01. "Sweet Wine" (Baker, Godfrey) – 3:27
02. Eric Clapton Interview – 0:54
03. "Wrapping Paper" (Bruce, Brown) – 2:29
04. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (Waters) – 3:02
05. "Steppin' Out" (Bracken) – 1:50
06. "Crossroads" (Johnson, arr. Clapton) – 1:53
07. "Cat's Squirrel" (Traditional, arr. S. Splurge) – 3:38
08. "Traintime" (Bruce) – 2:50
09. "I'm So Glad" (James) – 4:22
10. "Lawdy Mama" (Traditional, arr. Clapton) – 1:53
11. Eric Clapton Interview 2 – 0:48
12. "I Feel Free" (Bruce, Brown) – 2:54
13. "N.S.U." (Bruce) – 2:55
14. "Four Until Late" (Johnson, arr. Clapton) – 1:55
15. "Strange Brew" (Clapton, Pappalardi, Collins) – 3:00
16. Eric Clapton Interview 3 – 0:44
17. "Tales of Brave Ulysses" (Clapton, Sharp) – 2:55
18. "We're Going Wrong" (Bruce) – 3:25
19. Eric Clapton Interview 4 – 0:37
20. "Born Under a Bad Sign" (Jones, Bell) – 3:03
21. "Outside Woman Blues" (Reynolds) – 3:18
22. "Take It Back" (Bruce, Brown) – 2:17
23. "Sunshine Of Your Love" (Clapton, Bruce, Brown) – 4:08
24. "Politician" (Bruce, Brown) – 3:59
25. "SWLABR" (Bruce, Brown) – 2:32
26. "Steppin' Out" (Bracken) – 3:37

Artists:
    Eric Clapton – guitar, vocals
    Jack Bruce – bass, lead vocals, harmonica
    Ginger Baker – drums, percussion, vocals

This compilation of 22 Cream BBC tracks from 1966-1968 marked a major addition to the group's discography, particularly as they released relatively little product during their actual lifetime. All of but two of these cuts ("Lawdy Mama" and the 1968 version of "Steppin' Out," which had appeared on Eric Clapton's Crossroads box) were previously unreleased, and although many of these had made the round on bootlegs, the sound and presentation here is unsurprisingly preferable. As for actual surprises, there aren't many. It's a good cross section of songs from their studio records, though a couple, "Steppin' Out" and "Traintime," only appeared on live releases, and some of these BBC takes actually predate the release and recording of the album versions, which makes them of historical interest for intense Cream fans. (There are also four brief interviews with Eric Clapton from the original broadcasts.) There's a mild surprise in the absence of a version of "White Room," but otherwise many of the group's better compositions and covers are here, including "I Feel Free," "N.S.U.," "Strange Brew," "Tales of Brave Ulysses," "Sunshine of Your Love," "Born Under a Bad Sign," "Outside Woman Blues," "Crossroads," "We're Going Wrong," "I'm So Glad," "SWLABR," and "Politician." Cream took better advantage of the live-in-the-studio BBC format than some groups of similar stature. There's a lean urgency to most of the performances that, while not necessarily superior to the more fully realized and polished studio renditions, do vary notably in ambience from the more familiar versions. The sound quality is good but not perfect, and variable; sometimes it's excellent, yet at other times there seem to be imperfections in the tapes sourced, with "Sunshine of Your Love" suffering from a (not grievously) hollow, muffled quality. If there's any other slight criticism of this set, it's that a handful of BBC tracks don't appear, including some that don't make it onto this CD in any version, like "Sleepy Time Time," "Toad," and "Sitting on Top of the World." Given Cream's tendency to over-improvise on the band's live concert recordings, however, the concise nature of these BBC tracks (none of which exceed five minutes) makes them preferable listening in some respects. --- Richie Unterberger, allmusic.com

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1. Strange Brew
2. World Of Pain
3. Outside Woman Blues
4. Born Under A Bad Sign
5. Pressed Rat And Warthog
6. Tales Of Brave Ulysses
7. SWLABR
8. N.S.U.
9. Deserted Cities Of The Heart
10. Take It Back
11. Crossroads
12. Cat's Squirrel
13. Traintime
14. I'm So Glad
15. Passing The Time
16. Rollin' And Tumbling
17. Lawdy Mama (Version 2)
18. Spoonful
19. White Room
20. Politician
21. Wrapping Paper

Eric Clapton – guitar, vocals
Jack Bruce – bass, vocals
Ginger Baker - drums, vocals

To begin with, Cream, as its name boasted, consisted of three of the top musicians in the UK in the late sixties. Eric Clapton had established his mastery of the electric blues guitar with the Yardbirds and John Mayall. Jack Bruce was the most inventive bass player around. Ginger Baker was a demon on drums, specializing in a kit that boasted two bass drums. While Clapton was mostly a student of the blues, Bruce and Baker were at least as influenced by jazz. Their live shows relied heavily on improvisation and included long jam sessions on many numbers.

