On January 29th, 1967, Jack Bruce came reeling out of Jimi Hendrix’s show at the Saville Theatre in Covent Garden, went home and channelled his shell shock into – arguably – the defining riff of the Sixties, and the song that arguably created the template for heavy metal.
“I don’t think Jack had really taken him in before,” Cream bandmate Eric Clapton told Rolling Stone. “After the gig, he came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi.”
“Pete [lyricist Pete Brown] and I had been working all night trying to come up with some songs,” Bruce said. “I just picked up my double bass and looked out the window and the sun was coming up. And I just started playing the riff of Sunshine Of Your Love.
“And Pete looked out the window and said: ‘It’s getting near dawn,’ and he wrote it down, just like in one of those really cheesy biopics. So we played it, and then Eric came up with that really nice turnaround part: ‘I’ve been waiting so long…’”
For a band brought together by their mutual virtuosity – paying respect to the flashiest guitarist on the London scene – it’s curious that Cream’s most famous moment was little more than a mid-tempo seven-note descending bassline. Yet those seven notes worked their magic, while providing a spine on which Bruce’s bandmates hung some of their career-best playing.
Quoting the melody of Blue Moon, Clapton’s deliciously languid solo found the hotshot guitarist reining in the flash, leaving weeping notes to hang, in the best showcase of his smooth, dark, so-called ‘woman’ tone.
Meanwhile, Ginger Baker pulsed on his toms with an almost hypnotic intensity – although the beat was a sticking point. In later years, Baker would claim he had the idea of emphasising the ‘1’ and ‘3’, but in documentaries, engineer Tom Dowd maintained it was his suggestion. “I said, ‘Have you ever seen an American Western where the Indian beat – the downbeat – is the beat? When they started playing that way, all of the parts came together.”
Bruce sensed that Sunshine Of Your Love could fly: the song had already been endorsed by Otis Redding and Booker T. Jones at Atlantic Studios. The suits were a harder sell, steering Clapton into the frontman role and bemused to be presented with woozy, hippy-ish fare rather than straight-up blues. Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun, recalled Bruce in the Classic Albums series, didn’t sugarcoat his verdict: “He called it psychedelic hogwash.”
But the bassist’s vindication was emphatic. Released late in 1967, Sunshine Of Your Love would slow-burn to No.5 in the US, putting Cream into the American super-league and inspiring a generation of future rockers.
“Cream were a big influence on Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne told Classic Rock in 2006. “Listen to NIB [from Sabbath’s debut album] and compare it to Sunshine Of Your Love. The riff to NIB – Da-da-d-dah, dah-dah, da-da-d-dah – oh yeah! – is basically the same. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision at the time, but that’s it.”
“Sunshine of Your Love is a desert island classic,” said Samy Hagar. “I go back to that song again and again and again.
“That riff is probably the very first heavy metal riff ever,” said Zakk Wylde. “That’s my mount riffmore.”
“When Sunshine Of Your Love came out, it brought all that soulfulness together with some wonderful jazz influences in a way that wasn’t self-conscious at all,” mused Rod Argent. You had the wonderful imagery of Jack Bruce, you had Ginger Baker playing a drum part that no other drummer in the world would have played, and you had the wonderful lyricism of Clapton.”
And almost a half-century later, when Sunshine Of Your Love was the inevitable encore at the all-star tribute concert for Bruce – who died of liver disease in 2014 – it was hard to imagine a finer sunset.
