Ginger Baker
Plain-speaking rock drummer with Cream known for his frenzied solos and hailed as one of the all-time greats
GINGER Baker, who died last Sunday aged 80, was often credited with being the finest drummer in rock’n’roll, notably during his time with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce in Cream.
It was entirely in keeping with his perverse nature — which embraced tastes as varied as polo, heroin and olive farming — that he should insist he was actually a jazz musician.
But with his shaggy red hair and beard, wild-eyed stare and emaciated appearance, Baker seemed the epitome of the crazed rock drummer. His playing was intuitive, complex, polyrhythmical — and usually thunderously loud.
In their two-year existence Cream achieved spectacular success, establishing themselves as the first rock “supergroup” and gathering an army of fans in Europe and the United States.
When the group was formed in 1966, neither Clapton, Bruce nor Baker was especially well known, although they had played in some respected bands.
Bruce and Baker, in particular, had been together in the Graham Bond Organisation, from which the bass guitarist Bruce had been sacked by Baker, an intense, short-tempered man who had sidelined Bond from the leadership of his own outfit.
Thus it was much to Baker’s chagrin that when he asked Clapton to form a group with him, the guitarist agreed to do so only if Bruce also joined them. Moreover, all of them were to have equal status within the band.
Yet, unpleasant as these conditions were to Baker, they proved to be the foundations of Cream’s phenomenal success. It was Bruce who wrote much of the music they played, while as partners they strove to match each other on their instruments instead of being content to hide behind the vocalist.
The result was a magnificent blend of power blues and pop — songs such as I Feel Free, Sunshine of Your Love and White Room — that made stars of all three, especially in America where the albums Disraeli Gears (1967) and Wheels of Fire (1968) sold multiple millions of copies.
If it was Clapton’s soaring guitar licks that generated the most memorable graffiti (“Clapton Is God”), Baker became no less the focus of fans’ attention, his jazzy, offbeat style adored by the purists, his genius for rhythm hailed by all.
Of particular significance were his frenzied solos in which his wiry frame appeared to be in communion with his drums; in 1966, Baker collapsed during a gig at Sussex University following one extended display.
These lengthy instrumentals became prime influences, rather to his regret, on the development of heavy metal and progressive rock.
Yet the almost instant success of Cream, who by 1968 stood alongside The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix as the biggest act in rock music, appeared not to satisfy Baker, who had cut his teeth in tight jazz bands in south London.
In particular, he felt that the group’s emphasis on power degraded their playing.
Baker had firm opinions on other artists — “The Beatles? I was never a fan” – and regarded himself as one of the few genuine musicians in rock (“Elvis Presley? One of the biggest berks that ever lived”).
Soon, his ego and that of Bruce clashed fatally. Both wanted to explore new directions and in 1968, after only two years together, the band split up, playing a memorable last concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
Baker and Clapton then joined Steve Winwood in another short-lived supergroup, Blind Faith, which enjoyed huge ticket sales before imploding within a year. Baker was not yet 30, but he was to spend the remainder of his career without another hit and would finally entirely renounce rock music.
Peter Edward Baker was born on August 19, 1939 and brought up in Lewisham, south London.
His father, a bricklayer who gloried in the name of Frederick Louvaine Formidable Baker, was killed in 1943 during the Dodecanese campaign (“He knew he would die,” recalled Baker).
His sole legacy to the son he barely knew was a letter he left for him to open when he was 14; in it he advised Ginger to make his way in the world by liberal use of his fists.
Young Ginger was in fact a bright if rather unruly boy, and he won a place at Shooter’s Hill Grammar School. His initial ambition was to become a professional cyclist, but after a taxi wrote off his racer he diverted his considerable energies into drumming, the basics of which he mastered with a knife and a fork and the school dining table.
“There aren’t many drummers who can get anywhere near me,” he once said. “Of course I have a gift. I am ambidextrous and have remarkable co-ordination.”
He played first with traditional jazz bands, then by 1960 had secured himself a post as the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s club. At first, strapped for cash, he made do with a drum kit he had bought in a children’s toyshop. Later he built one from Perspex.
Baker then played with both Acker Bilk and Terry Lightfoot, stalwarts of the London jazz scene of the early Sixties. A more important influence was Phil Seaman, a bebop drummer who introduced him to African rhythms. Less happily, another drummer, Dicky Devere, introduced Baker to heroin, which would blight his life for the next 25 years.
To his regret, his new habit cost him a job with John Dankworth, and he spent much time trying to cure his dependency, a task not made easier by drug-dealing fans of Cream who would give him supplies for free.
His use of the drug contributed to his reputation for wild antics.
He was fearless, intimidating and, in his days of heroin addiction, by his own admission “not terribly pleasant”; his good friend, the jazz saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, described him as a black-hearted villain.
But there was no doubting the sheer force and conviction of his style, nor his ability to “feel” the music he played. Having learnt to read music while moonlighting with an Irish dance band in Kilburn, in 1962, Baker — by now a confirmed beatnik – turned to R&B in search of a less constricting form of music.
Charlie Watts, the drummer with the Stones, recommended him to the guitarist Alexis Korner, with whose group Blues Incorporated he played before moving on to that of Graham Bond.
Following the demise of Blind Faith, Baker formed a band called Air Force, but this flopped so he decamped to Nigeria to explore his long-standing interest in the roots of drumming. He built a studio near Lagos where Wings recorded the Band on the Run album and he played regularly with the Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti.
It was in Nigeria that Baker was first induced to try polo. Its fast-moving nature and blend of grace and aggression captivated him, and it soon became the other ruling passion of his life.
Yet by now he had lost a considerable fortune in the studio venture, and disagreements with the authorities over tax matters persuaded him to move in 1976 to Tuscany, where he set himself up as an olive farmer.
Here too, however, things did not go as planned. A hard winter destroyed many of his trees, his second marriage collapsed, and by the mid1980s Baker found himself working as a day labourer on building sites to make ends meet. It was in Italy, though, that he finally rid himself of his heroin dependency.
He spent much of the next 15 years in America, where he still had a substantial fanbase. He lived first in Los Angeles, where he worked with John Lydon’s band Public Image Limited (drumming on the hit Rise in 1986) and then on a ranch in Colorado, where he bred polo ponies.
In 1993, he was persuaded to reunite with Clapton and Bruce for a single night when Cream were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the following year he joined Bruce and Gary Moore in a power trio named BBM. The band released an album which sold well in America, but the ill-feeling with Bruce had not run its course and the group broke up.
In the late 1990s Baker wholly turned his back on rock and returned to his earliest days as a musician by recording several well-received jazz albums, among them Falling Off the Roof (1996) and Coward of the County (1999).
Drug convictions dating back to the 1970s meant that he could never settle permanently in America, and in 1999 he moved to a ranch 3,500 ft up in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa.
In 2005 he came out of seclusion and reunited with Clapton and Bruce for a series of Cream concerts at the Royal Albert Hall and Madison Square Garden, resulting in the album Royal Albert Hall London May 2-3-5-6, 2005.
Baker’s autobiography, Hellraiser, was published in 2009, and in 2012 a documentary about him won the Grand Jury Prize at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The title, Beware of Mr Baker, came from the sign outside his ranch.
In 2013 and 2014 he toured with a quartet, the Ginger Baker Jazz Confusion, and recorded an album, Why?
In 2016, suffering from heart trouble, he underwent an operation and announced that there would be no more touring.
Ginger Baker was married four times and had two daughters and a son.
‘He was fearless, intimidating and “not terribly pleasant”’