Cream - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: Farewell Concert, Royal Albert Hall, London, Britain, 11-26-1968

I'm glad to be finally posting this. In addition to being a BBC concert, it also is almost the last concert by Cream, except for a few reunion concerts decades later. I say almost because this was the early show out of the two on their last night. The late show was either not properly recorded or has never been made public.

Cream was only in existence from 1966 to 1968, but they were very productive and popular during that time. However, their sudden superstardom led to the usual drug and ego issues. In particular, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker already hated each other before the band even started, due to being in an earlier band together, and things between them slowly got worse. The third band member, guitarist Eric Clapton, eventually couldn't take it and decided to break up the band. But they went out with a final tour.

At the time, the BBC almost never broadcast concerts. Their popular "In Concert" program didn't start until 1970. However, the end of Cream was a big deal, so the BBC filmed this final concert. It was shown on TV in Britain in January 1969. Unfortunately, the film work was pretty poor and the audio quality was bad as well. A reviewer for a 2005 upgrade of the video commented, "The sound has been digitally remastered, but the audio is still a turgid sonic sludge. The visuals are even worse, with director Tony Palmer jerking the camera around as if this were an episode of NYPD Blue, layering the picture with dated and distracting psychedelic light effects, and providing far too many close-ups of Bruce's teeth (and almost no wide shots of the entire band)." On top of that, there was narration and interviews played over some of the music, making it hard to appreciate the songs.

In 2020, the concert was released on audio as part of a Cream box set called "Goodbye Tour - Live 1968" that contained four full concerts from the tour. But, as a Wikipedia article about it noted, "Sadly, the sound of this Royal Albert Hall concert is much worse than the sound of the other three shows of this box set."

Given all that, I'd known about this concert for a long time, but I decided against posting it to my blog due to the poor sound quality. However, nowadays, much can be done with audio editing, so I decided to see if it could be salvaged. I boosted the lead vocals a little bit relative to the instruments, using the UVR5 program. I lowered the crowd noise in the rare cases someone was talking between songs, so one might actually hear what they're saying. But most importantly, I gave the files to musical associate MZ. He's good at remixing. I suggested the bass was too loud, and he agreed. The version he sent back lowered some parts of the bass range and boosted some parts of the treble. It sounds much better now, like a layer of muck has been removed. Frankly, I don't know why the 2020 box set didn't do this. Audio editing technology has improved a lot since then, but simply lowering the bass in the mix was easy to do back then.

Does this sound great now? No. But it's much more listenable, on par with the other three soundboards from this final tour. Thanks to MZ for his valuable help.

By the way, in Clapton's autobiography, he discussed this final concert some. Here's what he said:

"Before the gig started, I just wanted to get it over with. But once I was up on stage, I became quite excited. I thought it was great that we could do this and keep our heads high, and walk away from the whole thing with a fair amount of good grace. ... It also meant a lot to me knowing that out there in the audience there were not just fans, but musician friends, and people on the scene who had all come to say their goodbyes. My overwhelming emotion, however, was that we had done the right thing. I think we all knew that. At the end of the second show, there was no party, no speeches. We just went our separate ways."

This album is an hour and four minutes long.

01 talk (Cream)
02 White Room (Cream)
03 Politician (Cream)
04 talk (Cream)
05 I'm So Glad (Cream)
06 talk (Cream)
07 Sitting on Top of the World (Cream)
08 talk (Cream)
09 Crossroads (Cream)
10 talk (Cream)
11 Toad [Instrumental] (Cream)
12 Spoonful (Cream)
13 talk (Cream)
14 Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)
15 talk (Cream)
16 Steppin' Out [Instrumental] (Cream)
17 talk (Cream)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/kYPH13rw

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/LY65LHVRqh7f5Z6/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

Cream - More BBC Sessions: 1966-1968

I've already posted two Cream BBC sessions albums, Volumes 1 and 2. So what's this album about, then? As I've said many times before, I generally dislike having two versions of the same song on one album. So those other two albums included the best sounding versions of every song Cream played for the BBC. In a few cases, I did use two versions, if I could chronologically fit one on Volume 1 and the other on Volume 2. This is everything that's left over.

That said, I think the music is worthy in its own right. Cream was known for the musical interplay of the three members, with a particular focus on the lead guitar heroics of Eric Clapton. They never played a song the same way twice. So you'll find a lot of excellent performances here. And in terms of sound quality, about half of these are on the same level as the versions of Volumes 1 and 2. The others generally sound at least good, although "I Feel Free" and "Tales of Brave Ulysses" are a bit rough.

There's really only one song that sounds out and out poor. That's "N.S.U.," which I demoted to bonus track status.

