BEVERLY, MA — Six decades after the English psychedelic blues rock band Cream put its indelible mark on music history, Malcolm Bruce — the son of the supergroup’s late bassist Jack Bruce — is honoring the band’s legacy as part of Sons of Cream at Beverly’s historic Cabot Theater next month.
Bruce, along with Kofi Baker, son of late Cream drummer Ginger Baker, and guitarist Rob Johnson, who is a grandnephew of Ginger Baker, are hitting the North Shore as part of an 11-date North American tour that he told Patch is “reinventing Cream’s music in our way” with improvised solos that differ each show around the framework of classics such as “Sunshine Of Your Love,” “White Room” and “I Feel Free.”
“All of us in the band are all pursuing our own music as well as this,” Bruce told Patch in a phone interview from England on Monday. “We’re all writers, composers, in our own right. So it’s not like a normal tribute band. Each show has a different result.
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“We are not like a tribute band that comes out dressed alike and plays all the same notes and all the same solos every night. That can be really exciting, I suppose, for some people in the generation that remembers them. But this is something different. We are breathing new life into those songs.”
Tickets for the Aug. 17 show can be found here.
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While Cream’s catalog still gets extensive airplay on classic rock radio stations and has been a part of memorable movie and television soundtracks, Bruce noted that their phenomenal string of releases came in three short years from 1966 to 1968. But, as a testament to their appeal and their potential for reimagination, he told Patch that Sons of Cream shows often run three hours or more — “If we are allowed to go that long,” he said. — and includes extended solos that can run as long as 17 minutes, as is the case with Baker’s drum solo on “Toad.”
Bruce said one of his personal favorites is the deeper cut “We’re Going Wrong,” which his father wrote for the 1967 album “Disraeli Gears.”
“That one always elicits a strong response,” he said. “It’s another one that takes its own shape and form with each night. Each show is its own animal.”
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Bruce said the set also includes two songs from Blind Faith, the band Eric Clapton and Baker joined along with Steve Windwood after Cream and Windwood’s Traffic broke up in 1968.
“People always come away from our shows surprised because it’s not a tribute band like they are used to,” said Bruce, who is also planning the release of a solo record in the spring that he hopes to support with another North American tour. “We play the songs that people have an expectation to hear. But we interpret them in our own way. So people come away saying that they didn’t expect this incredible thing that just happened.
“It’s a collective experience. We like the audience to come away from the show feeling like they were a part of it with us in that space.”
Bruce said this will be part of his first North American tour since the coronavirus health crisis in 2020 and that he is looking forward to playing the century-old theater as part of a run of shows with venues ranging from smaller clubs to outdoor festivals.
He said the crowds have included a great age range as well with some attendees in their 70s and 80s who remember when Clapton, Bruce and Baker released the songs nearly 60 years ago, as well as audience members in their teens whose parents and grandparents were fans of the original Cream.
“It’s great to see someone 12 or 16 years old who is just getting into music experience the show,” he said. “Their dad might be bringing them there because he wants them to experience that tradition. As we know, music is a tradition that has lived on for generations the same way people will still go to see classical music from Mozart today.
“The blues are a great example of that because that was something created by African-Americans, and then was discovered by the British in the 1960s, who mastered it and brought it back to America.
“It’s something we all share.”
(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at [email protected]. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)
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