Customer Reviews

Wheels of Fire

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Cream's last really deliberate effort in the studio, Wheels of Fire stands out as one of the all-time greatest rock albums, and one of the top ten albums of the sixties. Driven by the singles, "White Room" and "Crossroads," this was Cream's first and only number one album and the first album to be certified platinum, ever. Somewhat less coherent than Disraeli Gears, due to the increasing division between the band members, Wheels of Fire could be called Cream's White Album, showing the band moving off into separate directions with their respective writing partners and turning up with some surprisingly different, innovative and original songs. More melancholy and introspective than Disraeli Gears, Wheels of Fire jams less and grooves more, particularly on the ever topical "Politician" and the super precise "Sitting On Top of the World." Other songs seem like more of a throwback to Fresh Cream, the dreamy "As You Said" and "Those Were the Days" in particular. The cello-accented ballad, "Deserted Cities of the Heart," is one of Bruce and Brown's best, and there's more than a touch of strangeness in Baker's amusing and quaint recital of "Pressed Rat and Warthog." Eric, sitting out on the song-writing for a while, makes sure that no one completely forgets the blues, contributing arrangements of "Born Under A Bad Sign" and "Crossroads." On the second disc, the live material, as usual, is where Cream really shines. It seems as if they picked one song to showcase each band member, then chose the classic "Spoonful" to highlight them all. The instrumentation is even more magnificent than ever, showing incredible precision from all the members, especially Baker, whose drum solo on the live version of "Toad" is the only drum solo I've been able to tolerate, let only enjoy. "Crossroads" shows Clapton's soloing at its best, and "Traintime" features Bruce nearly passing out during a seven minute blues harp marathon. Listening to him gasp for breath near the end, yet keep on singing and playing, is to witness an inspiring sacrifice from an artist truly willing to suffer for his art. Cream's best album really could be considered a toss up between this one and Disraeli Gears, but I favor this one marginally because there's not a single slipup included.

This album, more than any other 60s work, sent more boys out to buy electric guitars with the hopes of becoming rock stars than anything before or since. And for good reason. The live recordings on this album gave us a mountainslide of brilliant no-holds-barred improv and a fiery dynamism that was the trademark of few bands of the time. It might not have been Clapton's best work -- for me that was the Bluesbreakers album with Mayall -- but it was near-genius nonetheless. Much has been said about this version of Crossroads and you'd better believe it all. Clapton's two solos on that son, one more incendiary than the other, rate as some of the most memorable guitar-playing of any rock era. The studio stuff is an added joy and even Baker's Pressed Rat isn't without its self-deprecating humor. Felix Pappalardi earns extra kudos for outstanding studio accompaniment and production. The original cover, black on silver ink, was a landmark of 60s album design. Listen to the audience on the live tracks. Clearly these people were there to soak in the brilliance of the music they were experiencing. You can too.

I was amazed at the transfer quality as earlier works sound tinny. I forgot how divers Cream is. It is as if they were experimenting with different types of songs. This is better than having variations of the same thing across the whole CD. It did not take me long to fall in love with the individual songs again. Everyone is familiar with "White Room" which is what made me think of this first but few remember "Pressed Rat and Warthog" or "Those Were the Days".
Bottom line the album is worth discovering or rediscovering.

To find Diamonds,tiny little rocks,one must dig through tons of rock. Here, in "Spoonful" you'll find the brightest Diamond in the history of rock.But where is it? Very easy.If you have a CD, and who doesn't these days, fast forward to 2 minutes and fifty seconds into the song,just after the vocals have ended. Continue listening till about the 8 minute mark. This is it. After you've heard this for several times it will hit you. You will take off. Get in your car and blast this at maximum volume. Be careful not to crash. Let me know what you think.

Cream's best album combines studio and live material so you get the best of both. There are lots of reviews here and at allmusic and other places, I'm sure, that will go into detail about just what makes this album great. When I review something here, I am usually inclined to discuss the sound quality of particular classic rock releases in their various incarnations.