While the musicianship of the band’s three members tell much of the story concerning their live performances, their studio work is another tale altogether. Probably no other rock band in history had such a strong dichotomy between their two modes of expression. As live performers, they were the definitive power trio. Much of their concert work was recorded and released with great commercial and critical success. The compositions used were often old and rearranged blues classics, such as Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” “Howlin’ Wolf’s “Sitting On Top of the World,” and Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful,” combined with a few self-penned numbers such as “Toad.” In all these cases, though, the songs used were simply launching pads for the trio’s improvisational gymnastics.

In the studio, though, they became an entirely different proposition. Engineer Tom Dowd and producer Felix Pappalardi were significant contributors to the group’s sound, with Pappalardi co-composing and playing viola, piano and mellotron on some of their tracks. Dowd was a great contributor to their sound on record, and was responsible for editing a longer live performance into the fairly concise version of “Crossroads” that became a hit single. Their sometimes startlingly original compositions were co-penned by a variety of contributors, most importantly poet Pete Brown, but also including illustrator Martin Sharp, Gail Collins, the afore-mentioned Pappalardi and Beatle George Harrison. This unusual combination of talent was capable of producing all sorts of different sounds in the studio, but what emerged most often, and with greatest success, was a sort of psychedelic blues.

Cream was also very much a product of a unique point in time, starting as they did in 1966 and continuing through 1969. Older British bands, such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks were not doing American tours at this time, for various reasons, creating a vacuum in the American market. Previous tours had relied on older amplifiers even after the bands began playing huge venues such as stadiums, making the music less important than the appearance of the bands. Cream was one of the first groups to use the newer Marshall amplifiers on the road, and thus was able to produce an overwhelming sound in the largest of halls, even with only three musicians on stage. Dylan had just opened up the Top 40 to meaningfully vague lyrics and longer songs. Jimi Hendrix had introduced the possibilities of a power trio featuring a wildly improvisational guitarist. Hendrix had also demonstrated the possibilities of electronically distorted guitar sounds, extending the definition of psychedelia, using new tools such as the wah-wah pedal. So in many ways Cream was in the right place at the right time to be able to take advantage of all these new possibilities.

Although Cream stayed together for only two years — and long enough to produce three and a half studio albums — this group still has the distinction of being the only band to feature the talents of Eric Clapton for this long a run. And given their perfect timing, and the accelerated pace of activity in the rock world during this period, they were able to be enormously productive and influential over this relatively brief span. ---reasontorock.com

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1 - N.S.U.
2 - Steppin' Out
3 - Train Time
4 - Toad
5 - I'm So Glad
6 - Train Time
7 - Toad
8 – Spoonful

Line-up:
    Ginger Baker – drums, percussion, vocals
    Jack Bruce – bass, vocals, harmonica
    Eric Clapton – lead guitar, vocals

An excellent sounding Cream release from Mid Valley Records with tracks 1 to 5 from Stockholm, Sweden on March 7, 1967 and tracks 6 to 8 recorded on the Sports Arena, San Diego on October 20, 1968.

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Dysk 1 – Studio

    1. 	White Room 	(Bruce/Brown) 4:57
    2. 	Sitting on Top of the World 	(Howlin' Wolf) 4:57
    3. 	Passing the Time 	(Baker/Taylor) 4:30
    4. 	As You Said 	(Bruce/Brown) 4:18
    5. 	Pressed Rat and Warthog 	(Baker/Taylor) 3:13
    6. 	Politician 	(Bruce/Brown) 4:11
    7. 	Those Were the Days 	(Baker/Taylor) 2:54
    8. 	Born Under a Bad Sign 	(Booker T. Jones/William Bell) 3:08
    9. 	Deserted Cities of the Heart 	(Bruce/Brown) 3:37
    		
