Three direct experiences of Jack Bruce

1: First time I saw Jack Bruce play was at the per­form­ing arts cen­ter at William Paterson College, in 1980, most likely the fall, lead­ing an out­fit called Jack Bruce and Friends. I had­n’t heard a whole lot of his post-Cream out­put at the time, and a good deal of what I knew of seemed kind of intim­id­at­ing to me. But I was also wary of hold­ing him in the reflex­ive con­tempt that I still some­times thought my post-punk aes­thet­ic deman­ded. Having developed a taste for the astrin­gent pro­gressiv­ism of Henry Cow and Art Bears and such a couple of years earli­er, I was def­in­itely an art-rocker in train­ing, and Bruce’s present­a­tion hit a relaxed sweet spot with me. He and his band were relaxed, com­ing off like jour­ney­men virtuosos—Robert Christgau described Bruce’s music as “dense and dis­son­ant and throb­bing,” and it was/is, but the players—Clem Clemson on gui­tar, David Sancious on key­boards, Bruce of course on bass, and man-mountain Billy Cobham (whose con­stant grin was the only indic­a­tion that he was­n’t just on the verge of cas­u­ally des­troy­ing his kit) on drums—ere suf­fi­ciently relaxed and assured that this might have been the reg­u­lar Thursday night gig for a bar band that was very attached to its bar. I was impressed, and then when they came back for the encore to repave the cam­pus park­ing lot with a very heavy rolling rendi­tion of “Politician,” kind of awestruck. 

2: In the largely first rate bio­graphy of Bruce by Harry Shapiro, Jack Bruce: Composing Himself, the musi­cian recol­lects his brief ten­ure with the then-carnivalesque Golden Palominos, begin­ning in 1986. “That was a com­pletely mad band,” Bruce says. “[Founder and drum­mer] Anton Fier was com­pletely drunk all the time. I remem­ber Anton sit­ting in the first class lounge in Paris Airport with a bottle of brandy and drink­ing it in the twenty minutes between flights.” 

I do not doubt this. The pro­file I wrote of Fier and the Palominos, which ran in the February 1987 issue of Spin, is for the most part an account of the writer get­ting nearly blind drunk on a vari­ety of Chinese wines with Fier and Peter Blegvad. At the time, which seems in my mind to have been by an etern­ity from the feck­less col­legi­ate fall of 1980, feck­less freel­ance rock crit­ic and con­sumer elec­tron­ics magazine Associate Editor me had become a poten­tial Boswell to the GoPals, as they were referred to on the scene. I did not really ride to any unpre­ced­en­ted career heights in this endeavor but I heard a lot of great music and got roy­ally fucked up with a bunch of won­der­ful artists. Singer Syd Straw used to mar­vel at tour­ing with a bunch of guys who actu­ally played chess in the van, and yeah, eaves­drop on a con­ver­sa­tion between Blegvad and Jody Harris and you were likely to hear them com­par­ing notes on Thom Gunn, but good God those guys liked their drink, and when he was tour­ing with them between ’86 and ’87, so too did Bruce. I remem­ber a show at Webster Hall at which Harris, with both his stand­ard dead­pan detach­ment and a dol­lop of genu­ine irrit­a­tion, told me of a Bostn show the night before at which Jack had got­ten so blitzed that he futzed the words to most of the songs he had to sing. “I’m really sorry, I’ll nev­er do it again,” Jody repor­ted as Jack’s apo­logy, and we both smirked. “I’m sure no one who’s ever worked with him has ever heard that before, ever,” I observed. 