This is another case of the label's remaster actually sounding worse than the original release. It's got too much boost in the mid-frequency spectrum which causes a distinct lack of clarity on vocals and other details. In terms of loudness and compression, this one actually does a good job not brick walling everything to make it distorted like so many remasters tend to do. So, you have the good and the bad...but you can always choose to have only the good....

How, you say? First, if you can afford it, go for a used copy of the DCC gold disc version of this mastered by Steve Hoffman. It is the best version of this album on CD, period. The gold disc part really has nothing to do with that...it's the excellent and meticulous mastering by Mr. Hoffman that makes this shine. However, you'll pay well over $50 for one of these.

Your second choice would be a used copy of the original release on Polydor (amazon lists this as the 1990 version). This was done by Dennis Drake and sounds really good, too, and you can find it here in the marketplace for under $15 (just make sure to ask the seller if it's the original release in the wide or fatboy case with the silver discs). If you don't believe me, buy one of each and have your own shootout and find out for yourself.

This album really epitomizes what Cream was about. They were both marvels live and in the studio, and never was that shown better than in this album. Jack Bruce and Peter Brown were amazingly prolific writers, and their best songs are all here. White Room is deserving of its classic (with a really good, intricate drum workout by Ginger Baker), and As You Said is another gentle, charming song. Passing the Time is really beautiful (showing Baker could write great songs too). I love Politician, whose chorus "I support the left, though I'm leaning, leaning to the right" still rings true today. The live stuff is phenomenal, especially the epic cover of Spoonful and Bruce's blues workout Train Time. The only song I could do without was Toad. It starts out well, but Baker's drum solo isn't very dynamic, and it goes on much too long. If Baker and Bruce had gotten along better (contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Clapton feuding with his other band mates, but Baker and Bruce, who had a bit of a history before Cream), Cream would have kept making great albums for a while. Nevertheless, this is a great album, Cream's best.

Consisting of one entire disc of studio material and a second disc culled from Cream's 1967 American tour, Wheels of Fire presents two dramaticly different views of the quintessential power trio. Beginning with White Room, a tour de fource electric blues classic, Cream leaves no doubt as to their virtuosity and improvisional skills. They also pay homage to Chester Burnette AKA Howlin Wolf on Sitting On Top of The World and cover Albert King's Born Under A Bad Sign. Both are deftly rendered with Cream's unique blend of electric blues and psycedellic soul. Then there's Passing The Time, Pressed Rat and Warthog, Those Were The Days, Deserted Cites of The Heart and As You Said, all Pete Brown/Jack Bruce orginals. Brown and Bruce form one of the sixities/early seventies most unique and orginal song writing teams. Brown's strange and surreal lyrics create a world where wathogs sell amplified hate and Pressed rat's collection of dog legs and feet. After Cream disbanned in 1968, they joined together for Jack Bruce's Songs For A Taylor, one of the most underated albums of the golden age of rock.

The Live disc consists of the Willie Dixon's blues classic Spoonful, (the UK release of Fresh Cream contained a studio version) and only three other selections. Crossroads is one of the rare opportunities for Clapton to step into the spotlight and demonstrate his vocal prowess. He was very shy to do so at this stage of his career, particularly on the concert stage. But here he delivers a confident and soulful reading of the Robert Johnson classic. Traintime is perhaps the only performance ever, (or at least as far as I know) of a harmonica and drum duet. Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce wail through twenty odd minutes of frantic "giddy up traintime" maddness. Then there's Baker's drum solo to end all drum solos. In the sixities and early seventies a concert performance, by any rock band worth their salt, had to include an extended drum solo. There were some great ones that readily come to mind, Soul Sacrafice by Santana at Woodstock, Moby Dick a great John Bonham solo by Zeplin and the duel percussion attack by Jaimo and Buth Trucks on the Allman Brother's Mountian Jam. But for sheer stamina, creativity and all out balls, Toad wins hands down. Baker was the first to create a twin base technique and here he demonstrates his virtuosity in delivering an incredible two-footed base performance that defies human capabilitiy. Ginger Baker is the most inventive and dynamic drummer ever to beat a skin in the rock world. As musicians, all three members of Cream are artists of the highest caliber and for a short while delighted the world with their creative genius and improasational skill. Look to Wheels Of Fire to capture them at the zenith of their powers.

