![\"Jack](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Jack-Bruce-names-his-favourite-Cream-song-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credit: F. van Geelen)<\/p>\n
Mon 16 June 2025 4:00, UK <\/p>\n
By 1966, Scottish bassist Jack Bruce<\/a> was already a key name in the swinging London counterculture, playing with The Graham Bond Organisation and briefly joining John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers. Having met drumming maestro Ginger Baker and virtuoso guitarist Eric Clapton in both respective bands, a short spell in Manfred Mann preceded his founding of Cream, the power trio that conjured psychedelic rock mixed with heavy blues attack and co-writing some of their biggest hits including \u2018Sunshine of Your Love\u2019 and \u2018White Room\u2019.<\/p>\n Touring with Cream and beyond with his solo career and West, Bruce and Laing project, Bruce hung out and jammed with the era\u2019s most legendary names. Sharing bills with Jimi Hendrix, cutting songs with George Harrison, and credited on sessions from Lou Reed, Soft Machine, and Carla Bley\u2019s Escalator over the Hill jazz opera.<\/p>\n Boasting such acclaimed and diverse collaborations and ventures, Bruce singled out Frank Zappa from his storied creative history for an admired artistry mixed with complex feelings regarding his style of captaining.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve got a lot of respect for Frank, but it was always the Mothers that I loved, Bruce confessed to Classic Rock in 2008. \u201cWhen I was living in Germany [in the early 1990s], I got a phone call from The Mothers and I went to see them. They were living in this one little room, cooking spaghetti on a little hob. And I was thinking: \u2018Fuck me! This ain\u2019t right. This is The Mothers we\u2019re talking about here\u201d.<\/p>\n Zappa was never a hippy as is often misconceived. While afforded fame via the West Coast psychedelia that exploded in the mid-1960s, Zappa cared little for the LSD<\/a> chemical recreation indulged left, right and centre, and far too much of a shrewd businessman to ignore \u2018The Man\u2019 and the music industry bigwigs that stood as the hippies\u2019 enemy.<\/p>\n Zappa was a freak at heart, wedded to the anti-establishment precedent of the Beat generation but cynical to the core with the flower power idyll. Indeed, 1968\u2019s We\u2019re Only in It for the Money excoriated the Summer of Love by featuring a scored counter to The Beatles\u2019 Sgt Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band with a discoloured collage of rotten vegetables and thunderstorms.<\/p>\n He was also an unforgiving taskmaster. With a reputation for fastidious creative control over his work, any recruit in his band would suffer ungodly levels of rehearsals and strict expectations to stick to the complex arrangement. Any showboating or push to add some individual flair would be met with the ungracious \u201cWindow or aisle, how would you like to return home?\u201d With Bruce lending his basslines to 1974\u2019s \u2018Apostrophe\u2019, it\u2019s unclear whether he too felt the the sharp end of his authoritarianism.<\/p>\n Zappa would break up and reset The Mothers of Invention several times across the 1970s, leaving a sour legacy of royalty disputes, separate hotel rooms, and even overdubs of later reissues of The Mothers\u2019 back catalogue. Dying of cancer in 1993, Zappa even managed to provoke ire in Bruce, even in death: \u201cIt really annoyed me. And what really got to me was that they inducted Frank into the\u00a0Ro<\/a>ck and Roll Hall of Fame,\u00a0<\/a>but the rest of the guys didn\u2019t get any recognition. They were certainly affected badly by that\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Related Topics<\/p>\n The Far Out Music Newsletter<\/p>\n All the latest music news from the independant voice of culture.
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