Dysk 2 – Live at the Fillmore

    1. 	Crossroads 	(Robert Johnson) 4:14
    2. 	Spoonful 	(Willie Dixon) 16:43
    3. 	Traintime 	(Bruce) 7:00
    4. 	Toad 	(Baker) 16:15

Jack Bruce – vocals, lead vocals, bass, cello, harmonica, calliope, acoustic guitar, recorder
Ginger Baker – drums, percussion, bells, glockenspiel, timpani, spoken word on "Pressed Rat and Warthog"
Eric Clapton – guitar, vocals
Felix Pappalardi – viola, bells, organ, trumpet, tonette

If Disraeli Gears was the album where Cream came into their own, its successor, Wheels of Fire, finds the trio in full fight, capturing every side of their multi-faceted personality, even hinting at the internal pressures that soon would tear the band asunder. A dense, unwieldy double album split into an LP of new studio material and an LP of live material, it's sprawling and scattered, at once awesome in its achievement and maddening in how it falls just short of greatness. It misses its goal not because one LP works and the other doesn't, but because both the live and studio sets suffer from strikingly similar flaws, deriving from the constant power struggle between the trio. Of the three, Ginger Baker comes up short, contributing the passable "Passing the Time" and "Those Were the Days," which are overshadowed by how he extends his solo drum showcase "Toad" to a numbing quarter of an hour and trips upon the Wind & the Willows whimsy of "Pressed Rat and Warthog," whose studied eccentricity pales next to Eric Clapton's nimble, eerily cheerful "Anyone for Tennis." In almost every regard, Wheels of Fire is a terrific showcase for Clapton as a guitarist, especially on the first side of the live album with "Crossroads," a mighty encapsulation of all of his strengths. Some of that is studio trickery, as producer Felix Pappalardi cut together the best bits of a winding improvisation to a tight four minutes, giving this track a relentless momentum that's exceptionally exciting, but there's no denying that Clapton is at a peak here, whether he's tearing off solos on a 17-minute "Spoonful" or goosing "White Room" toward the heights of madness. But it's the architect of "White Room," bassist Jack Bruce, who, along with his collaborator Peter Brown, reaches a peak as a songwriter. Aside from the monumental "White Room," he has the lovely, wistful "As You Said," the cinematic "Deserted Cities of the Heart," and the slow, cynical blues "Politician," all among Cream's very best work. And in many ways Wheels of Fire is indeed filled with Cream's very best work, since it also captures the fury and invention (and indulgence) of the band at its peak on the stage and in the studio, but as it tries to find a delicate balance between these three titanic egos, it doesn't quite add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. But taken alone, those individual parts are often quite tremendous. ---Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

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Tracklist :
1 Strange Brew (2:50)
2 Sunshine of Your Love (4:13)
3 World of Pain (3:05)
4 Dance the Night Away (3:36)
5 Blue Condition (3:32)
6 Tales of Brave Ulysses (2:49)
7 Swlabr (2:34)
8 We're Going Wrong (3:29)
9 Outside Woman Blues (2:27)
10 Take It Back (3:08)
11 Mother's Lament (1:47)

Ginger Baker – drums, percussion, vocals
Jack Bruce – bass, piano, vocals, harmonica
Eric Clapton – lead guitar, rhythm guitar, 12-string guitar, vocals

Cream teamed up with producer Felix Pappalardi for their second album, Disraeli Gears, a move that helped push the power trio toward psychedelia and also helped give the album a thematic coherence missing from the debut. This, of course, means that Cream get further away from the pure blues improvisatory troupe they were intended to be, but it does get them to be who they truly are: a massive, innovative power trio. The blues still courses throughout Disraeli Gears -- the swirling kaleidoscopic "Strange Brew" is built upon a riff lifted from Albert King -- but it's filtered into saturated colors, as it is on "Sunshine of Your Love," or it's slowed down and blurred out, as it is on the ominous murk of "Tales of Brave Ulysses." It's a pure psychedelic move that's spurred along by Jack Bruce's flourishing collaboration with Pete Brown. Together, this pair steers the album away from recycled blues-rock and toward its eccentric British core, for with the fuzzy freakout "Swlabr," the music hall flourishes of "Dance the Night Away," the swinging "Take It Back," and of course, the old music hall song "Mother's Lament," this is a very British record. Even so, this crossed the ocean and also became a major hit in America, because regardless of how whimsical certain segments are, Cream are still a heavy rock trio and Disraeli Gears is a quintessential heavy rock album of the '60s. Yes, its psychedelic trappings tie it forever to 1967, but the imagination of the arrangements, the strength of the compositions, and especially the force of the musicianship make this album transcend its time as well. ---Stephen Thomas Erlewine, allmusic.com

