The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (2024)

By Mick Wall

( Classic Rock )

published

Driving across deserts, owning polo ponies, making and losingfortunes, influencing generations of musicians… Ginger Baker‘s story nothing was like no one else's

The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (1)

If you know Ginger Baker only as the then drummer in Cream, you really don’t know Ginger Baker at all. Yes, it was in Cream that Baker became the world’s first superstar rock drummer, was the first to play an extended rock drum solo (on Toad, from Cream’s debut Fresh Cream) and solidified the rock drummer archetype of the crazy bastard at the back.

But that’s not where Baker’s reputation really lies. This is the guy who routinely dismisses his peers out of hand. According to Ginger, “[John] Bonham had technique but he couldn’t swing a sack of sh*t. The same with [Keith] Moonie.” The guy who said: “I won’t go within ten miles of a Rolling Stones gig.” Ginger Baker is the drummer who even hated his own band, claiming he would never play with them again, even after he’d just done seven reunion shows in 2005. Why? “We’ve done it.”

Baker would throw his drum sticks at Cream bassist Jack Bruce’s head during shows, get up and fight him during others, and even fired him once, when they were both in the Graham Bond Organization. Bruce told me before his death: “Ginger Baker had the idea [for Cream] with Eric Clapton, but Eric said: ‘Yeah, I’ll play with you but we’ve got to have Jack as the bass player and the singer.’ Ginger was like: ‘No problem.’ What he didn’t tell Eric was that the last time he’d seen me he pulled a knife on me and told me if he ever saw me again, the knife would be waiting for me.”

A few hours before his death in 2014, Bruce phoned Baker and told him: “I’m dying, Ginger, f*ck you,” then slammed the phone down. Musically, Baker was, as Rush drummer Neil Peart put it, “a revolutionary… He set the bar for what rock drumming could be. I certainly emulated Ginger’s approaches to rhythm – his hard, flat, percussive sound was very innovative. Every rock drummer since has been influenced in some way by Ginger – even if they don’t know it.”

The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (2)

Peter Edward Baker was born in London on August 9, 1939, the son of a bricklayer who was killed in the Second World War when Ginger was just four. In his teens he was a keen cyclist and wanted to be a rider in the Tour de France, pedalling his bike like crazy, mile after mile – until one day a taxi knocked him over, crushing his bike.

At a party shortly afterwards, for a dare he sat at a set of drums – and tore into them as though he’d been playing all his life. “The hi-hat, the bass drum, the cymbals… I don’t know how, but I could do it all,” he recalled.

He got his first pro gig at 17, beating the skins in a trad-jazz band. He spent the late 1950s hanging with the cool cats in Soho, picking up tips from English jazz drumming legend Phil Seamen. He was one of the first to dig heavily what are now called ‘world rhythms’, where syncopated jazz met Afro-polyrhythms – and heroin.

Classic Rock Newsletter

Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!

In 1962, Baker replaced his pal Charlie Watts in Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, where he met keyboard player Graham Bond, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and bassist Jack Bruce.

Deciding to “go commercial” and make some money, they formed the Graham Bond Organization, an R&B group that were soon considered one of the hottest on the scene, and also featured a young and already fully crazy John McLaughlin on guitar.

The GBO were full-tilt f*ck-ups. Too much smack, too many egos, but by God could they play. The kind of group that made pop schlock like I Saw Her Standing There sound like an acid trip.

Then Bond got Baker to fire Bruce, and the GBO’s weird blend of proto-prog and before-itstime jazz-fusion rock eventually fizzled out. Bond later fell under a train and died amid whispers of black-magic curses. Baker got his own dose of bad-karma payback when Clapton insisted on Bruce joining them in Cream.

The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (3)

Cue pious tales of rock’s first supergroup, Sunshine Of Your Love, 15 million record sales, first ever platinum-selling double album (Wheels Of Fire), yadda yadda… Albert Hall farewell.

“My brother and I used to listen to those Cream records, trying to emulate them,” Alex Van Halen would later recall.

So was everyone else that formed a heavy rock band at that time. Not that Baker gave a f*ck. “People try to say that Cream gave birth to heavy metal,” he once observed in Rolling Stone. “If that’s the case, we should have had an abortion.”

After Cream split, he went with Clapton to form Blind Faith, yet another supergroup, along with Steve Winwood from Traffic, and they released one of the biggest-selling albums of 1969, full of soul, country, folk, blues, jazz, yet melded together to make something… else.

Blind Faith should have been the start of another musical revolution. But then Clapton bailed after realising that Baker was rapidly becoming lost down the heroin rabbit hole.