I also included three songs that weren't actually done for the BBC. "Dance the Night Away" and "World of Pain" come from a 1967 concert bootleg. I've included them because the band almost never played those songs in concert. In fact, this recording may be the only such time for both. The concert took place during the recording of the album they were on, so they were briefly remembered enough to give them a try. The sound for those two is merely okay, but still well above the bonus track.

The third song I included is a version of "Sunshine of My Love" recorded for the Glen Campbell Show. It's the only officially released song here, as this version was released on the "Those Were the Days" box set.

01 I'm So Glad (Cream)
02 Steppin' Out [Instrumental] (Cream)
03 I Feel Free [Live Vocals Over Remixed Studio Version] (Cream)
04 Traintime [Edit] (Cream)
05 Take It Back (Cream)
06 We're Going Wrong (Cream)
07 Dance the Night Away (Cream)
08 World of Pain (Cream)
09 Strange Brew (Cream)
10 Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream)
11 We're Going Wrong (Cream)
12 SWLABR [She Walks like a Bearded Rainbow] [Alternate Take] (Cream)
13 Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)

N. S. U. (Cream)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15904816/Crea_1966-1968_MoreBBSessions_atse.zip.html

I'm not sure when or where the cover art photo is from, but I liked it, so I used it. Ginger Baker, at the bottom, was a little lower in the original, but I used Photoshop to raise him up a bit, so I could fit all three faces in the frame without having the text over them.

Cream - Grande Ballroom, Detroit, MI, 10-15-1967

Ginger Baker, former drummer for Cream, died a few days ago (as I write this in October 2019). By all accounts, he was a jerk. (The interesting documentary "Beware of Mr. Baker" shows this in spades.) And yet, he was a towering musical talent on the drums. To mark his passing, I wanted to post something from Cream, and this live show came to mind.

In short, if you want one live concert from Cream, this is definitely it. This show is often on the list of best concert bootlegs of all time, for any musical act. It's the only soundboard from 1967, and when it comes to Cream concerts, the earlier the date, the better. As time passed during the band's short existence from 1966 to 1968, personality clashes, too much fame too soon, and other problems slowly killed the band's creative fire. Pretty much all the excellent sounding live recordings date from 1968 (except for this one!), including all the officially released material. But by that time, while they were still able to run circles around most bands of the time, they had lost a lot from what they had been in 1966 and 1967.

So the content here is stellar. But even though the sound quality is the best from 1967, it had some problems. I say "had" because I believe I've pretty much fixed them. The bootleg I own has some liner notes that note the vocals sometimes aren't heard well, and that was true. But luckily it turns out there's a lot of stereo separation on the recording, and one of the stereo tracks has nearly all the vocals. That enabled me to do some tinkering. For instance, for songs where the vocals were noticeably low, I painstakingly increased the volume for the vocals, doing so line by line.

I also fixed some obvious flaws. For instance, the first few seconds of the intro to one of the songs was cut off. But luckily, it was a riff that was repeated a few seconds later, so I was able to patch in a fix. Another song had a big sound glitch where a couple of seconds were missing, but it was another case of a repeated intro riff, so I was able to fix that too. Additionally, the band members didn't speak much before songs, but when they did the volume was so low as to be almost inaudible. I upped the volume so their words could be easily heard. I also cut out some dead air between songs, such as guitar tuning time. On top of that, the audience was nearly inaudible too, due to the recording being a soundboard that picked up mainly what was happening on stage. I markedly increased the cheering after each song, so it wouldn't seem like the band was playing to a nearly empty room.

But wait, there's more! ;) I believe the recording captured the entire show. But I was disappointed they didn't play "Sunshine of Your Love." The album that's from, "Disraeli Gears," would be released a couple of weeks after this concert. But the band had been playing the song at almost every concert since January, so it's surprising it wasn't played this time too. I "fixed" that by adding two songs - "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Lawdy Mama" - at the end from another concert earlier in 1967 (at the Ricky Tick in London in April). The sound quality of these two songs are nearly good as the rest, especially because I made some edits to make the vocals more audible in that case as well, especially for "Lawdy Mama."

As usual, Cream really stretched things out with their soloing. So the concert is nearly two hours long, if you include the two extra songs. The only downside is that the bass is a bit low in the mix sometimes. But if want to listen to live Cream, I'd say this is better than anything else I've heard, including the officially released live tracks.

