Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Tuesday Tuneage
Cream - “I Feel Free”
1966

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s best album, Second Helping, is also arguably the best rock guitar album of the seventies. On “The Needle and the Spoon,” Allen Collins unleashes a brilliant Clapton-in-Cream-like wah-wah solo. That handiwork got me back into listening to Cream — guess I (ha ha) needed a break from the Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, and the original Jeff Beck Group ha ha. Whew, some of those songs: “White Room,” “SWLABR,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “Tales of Brave Ulysses,”  “Deserted Cities of the Heart” are incredible. Most fascinating lately for me is “I Feel Free”, the first song on the US version of their debut album. It’s short on guitar histrionics and has more of the great weirdness of Jack Bruce. The opening bomp-bomp-bomp scatting I did one night repeatedly weeks ago while walking around my apartment when lockdown boredom had hit full effect. Then Twitter pal @bennyc50 pointed out one could sing “quarantine” instead of “I feel free.” Genius. So, of course, I moved on to singing THAT all the time. Boredom lifted, at least for a bit.