“I took one look at his eyes and was sure he was back on it,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Baker, meanwhile, maintains he was straight throughout Blind Faith. “I only got f*cked up at the end of the US tour!” he said, adding: “I was an evil person back then. Eric just wanted to get away from me.”

Everybody did.

Almost dying of an OD after shooting up a speedball – a lethal mix of cocaine and heroin – on the very same night that Hendrix died, Baker fled London and drove – yes, drove – to Nigeria.

In the capital Lagos he opened West Africa’s first 16-track studio and toured with local hero Fela Kuti, performing to crowds of 150,000 and becoming famous throughout Nigeria as the ‘Oyinbo’ – Kuti’s ‘white’ drummer.

1971 Ginger Baker Jam Session with Nigerian Afrobeat Band in Lagos | Premium Footage - YouTubeThe tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (4)

Watch On

There were occasional forays back into the rock mainstream throughout the 1970s, firstly fronting Ginger Baker’s Air Force – a ‘floating’ line-up of more than 18 musicians including Winwood, Denny Laine, Alan White, Rick Grech and Phil Seamen – who released two jazz-rock-fusion albums.

That was followed by the Baker Gurvitz Army, which was aimed more at the post-Cream Robin Trower crowd. They released three albums, none of which really hit. Mainly, though, Ginger did his thing, living on an olive ranch in Italy in the early 80s and getting into polo. Yes, polo. He became a lifelong member of the all-white Lagos Polo Club, where members of Nigeria’s military dictatorship held court. Baker was eventually kicked out for fielding a team of black polo players from Nigeria – who promptly beat the whites.

I met Ginger briefly in 1980 when he was the drummer for a spell in Hawkwind, for whom I was then doing the PR. I recall going backstage on tour one night and enquiring whether I might be allowed to introduce him to a journalist from Melody Maker who had expressed an interest in meeting him.

“f*ck off,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said. “But the journalist says he’s met you before and knows you.”

“f*ck off, you little c**t. I don’t know any journalists. And I don’t want to.”

In 1986 John Lydon got Baker in to play drums on the extraordinary Public Image Ltd album Album (which also featured Steve Vai on guitar), and in 1992 Baker played quite brilliantly on the Masters Of Reality album Sunrise On The Sufferbus. After that he formed the short-lived Ginger Baker Trio.

Mainly, though, what Baker did was sell cocaine, take prescription morphine, and sue a former servant/lover in Nigeria who he claimed had stolen 60,000 dollars from him. He also became ill with various ailments including lung disease and heart problems.

Oh, and he formed a power trio, BBM, a ‘Cream Mk.II’, with Gary Moore and – ye gods! – Jack Bruce. Then, against all the odds, in 2005 Cream reunited and he played four shows with them at the Albert Hall and three at Madison Square Garden. All of which were transcendent in their depiction of a modern-day drummer of quite extraordinary talent, boldness and sheer balls. The latter ended when Baker and Bruce began fighting on stage in New York.

Cream - Toad (Royal Albert Hall) (18 of 22) - YouTubeThe tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (5)

Watch On

Along the way there were also four marriages, three children, various affairs, an autobiography called Hellraiser, a documentary film called Beware Of Mr. Baker that won the Grand Jury award at the South By Southwest festival in Texas in 2012, disputes with the local mafia in Tuscany, and a couple of ‘experimental’ albums called Horses & Trees and Middle Passage that merged jazz and world music.

He was hounded by the tax man in Britain and America. He began to lose his hearing in latter years – something blaming Jack Bruce for after the years he spent having to share a stage with Bruce’s excessive amplification. He once recalled of the Cream reunion shows: “Jack was playing so f*cking loud. And he’s shouting at me, saying that I’m playing too loud. On stage – in front of everybody! And Eric got pissed at both of us.”

Before the 2016 heart ops that for a period left him too weak to play, he had been touring a new group, Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion, who released one album, Why?, in 2014.

“God is punishing me for my past wickedness by keeping me alive and in as much pain as he can,” Baker said.

Even though he always “hated rock’n’roll”, Ginger Baker was the greatest rock (and jazz) drummer of them all. Just ask all the rest

The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (6)

Mick Wall

Mick Wall is the UK's best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin (When Giants Walked the Earth), Metallica (Enter Night), AC/DC (Hell Ain't a Bad Place To Be), Black Sabbath (Symptom of the Universe), Lou Reed, The Doors (Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre), Guns N' Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.

