Cream is often considered one of rock’s first supergroups. Jack Bruce (lead vocals/lead bass) was known from the Graham Bond Organisation as well as John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, where he met Eric Clapton (lead guitar/vocals) who had also previously been in The Yardbirds. Ginger Baker (lead drums) had been a member of Blues Incorporated, and also played alongside Bruce in the GBO.
The power trio played their own brand of virtuoso hard-edged blues rock with dashes of psychedelia. Musically they gelled from day one, but the mixture of personalities proved to be a volatile one, and the band was destined to shine brightly for a short time. They were active for three years, between 1966 and 1968, only reuniting for a live performance at their Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1993, as well as doing a stint of seven shows in 2005.
During their time together they managed to release four albums, two of which mixed studio and live material. Several live albums were also released after their dissolution.
White Room is one of their classic tracks, composed by Jack Bruce with lyrics by poet Pete Brown. The track opens their double half-studio/half-live third album, 1968’s Wheels of Fire.
Pete Brown is not just the lyricist behind White Room, but did in fact contribute to many other Cream classics – Sunshine of Your Love, SWLABR, I Feel Free, and Deserted Cities of the Heart among them. Their collaboration turned out to be just what the band needed. The three members were amazing musicians, but none of them were particularly adept at (or interested in spending lots of time) writing good lyrics. This was problematic as the bar was set high for lyrics during that time. The focus of popular music was changing from happy-go-lucky singles to full-length albums that were becoming artistic statements. Dedicated poets – especially those who could transform their words into song lyrics – were in high demand. Some of these lyricists, like Pete Sinfield of King Crimson and Keith Reid of Procol Harum, were considered fully fledged band members.
Cream’s most memorable songs used dedicated lyricists, including Gail Collins on Strange Brew and Martin Sharp on Tales of Brave Ulysses, but Brown was their mainstay, contributing words to all of their four albums.
In the mid-60s, Brown toured with Allen Ginsberg, performing his own poetry during the shows. Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce took note of him at a gig and they ended up chatting. They got on well and asked him if he would be interested in supplying some lyrics for Cream, which he did. Then he kept supplying more. Their collaboration would be very successful and last for the duration of the band.
Originally, Brown was seen as a writing partner for drummer Ginger Baker, but the group quickly discovered that he worked better with bassist Jack Bruce. Of the situation, Bruce later remarked: “Ginger and Pete were at my flat trying to work on a song but it wasn’t happening. My wife Janet then got with Ginger and they wrote Sweet Wine while I started working with Pete.”
White Room is Brown’s most intriguing Cream composition, taking place in the dark corners of the mind where the “shadows run from themselves.”
In the white room with black curtains near the station
Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentmentI’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselvesYou said no strings could secure you at the station
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows
I walked into such a sad time at the station
As I walked out, felt my own need just beginningI’ll wait in the queue when the trains come back
Lie with you where the shadows run from themselves
Initially, White Room had started out as eight pages worth of poetry. This had to be condensed into a lyric. Brown was not the type of writer who brought in tons of poems while the band was touring to bring into a writing situation. He was much more of a collaborator, preferring to write with some input or direction from the band, ideally knowing how the music went, so he could tailor moods and structure accordingly. This meant that nothing was created when the band was on tour, which they were for large amounts of their active years.
This meant that when they gathered to put together material for Wheels of Fire, they were as usual short on time to come up with ideas. They looked at every idea possible.
“It so happened that I had been trained at one point, very unsuccessfully, as a journalist,” Brown told Songfacts in 2017, “because I was thrown out of school and because it was free to go to journalism college in those days, I went for a few months. And one of the things I did learn was how to precis things, so I had eight pages of this poem and I suddenly thought, ‘Well, we need something.’ Jack had already written some of the music and we tried a different kind of lyric with it, and then I suddenly thought, ‘What about this idea, this ‘white room’ idea?’ It was an eight-page poem and I cut it down to a page and it worked.”
Initially, Bruce had attempted to write his own lyrics to the instrumental he concocted. The tentative title was Cinderella’s Last Goodnight and it was about, in Bruce’s own words, “some doomed hippie girl.” Perhaps getting Brown to contribute was for the best.
Many have wondered about what the white room in the song refers to. While the answer may be more multi-faceted, at its core it refers to the actual room that Brown was living in at the time. He was sharing an apartment with others, but the actual white room was his.
“[The original eight-page poem] was a meandering thing about a relationship that I was in and how I was at the time,” Brown said. “It was a kind of watershed period really. It was a time before I stopped being a relative barman and became a songwriter, because I was a professional poet, you know. I was doing poetry readings and making a living from that. It wasn’t a very good living, and then I got asked to work by Ginger and Jack with them and then started to make a kind of living. There was this kind of transitional period where I lived in this actual white room and was trying to come to terms with various things that were going on. It’s a place where I stopped, I gave up all drugs and alcohol at that time in 1967 as a result of being in the white room, so it was a kind of watershed period. That song’s like a kind of weird little movie: it changes perspectives all the time. That’s why it’s probably lasted – it’s got a kind of mystery to it.”
Brown definitely lends a poet’s touch to the lyrics. “In the white room with black curtains near the station / Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.” While some references might be a bit convoluted and hard to pin down exactly, they still feel meaningful.
In a conversation with Songfacts, Brown revealed that the “goodbye windows” illustrates people waving goodbye from train windows. The “black-roof country” and “black curtains” comes from the area that he lived in, where the steam trains would pass nearby, making all the roofs – and some of the curtains – black with soot.
“Tired starlings” was more literal – the starlings are completely gone from London now, but in those days they were already getting tired from the pollution and other changes. “The ‘tired starlings’ is also a little bit of a metaphor for the feminine in a way, as well,” Brown said. “It was women having to put up with rather a lot – too much pressure on them at the time.”
Initial sessions for the album began in London in 1967. In December, work continued at Atlantic Studios in New York City and was completed during three sessions in February, April and June 1968, also at Atlantic.
Jack Bruce sang and played bass on the song, Eric Clapton overdubbed guitar parts, Ginger Baker played drums and timpani, and Felix Pappalardi – the group’s producer – contributed violas. Clapton played his guitar through a wah-wah pedal to achieve a “talking-effect”. The song has an identical chord progression to Cream’s previous recording Tales of Brave Ulysses. Both Bruce and Baker claimed to have added the distinctive 5/4 or quintuple metre opening to what had been a 4/4 or common time composition.
Wheels of Fire was released on 14 June 1968 in the US, while UK/Europe had to wait until 9 August. The White Room single had a similar delay, released in September the same year in the US and in January 1969 in the UK. For the US single release, a shorter edit (without the third verse) was released for AM radio stations, although album-oriented FM radio stations played the full album version. The subsequent UK single release used the full-length album version of the track.
Sometimes a few months make all the difference. When the single was released in the UK, Cream had already split up. Brown continued to work with Bruce on his solo albums. This was a natural progression of their work together in Cream, where Brown had worked most closely with Bruce.
White Room is a bona fide classic. The song has been covered frequently, and by a wide range of artists, including fellow classic rockers Deep Purple and Ace Frehley, Broadway star Joel Grey, the Finnish symphonic metal band Apocalyptica, fusion guitarist Frank Gambale, the Bluegrass-inspired Cache Valley Drifters, and heavy metal band Helloween.
If nothing else, this shows that White Room is a multi-faceted song, containing equal parts dramatic spectacle, intricate musicality, and hard rock menace. Other artists often emphasize different elements in their interpretations, but the original Cream version wraps it all up in one startling package.
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