and a bit off key with a lot of screaming fans but this is the exception. Incredible riffs and improvisation with unparalled power and technical mastery, far more satisfying than any of their fine studio albums. Thirty years of enjoying this album and it still gives me goosebumps. Very intense and highly recommended.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cream playing at their best which means playing live and improvisin', December 30, 2005

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Live 1 (Audio CD)

Cream was basically a power trio that went super nova, which is pretty easy to do when you have Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. Their first album came out in 1966 and by the time their fourth album "Goodbye" came out in 1969 they had already disbanded. But one thing they proved with those four albums was that they were better on stage than they were in the studio, which explains why half the tracks on the last two albums were recorded live. Their last album was also their most successful, making it to #2 on the Billboard album chart, which explains why the next year their label came out with this album.

Four of the five tracks on "Live Cream, Volume 1" appeared on their debut album, "Fresh Cream." The fifth, is the traditional blues piece "Lawdy Mama," given the Clapton treatment. It also stands out as being the only track on the album that does not represent the band's jazz-oriented approach to rock music, which simply means that they were into high-energy improvisation and extended solos. Add to this list that the song was only 2:46 while "N.S.U." clocks in at 10:15 and "Sweet Wine" at 15:16 (without Baker, who co-wrote it, ever going off on an extended drum solo), and "Lawdy Mama" ends up being like a postscript to the rest of the album, where the emphasis is on their improvisational playing of what are basically blues tracks reved up to the rock level. To top everything off, it sure sounds a lot like "Strange Brew."

Cream and Led Zeppelin were both into doing tunes by the old blues masters, which we see here with Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin,'" which is only a couple of minutes longer than the original. That is why the two monster tracks are the best on the album, because there are points where you do not even remember what song these guys were playing to begin with. The other thing of note with this album is being able to hear the band egg each other on during these tracks, which provides something a bit different and really captures what it was like at a Cream concert. What more would you want from a live album? Two years later "Live Cream, Volume 2" would come out, which includes "White Room," "Tales of Brave Ulysses," and a nice long version of "Sunshine of Your Love."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mostly the Best of What Earned Their Concert Rep, February 12, 2010

By 

BluesDuke "A sacred cow is worth but one thin... (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Live 1 (Audio CD)

Cream's dichotomy boiled down to this: In the studio, they graduated from a blues trio restless with the constrictions of most British blues of their day to a group of equally restless pop and rock experimenters not unlike the Yardbirds. (Irony of ironies: it was that group's move toward both more accesible pop and more post-blues experimentation precisely that prodded Eric Clapton to leave that group in the first place in favour of a career-making term with John Mayall.) In concert, they earned a reputation for freewheeling, collective improvisation still grounded in the blues but approaching free jazz without crossing entirely into that subgenre's frequent chaos. The former at its best created best-selling albums from which a hit single or three was almost entirely incidental; the latter created an impression that, depending upon whom you listened to, was either transcendental or pretentious.

Revisionist critics---including, occasionally, the members of Cream themselves---fault the trio for excess and self-indulgence in their improvisational extensions, and it's easy to understand why: three virtuosi giving reign to the fullest of their imaginations, under the pressure of one-night-stand touring that isn't always conducive to genuine inspiration, collding with the pressure of a pair of clashing egos and personalities (bassist Jack Bruce, drummer Ginger Baker) roiling a third personality (guitarist Eric Clapton) who ended up becoming a kind of referee between the two while coming to terms with his musical inclinations versus his unexpected international elevation. (It was one thing to be called God, as he was during his days with the Mayall group, but it was something else to be treated like one.) But at their absolute best, Cream accomplished what a lot of their contemporaries merely stabbed at doing on stage, earning intense adulation merely for showing up and playing their instruments (showmen they were not), and if they could be guilty of self-indulgent jamming at the expense of genuine musical expression, they at least had popular music's best interest at heart and, on their best nights, presented genuine possibilities for reimagining the blues and rock (they were the no-questions-asked inventors of the power trio, for one thing, a distinction they may not have sought overtly) that less worthy successors would turn into hamburger.

On the first of two live collections assembled after their split in late 1968, drawn almost entirely from selections that were part of their first studio album, it's the best of what earned their concert reputation for the most part. This is so especially for "Sweet Wine," an almost nondescript selection from their first studio album that becomes, here, as textbook a case as you'd want for what was so overwhelmingly impressive about the trio's improvisational style in the first place. You had to wait until side two on the original vinyl release to get there, but there's an ebb and flow in which the three players' dynamics, melodic sense, harmonic dextrousness, and synchronicity never flag, even in the more restrained passages, so much so that you almost forget there was an ensemble vocal verse to open and close. Baker here is as colouristic a percussionist as his reputation long suggested, Bruce is a second lead instrument without leaving the bottom to sink out of hearing, and Clapton draws on practically his entire store of the blues to spin a series of fluid, melodious lines that float and soar with striking passion and lyricism. (In other words, Cream achieves here what they merely tried to reach in the extension of "Spoonful" that highlighted the live half of "Wheels of Fire.") "Sleepy Time Time," from the same studio premiere, is as luminous a pure blues expression as the trio ever delivered, from the playful laziness of the lyric to the gripping thrust and cry of the playing. The early Muddy Waters highlight "Rollin' and Tumblin'" in their studio hands amounted to a tank gone berserk, with Baker particularly as the big gunner; here, before a concert audience, the tank isn't going berserk so much as it's cutting a deliberate swath. Clapton's shape-shifting rhythm guitar playing (as on the studio cut, Bruce dispenses with his bass entirely, while Clapton exercises variations on the core riff as though he's a second percussionist as well as a guitarist) and Baker's polyrhythmic rumbling clear, not bludgeon Bruce's route for a round of crisp if occasionally exhausted-sounding harmonica and a particularly fiery vocal.

"NSU," which kicks the set off, is probably the only genuinely weak point---it launches at full power and tries to stay there, but about four minutes in you begin to sense the trio trying to prime the pump a little too anxiously; it's as though they fired their guns furiously and forgot to account for replenishment ammunition, going from there mostly to survival mode and seeming relieved when they come away in one piece. If you want recorded evidence of Clapton's eventual recollection that inspiration isn't easy to come by night after night after night, you'd be hard pressed to find more acute evidence than this.

Anomalously, the set includes a studio cut, Clapton's rework of an ancient blues, "Lawdy Mama," into the foundation that ended up becoming the superior "Strange Brew" with a little help from Felix Pappalardi and Gail Collins. As a foundation it's not half bad, but archival and bootleg recordings since have suggested it developed away from the shuffle the guitarist originally devised for the song. As the gestation of one of Cream's most enduring studio recordings, it's an interesting listen (especially for the very different bass line, if not for Clapton's almost hesitant guitar break), but on a live album it's something along the line of fitting a sports car with a taxicab engine.