(Credits: Alamy)
Thu 6 November 2025 17:00, UK
Most people working with Ginger Baker knew what they were getting into.
He may have been one of the greatest drummers to walk the Earth, but when looking at the tension-fuelled fights that went on between him and Jack Bruce half the time, it wasn’t like he was exactly the easiest person to get along with all the time. But whereas Eric Clapton could be the peacemaker in Cream some of the time, Baker knew when he was dealing with a musician who didn’t know what they were doing.
Granted, it was going to take an insanely high track record to be able to match what Baker was doing. He liked the idea of making music that had a certain flow to it, but he was also quick to say that some of the greatest drummers of his generation, like John Bonham, weren’t nearly as good as the rest of the world claimed them to be.
That’s because Baker didn’t go to the school of rock and roll drumming. His heroes were all jazz musicians, and while that gave him a kinship with people like Charlie Watts whenever he saw him play with The Rolling Stones, it didn’t exactly endear him to bands that claimed to only play rock and roll.
Because if there’s one thing that jazz players know better than anyone, it’s the ability to improvise. The song isn’t supposed to have one set form from one bar to the next, and the beauty of seeing Cream in their prime was not knowing where the song was going to go whenever they started to jam together. So when Baker got back together with Bruce decades later, it felt like they were bound to recapture the magic all over again. All they needed was the right guitarist, but Gary Moore was far from the best choice in Baker’s mind.
Then again, it’s not like Moore was a hack by any means. He had been celebrated as one of the finest blues guitarists of his time, and listening to his solo work, it’s not like he didn’t have the chops to fill Clapton’s shoes if he wanted to. But when he got together with the rest of the band, the hardest hurdle for Baker to get over was knowing that he couldn’t improvise to save his life.
For him, the beauty of playing live was getting the chance to stretch out, and Baker knew he was dealing with someone who refused to get themselves out of first gear, saying, “More gigs were cancelled than played. And they were awful anyway. Unlike Cream, everything with Gary Moore was contrived. Every solo he played was the same. I like to improvise.” And if you want to see what Baker was talking about, you only need to look at Cream’s farewell gigs.
Getting Clapton to depart from his solo career for a little while was already a godsend, but the songs that they played those handful of nights weren’t always exactly like the record. Whether it was ‘White Room’ or Baker cutting loose on ‘Pressed Rat and Warthog’, every tune gave them a new opportunity to pull something out of themselves that they hadn’t heard before, which is always far more interesting than getting the same results every night.
And given where modern music has gone now, Baker would have most likely been a bit sniffy to see bands that play music to a grid if he were here. When he was first making music, bands needed to leave all of their magic on the stage, and if Moore wasn’t giving him what he was looking for, chances are the next generation wasn’t going to be much better.
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