Up to this album, to us righteous rock'n'rollers, it seemed to be. This trio of Clapton, Bruce and Baker (with songwriting help from Pete Brown and instrumental help from soon-to-be-Mountaineer Felix Pappalardi) legitimized the blues in rock doctrine and paved the way for such almost-pure blues bands as Canned Heat and Ten Years After. Today, their contemporaries The Rolling Stones and the late Jimi Hendrix are seen by many experts as blues artists. As you will hear on the live track "Spoonful", Eric Clapton had not yet gotten the notion that Fender built his guitar primarily to accompany his voice--the song's a pure-dee blues "fugue" between him and bassist Jack Bruce--16 minutes without a drum solo, which was unusual back then for a song that long. Songs like "White Room" and "Deserted Cities Of the Heart" are consistent with their earlier albums "Fresh Cream" and "Disraeli Gears", but as well as "Spoonful", you get other unabashed blues numbers as "Sitting On Top Of the World" and Booker T. Jones' "Born Under a Bad Sign" (did he ever do that one with the MG's?). And you get some hints of the approaching prog sound in "As You Said" and "Passing the Time". As well as Ginger Baker's lighthearted recitation "Pressed Rat and Warthog" ("Blue Condition" from "Disraeli Gears" had proven that he can't sing). Unfortunately, the trio ran their tank dry here--the next album, appropriately titled "Goodbye", had less than half new material.

I have to let you know that I never been a big Eric Clapton fan. But even I have to acknowledge that he's simply one of the all-time great guitarists, even if a lot of what he's done isn't to my liking. For many, even Clapton-detractors, Cream is without a doubt the finest and most interesting band he ever played in. Each of the three musicians had experience before, so they were no strangers to music when they got together in 1966 and recorded and released their debut, Fresh Cream. That one was more pop-oriented, but the blues influence was still there, as there were covers of blues songs. Disraeli Gears is without a doubt the band's high point, which included several songs that became radio staples ("Sunshine of Your Love", "Strange Brew", etc.). The band moved to psychedelia which really served them well.

Now comes Wheels of Fire, which was a double album set, one studio, one live, so you get to see what this band was made of in both settings. Let's start with the studio set: many of the songs are Jack Bruce (and Pete Brown) and Ginger Baker (with Mike Taylor) originals, with a handful of covers of blues songs originally done by blues artists. We all heard "White Room" plenty of times, it's became very much an FM radio staple. It bears more than a striking resemblance to "Tales of Brave Ulysses", right down to Clapton's use of wah-wah, and similar scales. "Sittin' On Top of the World" is a cover of a blues song, by Howlin' Wolf. Even during Cream's psychedelic phase, they hadn't forgotten their blues roots. Clapton never made a secret that he was big on the blues, as that constantly showed up throughout his career, through the various bands and his solo career. Of course, some people felt the material on this album was uneven, certainly not the easiest stuff to get into, and some people felt they could live without the stuff Ginger Baker wrote. But these songs to my ears are quite good, even if a bit peculiar. One of them being "Passing the Time". Way back as a teenager (around 1989, I was not alive in the 1960s, I was born in 1972) I first heard that song and disliked it, I was put off by Ginger Baker's singing and the circus organ. But hearing this song many year later, it isn't that bad, and I really liked that intense jam that comes out of nowhere showing Jack Bruce's bass skills and Baker's drumming. The jam fads back into the more mellow state the song started. Felix Pappalardi provided some cello work as well. The Jack Bruce/Pete Brown "As You Said" might not to be everyone's liking, but I thought of it as a nice experimental psychedelic piece (the only thing missing here was sitar). Strange use of phasing, I get reminded a little of the Beatles' "I am the Walrus", but it didn't quite have the big hooks that made the Beatles song so popular and such a big hit. Baker and Taylor's "Pressed Rat and Warthog" is an interesting piece where Baker narrates about two characters forced to close a shop because they were selling "atonal apples and amplified heat" with "Pressed Rat's collection of dog legs and feet". "Politician" might be familiar to many of you FM radio listeners, this one another one of those blues songs, but this time a Baker/Brown composition, rather than a cover of an old blues song. Baker/Taylor's "Those Were the Days" sounds very much like a traditional psychedelic Cream song, this time Jack Bruce doing vocals, so it sounds like Cream as you expect. This is probably one of the greatest songs Cream did that you don't hear on the radio. Next is a cover of Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign", another familiar blues song that everyone has heard on classic FM radio. "Anyone For Tennis" is sadly not on the original LP (it should have been), Clapton takes on vocals here. I really dig the use of recorder and percussion. The song originally came out as a single (its flip side being "Press Rat and Warthog"). So it's nice to see it included on the CD reissue as I really think it deserved to be on the original album. The second disc is certain to polarize many a listener. It's mainly a solo showcase for Clapton, Bruce, and Baker. You keep hearing about those live Cream improvisations. You get your chance here! You either find them mindblowing or boring. Remember that many people think the same with the Grateful Dead and their live improvisations, even if what they did was very different. First is Robert Johnson's "Crossroads". We all know this one, another radio staple. It has full band interaction. Then comes a cover of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful". If you're familiar with the studio version off Fresh Cream, you'll notice this one is considerably longer with an extended Clapton guitar solo. Bruce's "Traintime" is largely a harmonica solo (I wondered if this inspired the Blues Travelers? Of course Bruce's harmonica playing and sound was different from John Popper's). "Toad", Baker's time to show, was originally off Fresh Cream, this time the drum solo was way extended. This is where it would scare the more casual listeners off for good. But he has such a creative and imaginative approach to drumming that I wanted to listen to this drum solo. That drum solo certainly inspired the likes of Led Zeppelin, and Jethro Tull ("Dharma For One"). The studio original, I'm certain, inspired Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" (they also happened to share the same label: Atco).