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Side 1

   1. "I Feel Free" (Jack Bruce, Pete Brown) - 2:53
   2. "N.S.U." (Bruce) – 2:43
   3. "Sleepy Time Time" (Bruce, Janet Godfrey) – 4:20
   4. "Dreaming" (Bruce) – 1:58
   5. "Sweet Wine" (Ginger Baker, Godfrey) – 3:17
   6. "Spoonful" (Willie Dixon) – 6:30

Side 2

   1. "Cat's Squirrel" (Traditional, arr. S. Splurge) – 3:03
   2. "Four Until Late" (Robert Johnson, arr. Eric Clapton) – 2:07
   3. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (McKinley Morganfield) – 4:42
   4. "I'm So Glad" (Skip James) – 3:57
   5. "Toad" (Baker) – 5:11

Jack Bruce - Bass, Harmonica, Keyboards, Vocals
Eric Clapton - Guitar, Vocals
Ginger Baker - Drums, Vocals

Fresh Cream represents so many different firsts, it's difficult to keep count. Cream, of course, was the first supergroup, but their first album not only gave birth to the power trio, it also was instrumental in the birth of heavy metal and the birth of jam rock. That's a lot of weight for one record and, like a lot of pioneering records, Fresh Cream doesn't seem quite as mighty as what would come later, both from the group and its acolytes. In retrospect, the moments on the LP that are a bit unformed -- in particular, the halting waltz of "Dreaming" never achieves the sweet ethereal atmosphere it aspires to -- stand out more than the innovations, which have been so thoroughly assimilated into the vocabulary of rock & roll, but Fresh Cream was a remarkable shift forward in rock upon its 1966 release and it remains quite potent. Certainly at this early stage the trio was still grounded heavily in blues, only fitting given guitarist Eric Clapton's stint in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, which is where he first played with bassist Jack Bruce, but Cream never had the purist bent of Mayall, and not just because they dabbled heavily in psychedelia. The rhythm section of Bruce and Ginger Baker had a distinct jazzy bent to their beat; this isn't hard and pure, it's spongy and elastic, giving the musicians plenty of room to roam. This fluidity is most apparent on the blues covers that take up nearly half the record, especially on "Spoonful," where the swirling instrumental interplay, echo, fuzz tones, and overwhelming volume constitute true psychedelic music, and also points strongly toward the guitar worship of heavy metal. Almost all the second side of Fresh Cream is devoted to this, closing with Baker's showcase "Toad," but for as hard and restless as this half of the album is, there is some lightness on the first portion of the record where Bruce reveals himself as an inventive psychedelic pop songwriter with the tense, colorful "N.S.U." and the hook- and harmony-laden "I Feel Free." Cream shows as much force and mastery on these tighter, poppier tunes as they do on the free-flowing jams, yet they show a clear bias toward the long-form blues numbers, which makes sense: they formed to be able to pursue this freedom, which they do so without restraint. If at times that does make the album indulgent or lopsided, this is nevertheless where Cream was feeling their way forward, creating their heavy psychedelic jazz-blues and, in the process, opening the door to all kinds of serious rock music that may have happened without Fresh Cream, but it just would not have happened in the same fashion as it did with this record as precedent. --- Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

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Disc 1:
1.Tales of Brave Ulysses
2.N.S.U.
3.Sitting On Top of the World
4.Sweet Wine
5.Rollin' And Tumblin'
6.Spoonful 

Disc 2:
1.Stepping Out
2.Traintime
3.Toad
4.I'm So Glad

Eric Clapton - guitar, vocals
Jack Bruce - bass, vocals
Ginger Baker - drums 

Sun Vanishes - Birth of the Six Strings God
Detroit, Mi. - October 15, 1967 - Mid Valley

This is the best soundboard recording to surface from The Grande Ballroom in Detroit on 15 October 1967. By this time, Cream was much more adventurous in their playing when compared to shows earlier in year. This set features a truly amazing version of “Spoonful”. “NSU” and “Steppin’ Out” are excellent examples of why Eric is credited as being one of the prime innovators of feedback as a musical tool. “NSU” also features a live example of Eric’s distinctive “woman tone” sound. ---whereseric.com

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