Crème de la Crème

A number of Baby Boomers are commenting on Facebook on the passing of Ginger Baker, the drummer for Cream, at age 80. Given the rocker’s personal history, that’s a ripe enough old age. The only thing I find strange is that rock musicians from my youth are now 80. That just doesn’t seem probable despite the old guy (whoever he is) who looks back at me in the mirror each morning. Cream was definitely in my vinyl inventory back in the day. I mentioned the band in a blog nearly 10 years ago on Myspace. Remember Myspace? That this was a decade ago also seems improbable. As that may be, to mark the passage of one decade and of five, I’ll repost it here today:

February 20, 2010

White Room

Sometime around 1981 I sat at my desk reading a biography of Benito Mussolini. (It was a slow day in the real estate business, rather like today.) Burt Pariser, a local attorney, walked by my desk and caught the title. Shaking his head, he said, “You know, it’s so strange. You [indicating “young people” generally, though I was 28] read that stuff as history. I actually remember those guys.” Burt never met Il Duce personally, of course, but I know what he meant. We always feel a connection to the personalities who were or are culturally prominent in our lifetimes. As a presence in our lives – if only a background presence – they form a part of our own identities. I feel that way about Richard Nixon, for example, whom I actually did see in person a few times, though we never formally (or informally) met as such. The years since 1981 have gone by with their usual predictable yet somehow unexpected rapidity, and now the Nixon Administration is as far back in time as Mussolini was then. I see students studying the era as history.

So now, I sometimes find myself in a curious position as “elder” witness to a funny cultural era. High school kids look at the late-60s/early-70s much as, in 1970, I did at the 1920s. Occasionally I am asked odd questions about them. Just the other day some teenage companions of a friend’s daughter (if you follow that) were at my house and were bored. They discovered the Beatles’ Let It Be album on vinyl on a shelf by the stereo and cranked it up. Afterward, one of them asked me what single song best represents the 60s. It was an intriguing question to which I had no good answer. (Let It Be was 1970, but let’s not quibble.) A decade as musically rich and varied as the 60s is all but impossible to pin down that way. I pretended I had an answer, however. I quickly proclaimed White Room by Cream. Hey, if you want to maintain your image as an authority on a subject, you have to exude an air of ready confidence, especially if the justification for it is lacking. I extemporaneously rattled off a few reasons, and then extracted myself from the conversation.

The funny thing is, now that I’ve had time to reflect at leisure, I still think White Room wasn’t a bad choice. The song was psychedelic, haunting, unorthodox, poetic, and on every rock station’s playlist – though not at the top. The 60s broke with the past in many ways, and so does the song: it has no rhymes, alliterations, assonances, or other traditional devices. The lines do scan, but in an unconventional and imperfect way. In formal terms, they alternate pyrrhic with trochee feet (e.g. /in the / WHITE room/) in hexameter. Like the decade itself, the lyrics seem much more profound than they really are. This is so much the case that many listeners insist they really are about Clapton’s drug use or about the Vietnam War. The trouble with those theories is 1) Eric Clapton didn’t write the song (he played guitar), and 2) the British didn’t fight in the Vietnam War. No, the lyrics mean just what they (admittedly less than straightforwardly) say. A fellow picks up a woman who is both romantic and primal (horses on moonbeams and tigers in jungles) at a party, but no strings can hold her and she leaves him at the station. He feels desolate. That’s it. And, you know? It’s enough.


Lyrics:

White Room

by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown

In the white room with black curtains near the station.
Blackroof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawnlight smiles on you leaving, my contentment.

I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.

You 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 beginning.

I'll wait in the queue when the trains come back;
Lie with you where the shadows run from themselves.

At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd.
Consolation for the old wound now forgotten.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.

I'll sleep in this place with the lonely crowd;
Lie in the dark where the shadows run from themselves.


Post script
Not long after the 60s question, the same young person asked what song I thought represented the 90s. I simply refuse to think of the 1990s as ancient times, so I pretended to misunderstand. “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” I answered. “It was the hit of the Spanish-American War.” 

Cream – White Room