More about classic rock

Black Smoke Trigger come from a small city in New Zealand but their ambition is globalThe Hives' joyous video for Rigor Mortis Radio is the greatest 2 minutes and 57 seconds of anything you'll watch today

Latest

"A new heavy metal classic for the ages": The song Ronnie James Dio called one of the "proudest things he'd ever done"
See more latest►

Most Popular
“I don’t think the underground or extreme metal scene will ever dig us. It’s elitist”: How Trivium defied the gatekeepers and split the critics with The Crusade
“We were getting hassle from everyone to make the perfect album. It had to sell or the band would stall”: How Bon Jovi made a hard rock monster and saved their career with Slippery When Wet
“We booked a studio and said, ‘Whoever’s here on Monday morning is in Yes’”: How the band regenerated to make Drama, in their own words
"It was an unfortunate incident which has been exaggerated and turned into folklore": How contractual differences between Aerosmith and Metallica at Woodstock 1994 came to blows
“I got fed up with writing about crap monsters. What’s horrific about that? The real evil in this world goes on in society”: The stellar rise and tragic demise of Death, the band who pushed metal to new extremes
“The first time I met Lemmy, he said: ‘How do you sit down with that sawblade codpiece?’ I said, ‘You don’t!’”: WASP frontman Blackie Lawless’s strange journey from shock rock to God
“When we recorded Tears Don’t Fall, I passed out. On the take, you can hear a scream, and then this dropping body”: How Bullet For My Valentine stepped up to metal’s big league with The Poison
“People go, ‘How can you write another Free Bird?’ And I go, ‘You can’t.’ Nobody could ever fill Ronnie’s shoes”: The unlikely second coming of Lynyrd Skynyrd
“We knew Chris Barnes had to go. We phoned him on the road and said, ‘Dude, you’re out.’ It was as simple as that”: How Cannibal Corpse made 90s death metal classic Vile and ended up in the US charts
The 15 best new metal songs you need to hear right now
New proggy sounds from Nightwish, i Häxa, Souls Of Ambience and more in Prog's Tracks Of The Week
The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker (2024)

References

Top Articles
Craigslist Gigs Maine
14 of The BEST Breakfast Restaurants in Portland - (With Photos) - Go To Destinations
Christian McCaffrey loses fumble to open Super Bowl LVIII
Belle Meade Barbershop | Uncle Classic Barbershop | Nashville Barbers
Kokichi's Day At The Zoo
Www.politicser.com Pepperboy News
Voorraad - Foodtrailers
Usborne Links
Flixtor The Meg
Music Archives | Hotel Grand Bach - Hotel GrandBach
Ukraine-Russia war: Latest updates
A rough Sunday for some of the NFL's best teams in 2023 led to the three biggest upsets: Analysis - NFL
Byte Delta Dental
Chastity Brainwash
Nissan Rogue Tire Size
Icommerce Agent
How Much You Should Be Tipping For Beauty Services - American Beauty Institute
Days Until Oct 8
Sulfur - Element information, properties and uses
Project, Time & Expense Tracking Software for Business
Tu Pulga Online Utah
Miltank Gamepress
Buying Cars from Craigslist: Tips for a Safe and Smart Purchase
Knock At The Cabin Showtimes Near Alamo Drafthouse Raleigh
Reviews over Supersaver - Opiness - Spreekt uit ervaring
Ltg Speech Copy Paste
Page 2383 – Christianity Today
Lbrands Login Aces
Ultra Ball Pixelmon
Federal Express Drop Off Center Near Me
Lincoln Financial Field, section 110, row 4, home of Philadelphia Eagles, Temple Owls, page 1
Rubmaps H
Royal Caribbean Luggage Tags Pending
How to Destroy Rule 34
Heavenly Delusion Gif
2024 Ford Bronco Sport for sale - McDonough, GA - craigslist
拿到绿卡后一亩三分地
Empire Visionworks The Crossings Clifton Park Photos
Ludvigsen Mortuary Fremont Nebraska
Body Surface Area (BSA) Calculator
Felix Mallard Lpsg
Conan Exiles Armor Flexibility Kit
Exploring the Digital Marketplace: A Guide to Craigslist Miami
10 Types of Funeral Services, Ceremonies, and Events » US Urns Online
Steam Input Per Game Setting
Craiglist.nj
Rise Meadville Reviews
8663831604
Mazda 3 Depreciation
Inloggen bij AH Sam - E-Overheid
Cheryl Mchenry Retirement
E. 81 St. Deli Menu
Latest Posts
Article information

Author: Terrell Hackett

Last Updated:

Views: 6460

Rating: 4.1 / 5 (72 voted)

Reviews: 95% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Terrell Hackett

Birthday: 1992-03-17

Address: Suite 453 459 Gibson Squares, East Adriane, AK 71925-5692

Phone: +21811810803470

Job: Chief Representative

Hobby: Board games, Rock climbing, Ghost hunting, Origami, Kabaddi, Mushroom hunting, Gaming

Introduction: My name is Terrell Hackett, I am a gleaming, brainy, courageous, helpful, healthy, cooperative, graceful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.