Cream - "Goodbye" (double album version)

Hey, it's my birthday! Let's get through this quickly so I can get back to eating cake.

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Note: I had essentially completed this entry for the blog several months ago, and added it to the queue. In the meantime, The Reconstructor created his own version of this album. I only point this out to show that this is a case of "great minds...." rather than me just piggybacking on other people's work. Enjoy.

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Cream sort of stumbled to the finish line. The band's last tour had triumphs and pitfalls, and its last album was completed with live renditions as filler. In fact, the original plan for the band's final album, Goodbye, was to have it be a double album like its predecessor Wheels of Fire -- with one disc of studio tracks and one disc of live tracks. 

However, bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker often feuded, and guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton was ready to move on to something else. So, to fulfill the band's contract, Goodbye featured just three studio tracks, and the rest of the album was filled with tracks recorded live in October 1968 at the L.A. Forum.

I decided to take a stab at creating a double album as originally envisioned.

SIDE A

1. The Clearout

2. Presence of the Lord

3. Anyone for Tennis

4. The Coffee Song

5. Lawdy Mama

6. Weird of Hermiston

7. What a Bringdown

SIDE B

1. Badge

2. Doing that Scrapyard Thing

3. Do What You Like

SIDE C

1. I'm So Glad

2. Politician

3. Rollin' and Tumblin'

SIDE D

1. N.S.U.

2. Sleepy Time Time

3. Sitting on Top of the World

Even when gathering the studio tracks from Goodbye, a non-album single track and a couple of outtakes, I found myself still not having enough songs for the studio sides. This is because, despite Cream's live interpretations of songs that could run as long as 20 minutes or more, their studio tracks were often almost comically short. So to fill out Sides A and B, I decided to raid Blind Faith's and Bruce's debut albums.

Since Blind Faith included both Clapton and Baker, as well as Steve Winwood (whom Clapton had earlier tried to bring into Cream to revitalize the band), the inclusion of a couple of their songs is not that far-fetched. The two songs I chose from Blind Faith were Clapton's "Presence of the Lord" and Baker's "Do What You Like." 

From Bruce's Songs of a Sailor solo album, I picked two tracks that had originally been intended for Cream's Disraeli Gears album: "The Clearout" and "Weird of Hermiston."

Besides "Badge," "Doing That Scrapyard Thing" and "What a Bringdown" from Goodbye, I also included "Anyone for Tennis" and "The Coffee Song," from non-album singles, and "Lawdy Mama," the one studio track on Live Cream. Tied together, these tracks make up the "studio sides" of the album.

Although a box set of live tracks recorded at four shows (Oakland, L.A., San Diego and London) during the 1968 tour was recently released, I decided to concentrate on only those tracks that were initially released from this tour. My reasoning is that the band, record company or both considered them the best of the bunch. About a year after Goodbye was released, an album with four live tracks (all recorded in March '68 in San Francisco) and one studio track (recorded in '67) was released called Live Cream.

For Sides C and D (the "live sides") of this album, I took all the live tracks from Goodbye and Live Cream, except one: "Sweet Wine." At 15:16, the song was simply too long to fit in if we were going to work within the time constraints of a vinyl album.

The final result is pretty good, I think. The Bruce and Blind Faith tracks don't jump out as being so completely different from Cream. And considering both albums came out about the same time and so very soon after Goodbye, it's reasonable to assume that they could have been included had the group lasted longer.

I kept the cover the same as the released version of the album.