Whatever his dam­age had been the night pri­or, he bounced back strongly that even­ing, and the set was a remark­able pageant of rauc­ous, unself-conscious eclecticism. Slapp Happy and Funkadelic are not two bands one gen­er­ally thinks of in the space of a single 24-hour or even two-week peri­od, and yet here’s a stage fea­tur­ing found­ing mem­bers of both (Bernie Worrell and, later, Mike Hampton played that night) as well as Jack Bruce, and it all meshes, and rocks, and pushes. I got to go to what is com­monly referred to these days as “the after party” (I think back then it was called “a party”) and every­one was so wired that it was once more off to the races, and that’s when I had my most sig­ni­fic­ant per­son­al inter­ac­tion with Jack Bruce. I was wait­ing in a short line to use the facil­it­ies, and Bruce scur­ried over to me, hunched over a bit, and manically reques­ted per­mis­sion to cut in. “I have to go really bad,” he said. Well, who was I to deny Jack Bruce. I said go ahead, and when the bath­room door opened, Bruce scur­ried in, and held the door open to let in anoth­er guy. Feeling slightly burnt, I said, “What he gonna do, hold your dick for you?” Jack Bruce thought this was hil­ari­ous. He was still laugh­ing as he closed the door.

The thing was, whatever Bruce was doing at any giv­en time, there was nev­er a trace of genuine-rock-superstar-condescension in the way he car­ried himself,and there was nev­er a minute of doubt rel­at­ive to the music to which he chose to com­mit him­self. Coming out of Cream and into Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Bruce came off as if it was Williams who was doing him a favor. Listen to him with Carla Bley, with Mike Mantler, with Kip Hanrahan; his dis­cip­line, his pas­sion (any­one with doubts of that ought to listen to Cream’s “Spoonful” quick fast and in a hurry), his almost off­hand sense of adven­ture all come through  like a‑ringing a bell. And in the Golden Palominos, Bruce gave the most con­vin­cing read­ing, pace the wong­writer him­self, of Peter Blegvad’s dread-laden “Something Else (Is Working Harder).” “People work hard to keep a lid on their anger./To see that justice will prevail,/to no avail, their efforts fail—/something else is work­ing harder.” 

3) In June of 2012, I went to B.B. King’s Blues Club And Grill to see Spectrum Road, a band—what they used to call a super­group, maybe—dedicated to the music of the afore­men­tioned Tony Williams. I could­n’t swing the Cream reunion, but this I could, and I had been pretty impressed by the attend­ant album by the group, which seemed a genu­ine band effort. The oth­er mem­bers were gui­tar­ist Vernon Reid, who’d flir­ted with rock super­star­dom in Living Colour and of late has been, among oth­er things, con­duct­ing a pro­duct­ive col­lab­or­a­tion with James “Blood” Ulmer; key­board­ist John Medeski, whose combo Medeski, Martin, and Wood has made sig­ni­fic­ant inroads with jam-band fans while remain­ing stead­fast to its John-Zorn-affiliated roots; and drum­mer Cindy Blackman Santana, whose dynam­ism as a per­cus­sion­ist had not, I think, been so fully rep­res­en­ted on any record pri­or to this one. In any event, through­out the selec­tions, the music flows and pum­mels beau­ti­fully with no sense of it being led in any tra­di­tion­al sense; not to sound trite or any­thing, but it’s one of those trib­ute records on which is seems that the spir­it of the honored musi­cian really is in charge of the whole thing. 

Live, it was like that, and a little more. Almost, or per­haps more than, a cen­tury of assured musi­cian­ship had come to play, and as Bruce had the main micro­phone, he was the de facto front­man (although Blackman did vocal­ize on one tune, and quite well). He had turned 69 in May. In 2003 he had under­gone a liv­er trans­plant. On stage, he had a not-terribly large bottle of Poland Spring water nearby, and at the stage read there was a standing-stool sort of con­trap­tion on which he could rest while play­ing if need be. 

He did­n’t use it that often, if at all. First among equals with his band­mates, he com­manded the stage for the entirety of a nearly two-hour set, step­ping out only dur­ing Blackman’s drum solo fea­ture. His bass play­ing was, as ever, aston­ish­ing. Jaco Pastorious and Jamaladeen Tacuma get a lot of cred­it for rein­vent­ing elec­tric bass play­ing from with­in a cer­tain gen­er­ic frame­work, and they were/are great play­ers, to be sure. But there is/was some­thing sui gen­er­is about the sim­ul­tan­eous mus­cu­lar­ity and del­ic­acy of Bruce’s touch. Something work­ing hard, and succeeding. 

At the encore, I thought, “I won­der if they’re going to trot out ‘Politician.’ ” They did, either before or after “Sunshine Of Your Love.” Why not. They crushed both.