I understand that there were versions of Wheels of Fire that had the studio and live versions sold separately, but most commonly is the double album set. Here in America, the album was originally released with a silvery cover. The cover artwork is by Martin Sharp, an Australian who also did the artwork to Disraeli Gears (no surprise, as the artwork is quite similar). But this one isn't color, but I really thought it looks better against a silvery background, as opposed to a gray background like many later prints.

It's strange that Wheels of Fire isn't exactly the most accessible album out there, and at the same time, it became one of the best-selling albums (along with Iron Butterfly's In-a-Gadda-da-Vida) in the Atlantic Records/Atco discography.

Cream also had a big impact on power trios to come in their wake. For example, the James Gang, their debut album, Yer' Album (1969) sounds to me like an American version of Cream. Check out Joe Walsh and his extended guitar improvisations, plus Tom Kriss' heavily fuzzed bass (he only appeared on that album) and similar bass playing. Mountain would not exist were it not for Cream, especially became Felix Pappalardi was a member of that group (and Leslie West's vocals often reminds me of Jack Bruce). I'd like to mention the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but they were Cream's contemporaries, and equally influential. Cream also influenced plenty of non-power trios too, including Jethro Tull, where the British press hailed them as "The next Cream". Mick Abrahams' guitar work was inspired by Clapton. Clive Bunker gave an extended drum solo with "Dharma For One". The more bluesy explorations were not unlike Cream's. And they also did a cover of "Cat's Squirrel" (of course we knew what happened to Tull afterwards: Abrahams left, Martin Barre came in, and Ian Anderson moved the band towards progressive rock, which certainly hardly hurt the band any).

Cream is one of those bands I should have reviewed their stuff ages ago. They are really one of the greats of rock, and while Wheels of Fire might be a bit much for the newbie (start with Disraeli Gears), it still comes highly recommended.

I bought this when I was a teenager in the late '60s. Loved it, of course. When it was available in the late '80's on CD I bought it but since then it was never enhanced with outtakes or anything. Good God, think of all the (stupid) albums that have been "Deluxed" but this one isn't??????
Five stars for musical quality. Zero for attention to making it the classic it should be.
I just got the "Rope Ladder to the Moon" DVD about Jack Bruce. Fantastic!!! Cream fans: get this!
Oh well. Thought The Ramones were fantasic too, but at least their catalog is done justice.
Bye
Eddie