Cream – Wheels of Fire

Wheels Of Fire is the third album by British rock band Cream. It was released in July 1968 as a double vinyl, with one disc recorded in the studio and the other live. It reached No. 3 in the UK and No. 1 in the United States, becoming the first double platinum album in history. In May 2012, it was ranked number 205 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album was also released on two separate LPs, one of the studio recording and one of the live version titled Live At The Fillmore, with similar cover art.

The album was originally planned to be released as a double, in which Atco Records producer Felix Pappalardi and the band would include several recordings from their live performances. The band under Pappalardi’s production had recorded material at London’s IBC Studios in July and August 1967, and at New York’s Atlantic Studios in September and October of the same year. Additional studio material was recorded at Atlantic Studios in January and February 1968, during a break from the band’s heavy concert schedule. The following month, Pappalardi commissioned a portable recording studio in Los Angeles to be transported to the Fillmore Amphitheater and San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. Six concerts were recorded in San Francisco by Pappalardi and sound engineer Bill Halverson, and material not included on Wheels Of Fire was included on the Live Cream and Live Cream Volume II albums.

The band’s drummer Ginger Baker wrote three songs for the album with pianist Mike Taylor, bassist Jack Bruce wrote four songs with poet Pete Brown, and guitarist Eric Clapton contributed to the album by choosing two cover songs.

For the second album, Felix Pappalardi chose “Traintime”, for Jack Bruce’s harmonica solo, and “Toad” for Ginger Baker’s percussion, while including both Eric Clapton’s covers of “Spoonful” and “Crossroads” for to highlight his guitar playing.

Through the music of Wheels Of Fire it becomes clear that what John Mayall failed to achieve, certainly because he held emotionally and stubbornly closer to his roots than he should have, achieved by Cream’s hard and pretentious sound, the limitless technical possibilities of Clapton, Baker and Bruce and the era’s thirst for something different.

Cream brought the blues, more as a form than as a feeling because they almost lacked lyricism, to a wide and receptive audience, operating more positively within the aesthetic space of rock music, which they expanded, freeing it definitively from the more or less it’s conservative formal and schematic framework.

Through this legendary double album we selecting to hear the amazing “White Room”.