What? Fifth Grade - Best of Cream suddenly appears - this is before Star Wars.
First day of school, 6th grader Jeff McCrindle casually strolled up and kicked me in the balls for no apparent reason whatsoever. Welcome to school, moathah-fuckah.
Why Jeff chose to do this is a mystery to me to this day. Maybe it was I was skinny and nerdy. Maybe it was because the year before I wore a Detroit Lions Sears poncho since I had no idea about football. Yeah. That seems unlikely, but still plausible. I’m guessing that getting kicked there is a universal, “Wha tth e fuckin fuck jeezus why?” moment, regardless of gender.
So this record makes me think of that eyes clinched pain.
I regularly 'borrowed' records from my Dad's collection and played them on my shitty little all-in-one turntable with what was ostensibly using a sewing needle for a stylus. I'm surprised there wasn't a fine black plastic dust everywhere when I'd flip the side on whatever record was ‘discovered’.
Dad would not have been pleased to know I was playing his copies of DSOTM and Morricone records on a record player that was clearly designed to shorten their vinyl lifespans.
Being an inventive handyman, Dad re-purposed a steamer trunk into a stereo enclosure, which inside contained a Dual 1019 and a Sansui 2000X (which I'm currently experiencing and adore) settled upon a pleasant underlying framework, which to my 10 year old head meant, "Open trunk. Push this. Twist this." Of course, when no one else was around.
The back cover photo made me think of dirty old men in a back room that would only lead to trouble. Had I known that they were actually pretty much the same age as my dad, maybe it would have been less daunting.
They still looked like dirty hippies with flourish, which at fifth grade seemed appealing. "Hm. They seem so grown up. And maybe smell funny.”
In time I figured out that I could record them onto the clunky reel to reel using the handheld microphone and hold it next to one of the speakers and then DJ while flipping the side or queuing another record. Yes. If I had these tapes now, my priapism might resume.
I’d record this record, Elton John’s ‘Empty Sky’ MAYBE and intersperse it with banter. Even then I knew how to hook it in and hit the post as so many DJs on WLS did. Pretty sure I was even doing weather updates.
The oddball thing here? Friends would come over and believe that I was actually on the radio since I had these tapes. Think about this. A 10 year old boy says “I’m on the radio! Here! Listen!”.
Back to the hippy shit. I had just been gifted with a sunburst acoustic guitar from MusicLand that I immediately had no idea what to do with. Did I learn all the Clapton solos from ‘Best of Cream’? No. That did not happen. I learned ‘Country Roads’ and ‘Jet Airliner’. Trying to emulate the solo from ‘Crossroads’ was not going to happen. Pretty sure that guitar was destroyed in a basement.
The songs here on this record are what I think really encapsulate the Cream Experience, more so than retrospectively reviewing Disraeli Gears’ titles. I find it easy to dismiss Cream since I’m not actually high at the moment, and Clapton’s wang wang wang makes me weary.
My Dad still didn’t know I was surreptitiously playing and ruining his records. Maybe he did - which is why….
This appeared. Dude. Integrated turntable/receiver/eight track. What? What’s an eight track cassette? Of course, Dad already had a Pioneer deck that could record records onto blank tapes, “for vacations”, which is another topic. Trust me on this - the intent was solid, but the deployment was nerve-wracking.
When my Dad discovered that I had been doing this to his records, he just said “Why didn’t you ask me?”.
And for that, maybe I did deserve a random kick in the balls in the schoolyard.