01 Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream)
02 N.S.U. (Cream)
03 Sitting On Top of the World (Cream)
04 Sweet Wine (Cream)
05 Rollin' and Tumblin' (Cream)
06 Spoonful (Cream)
07 Steppin' Out [Instrumental] (Cream)
08 Traintime (Cream)
09 Toad [Instrumental] (Cream)
10 I'm So Glad (Cream)
11 Lawdy Mama (Cream)
12 Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dZp9i

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/21kqGrwi

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/wGVkkbbWxlGfcle/file

For the cover art, I was unable to find any photos from the concert in question. However, I got lucky and found the concert poster for that very show, and it's a nice one. I used that for the album cover, except for the central photo of the band. I also had to squish the art horizontally to get it to fit. Also, I completely changed the color scheme, because the original used some colors that didn't work well together, in my opinion. I removed all the text from the bottom and replaced it with new text, since the old text didn't say what I wanted to be said.

For the central photo, I found a color photo of the band in concert at the Fillmore in August 1967. It was just about the only good color photo I could find of the band playing live in 1967 at all. I'm surprised such a well known band wasn't photographed on stage more often. If anyone knows of a better one, please let me know.

Cream - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1967-1968

Here's the second of two volumes of Cream performing for the BBC. The songs are in rough chronological order. So while the first album covers 1966 to 1967, this covers 1967 to 1968.

As I did with Volume 1, avoided the use of versions from the official BBC album, as the sound quality is poorly regarded by serious fans. Instead, I relied on the versions used by Prof Stoned from his blog whenever possible. He worked with other serious Cream fans to figure out the best sounding versions, despite the fact they're all unreleased ones.

Also, as I explained with Volume 1, I don't like having two versions of the same song on the same album. So I've created another album called "More BBC Sessions," and I've put the best sounding versions on Volume 1 and here, and the lesser versions on the "More" album. 

However,  there are four songs here that also are on Volume 1. That's due to the fact that these albums are ordered chronologically, and the band played some of the same songs at widely different times, often resulting in significantly different versions. For instance, "Steppin' Out" was played at the BBC in 1966, and again in early 1968. The other songs found of both volumes are "Sunshine of Your Love," "White Room," and "Crossroads."

Boy, how I dislike Brian Matthew! He's the smarmy sounding BBC DJ who loved to talk over BBC broadcasts of great 1960s and 1970s bands like the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, and many more. He reminds me of a real life version of Troy McClure, a Z-list actor and product promoter voiced by Phil Hartman in the first few years of The Simpsons TV show.

Matthew's voice mars nearly every archival BBC release out there. Luckily, he only spoke over one song on Volume 1. However, he marred four songs in this volume, which are marked with
"[Edit]" in their titles. I used the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe those vocals while keeping the underlying music.

Two more songs have "[Edit]" in their titles for different reasons. An excellent sounding version of "We're Going Wrong" only lasted about three minutes out of the expected four and a half. There's a lesser quality version for the last minute an a half. I edited the two versions together so one can hear the complete thing with the best sound quality. There's a very noticeable drop off between versions though. Also, the lead vocals to "White Room" were too quiet for my tastes in places, so I used X-Minus to boost those vocals.

Unfortunately, although Cream stayed together until around the end of 1968, their last BBC session was in January 1968. This predates their last two albums, "Wheels of Fire" and "Goodbye." So to get more of their later songs represented, I used alternate sources for the last six songs. The first three of those come from the French TV show "Bouton Rouge." You shouldn't notice the change in terms of sound, because they performed for the show without an audience present. 

The last three songs do come from a concert. Technically, these are sourced from the BBC, because they come from a BBC documentary about the band called "Farewell Concert" that extensively used film footage of their last concert as a band in November 1968. This documentary was heavily criticized when it came out for its poor sound, as well as having talking over parts of the songs, and generally having poorly shot video footage. Furthermore, the band members didn't think much of their final show performance. Luckily, this documentary was released on DVD many years later, and that version improved the sound and got rid of the talking over the music. So I've used those versions. The poorly shot video footage doesn't matter to the audio. As to the performances being disappointing, I've only chosen three of the better played songs for that reason.

By the way, technically the song "SWLABR" doesn't have a subtitle, but I added one - "She Walks like a Bearded Rainbow" - because so few people know what the band intended "SWALBR" to stand for. Don't ask me what the heck it means though!

This album is 59 minutes long.

01 Born Under a Bad Sign (Cream)
02 Take It Back [Edit] (Cream)
03 Outside Woman Blues (Cream)
04 We're Going Wrong [Edit] (Cream)
05 Politician [Edit] (Cream)
06 SWLABR [She Walks like a Bearded Rainbow] [Edit] (Cream)
07 Steppin' Out [Instrumental] (Cream)
08 Blue Condition [Edit] (Cream)
09 Spoonful (Cream)
10 Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)
11 Tales of Brave Ulysses [Edit] (Cream)
12 White Room (Cream)
13 Crossroads (Cream)
14 Sitting on Top of the World (Cream)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15904818/Crea_1967-1968_BBSessionsVolume2_atse.zip.html

For Volume 1, I used a photo of the band playing on the "Ready Steady Go" TV show in 1966. I believe this is also from that show, but for an appearance in 1967.

