Jack Bruce

Young Jack Bruce with his Fender VI.

You sometimes played a Fender VI.

“Yes. I started playing that with Graham Bond, because when John McLaughlin left it meant that I could do little guitar-type solos and stuff. It wasn’t really a very playable instrument because the strings were very close together for a bass, and the scale was too big for a guitarist. It was a kind of hybrid. I enjoyed it for a while, it was fun.”

Was it only with Cream that you were allowed to express yourself on the bass as much as you wanted?

“Well, I was always doing that, really. Obviously with Cream we were able to do that because it was a jamming-type band. Cream was like a jazz band, but we didn’t tell Eric that... we were like a little free-jazz trio with Eric as Ornette Coleman, but without him knowing it.”

(Eric once said that his own band played for the first time only on the Ocean Boulevard album.)