We all know a couple or two who met with great passion and desire only to have their fire burn out in a short time. Chances are they ended their time together with a less than harmonious break up. That the kind of marriage is analogous to the founding of Cream. The trio of drummer Ginger Baker, bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton were smitten when they first met, and went off on a torrid musical affair. All too soon, though, they went their separate ways.

Ginger Baker recalls, "Eric had come and sat in a few times with the Graham Bond Organization [a British R & B group featuring Baker, Jack Bruce and organist Graham Bond] , and I met him a few times and got on really well. I was really impressed with his guitar playing and I was getting a bit fed up [with the Bond gig]. I thought, 'Why don't I get my own band together?' I went down to see Eric play with John Mayall in Oxford…."

Eric continues, "Ginger approached me at a John Mayall gig, and came and sat in. He said he was thinking of forming a band. Would I like to play? He liked the way I played. I liked the way he played. I said, 'What about Jack?' I had no idea, but Jack Bruce and he always had a feudal thing going on. They played with Graham Bond before and things had reached a pretty tense stage there."

Jack became the new band's bassist, harmonica player and singer. "I didn't reckon myself as a singer," he says modestly. "It was Eric, actually, that said I should be the singer. He said, 'You're the singer.' I said, 'No, you're the singer.' And I became the singer." Clearly Eric had some definite notions about what he was getting into. "My idea of what it was going to be like was much more of a Chicago blues thing. I'd heard this great album that Buddy [Guy] and Junior [Wells] had recorded with just a harmonica, bass, guitar and drums. And I thought, 'Well, this is it. It's a lightweight, easy-traveling kind of band. This is what Cream will be.' I hadn't taken into account the power of the personalities at all. And because they were a bit older than me, I took a back seat when it came to musical policy and drive, you know? That was Jack's province, really. [The Chicago blues band notion] was soon forgotten. The minute we started playing I realized it was a fully solo-oriented kind of thing, with the three of us going at it strong."

Even so, the blues watered the group's collective roots. Jack Bruce remembers, "I had joined a band called Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. It was really a fusion band. It was a mixture of [jazz bassist Charles] Mingus and Delta blues. I started then to listen to the roots of the music. And then when I met Eric, he turned me on to a lot of things like Skip James and all of those early records, which he actually gave me. So I'm very grateful to Eric for turning me on to those things."

Ginger continues, "The original material we did was stuff like 'Cat's Squirrel' and 'Hey Lawdy Mama' and a lot of blues stuff that Eric had. Then we started getting into doing our own material. I got [songwriting collaborator] Pete Brown there, whom I'd met from the jazz and poetry days. Pete came to one of the early gigs and I said, 'Pete, you're just what we need. We need somebody to help us with songwriting.' Next thing you know it was Bruce and Brown writing all the songs, so I was a little bit miffed. That's when it went into a sort of slightly different feel with Jack and Pete's writing. It was still the same scene, really, musically, it was just that the material changed a bit."

Pete joined Jack in a prolific writing partnership that continues to this day. Jack explains, "The songs I've written that [are credited to Jack Bruce] are ones where I had most of the words and then would work with Pete in order to hone them down or up. In other words, songs credited to 'Jack Bruce,' I wrote the words and the music. The ones that say 'Jack Bruce/Pete Brown,' he wrote all of the words, and I wrote all of the music.

"In the olden days, we used to write singles," he continues. "I mean, I wrote a couple of quite successful ones, like "I Feel Free" and "White Room." Those were deliberately written as singles. They weren't album tracks that got released as singles. I like the form, the shortness of the form, and the fact that you had three minutes or whatever it was, to say what you had to say, and that was it. I think it's a shame that that's past."

And so, between the hard-driving soloing and the direction of the songs, part of Eric's vision was left behind. "I had to forgo [the blues] a lot because of the material we played, but I tried to inject it in some way. I suppose I started to form a style then that was a cross-blend of so many different influences that it was satisfying without being pure blues at the same time."

A good example of the cross-blend was "Sunshine Of Your Love," one of Bruce's classic compositions. In a recent interview, Jack said, "I remember writing it. I remember playing it on the double bass, and I thought, 'That's kind of interesting.' It's a ripoff of the Kinks, but you know, I'll be doing it in 27 years."

With a few songs under their belts, Eric says the group-the first "supergroup," really-was itching to play. "The first gig we did was at a jazz and blues festival, and we got a standing ovation. We already had our following, which went right back to the Yardbirds for me. That followed me right through John Mayall, and of course Ginger and Jack had their own followings. So the three masses of fans and followings all came together and were really pleased with what they got. So we had our crowd already waiting."

The crowd was waiting, but Cream wasn't really ready, according to Eric. "To begin with, we didn't have a full set. We had maybe three quarters of an hour's material. When it became clear that we needed more than that, we just stretched the numbers out, and then that became the vogue. Purely accidental."

Those stretched-out jams fit in perfectly with the times, Eric continues. "Because of the light shows, you felt that there was a great deal of pressure taken off you to be anything more than soundtrack music. It was a whole environmental thing, and you could look at the audience and see that they were all spaced out of their minds. You could do anything you liked, really, as long as it was pretty good. The worst thing you could have done was go on and play 25 three-minute songs. That wouldn't have worked at all with the lights and the stoned atmosphere. So it had to be long, drawn-out mood music."

Though they came out to much praise, the honeymoon was soon over for Cream. Ginger recalls that the group soon came under critical fire. "There was an article in Rolling Stone saying 'Will Cream's music last?' and now it's on CD and the records are still selling. We were good. We knew we were good, and that's probably why it's lasted. Rolling Stone really slighted Eric and talked about his 'long-winded, boring' solos. Eric is a very sensitive guy and I think that had something to do with Cream folding up. That article really hit Eric hard, I think."

Maybe the criticism made up Eric's mind for him, but he was already thinking about moving on. "The story with Cream was that we went on the road and battered out the same material over and over again for the last year and a half or so without taking into consideration that everything in the world was changing. Good evidence of that was Music From Big Pink, and The Band hitting the scene. When I heard that, I felt we were really dinosaurs. What we were doing was rapidly becoming outdated."

It seems funny to hear that said about a band that has lasted so long as a critical and fan favorite, much longer than the actual lifespan of the group. In fact Cream has a lasting legacy much more important than what they actually played. In the words of Jack Bruce, "It's quite strange how in the early '60s and middle '60s, the blues were very popular in my country, but not very known in the U.S. So one of the positive things that came out of what we did was, I guess, was for America to discover it's own music."