Cream - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1966-1967

The vast majority of the Cream BBC performances here have been officially released. Unfortunately, the versions on the band's official BBC album don't sound very good. A blogger named Prof Stoned has found and mixed much better unreleased versions of the same performances. So I've used his versions whenever possible.

I don't like having more than one version of the same song on one album, unless they're very different from each other. In total, there's enough material for three BBC albums. So I took the best versions of each song and used those to make up Volumes 1 and 2. Then all the other versions of songs, sometimes with lower sound quality, were put on a third album called "More BBC Sessions." The end result is that the sound quality for this volume is generally excellent.

All but one of the songs here are from actual BBC sessions. Surprisingly, there's no BBC version of "White Room," one of the band's best known songs. However, I found an unreleased studio version that's quite good, so I've included it. I find it interesting that this version dates from July 1967, which would have given the band plenty of time to include it on their "Disraeli Gears" album released in November 1967. However, they kept tinkering with it and didn't release it until their "Wheels of Fire" album in June 1968.

"Rollin' and Tumblin'" has "[Edit]" in the title due to the usual problem of BBC DJs talking over the music. I was able to fix this using the X-Minus audio editing program. Luckily, that was the only song affected like that on this album (though there's a bunch more on Volume 2).

"Sunshine of Your Love" is edited for a different reason. The version available has excellent sound quality, but it stopped before the proper end point, during the last part of the last chorus. So I patched in a section from earlier in the song to finish off that chorus. Then it fades out using the same chords that followed the first appearance of the chorus earlier in the song. A fade out isn't an ideal way to end the song, since the band finished it differently, but using the ending from a different version would have had its own problems. As it is, this edit only affects about the last 15 seconds of the song.

This album is 51 minutes long. 

01 Sweet Wine (Cream)
02 Wrapping Paper (Cream)
03 Steppin' Out [Instrumental] (Cream)
04 Sleepy Time Time (Cream)
05 Rollin' and Tumblin' [Edit] (Cream)
06 Crossroads (Cream)
07 Cat's Squirrel (Cream)
08 Traintime (Cream)
09 Hey Lawdy Mama (Cream)
10 I'm So Glad (Cream)
11 I Feel Free (Cream)
12 Four until Late (Cream)
13 N. S. U. (Cream)
14 Toad [Instrumental] (Cream)
15 Strange Brew (Cream)
16 Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream)
17 White Room (Cream)
18 Sunshine of Your Love [Edit] (Cream)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15904628/Crea_1966-1967_BBSessionsVolume1_atse.zip.html

The album cover uses a photo of the band playing on the TV show "Ready Steady Go," in November 1966. Note how unusual it is that the drums were out in front, as if they were the lead instrument.

Cream - Goodbye - Alternate Version (1966-1969)

In 1969, after Cream had broken up, the album "Goodbye" was released. Its chief reason for being seemed to be a release of the three songs Cream did before breaking up, especially the all-time classic "Badge." However, those songs only add up to 10 minutes. But rather than put them out as a single, the record company padded out the album with 20 minutes of live performances. This was widely criticized as a cash grab, because all three had already been released in live versions on other albums and these versions weren't that different from the others.

What if, instead, the record company raided their vaults and released all the remaining studio material from the band? That's what I've done here. 

Adding in the various stray tracks to the three new songs, one still gets an album that's only 35 minutes long. So I've also added in the two most "Creamy" songs from Jack Bruce's album "Songs from a Tailor," which came out later that year. They almost certainly would have been turned into Cream songs had the band stayed together a little longer.

01 Badge (Cream)
02 Doing that Scrapyard Thing (Cream)
03 What a Bringdown (Cream)
04 Anyone for Tennis (Cream)
05 The Coffee Song (Cream)
06 You Make Me Feel (Cream)
07 Lawdy Mama (Cream)
08 Meet Me in the Bottom (Cream)
09 Hey Now Princess (Cream)
10 Weird of Hermiston (Cream)
11 The Clearout (Cream)
12 Rope Ladder to the Moon (Jack Bruce)
13 Theme from an Imaginary Western (Jack Bruce)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17363129/CREM1968-1969Godbye_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5k96ZGjQ

The cover is just a repeat of the official "Goodbye" cover.