Cream’s Jack Bruce Dead at 71

Jack Bruce, the Scottish bassist and vocalist best known for his tenure as one-third of the power trio Cream, has died. His website features a note from his family confirming his passing. According to the BBC, he died at his home in Suffolk surrounded by his family; The Herald reports that the cause of death was liver disease. He was 71.

Bruce was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1943. He briefly attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music on a cello scholarship, but dropped out because the school wouldn’t let him play jazz. Opting out of a proper education, he joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated in 1962 as their bassist. A year later, he joined the Graham Bond Organization. In 1966, he was a member of Manfred Mann. 

He was apparently offered a touring spot with Marvin Gaye in the 1960s, but turned it down, and in the interim, joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, where he replaced John McVie. That’s how he met Eric Clapton. Bruce recalled his first collaboration with Clapton in a Zigzag interview (via Rock of Ages):

“When Eric started to play … whew, I’d never heard anything like it before. He’d seen and heard me with Graham [Bond], but I’d never seen him before—but when we played together, we had an instant rapport, which led to us having long chats together about what our aims and hopes were. I thought that although the blues were great, there was more than that … it was the beginning rather than the end.”

Since Mayall’s band didn’t offer much of an outlet for experimentation, Bruce, Clapton, and Bruce’s former Blues Incorporated bandmate Ginger Baker formed Cream in 1966. They were a band without an obvious leader. They operated more as a unit: everybody wrote songs, everybody took solos. Bruce wrote and sang some of the band’s most famous songs, including “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room”. They released four albums between 1966 and 1969—Fresh Cream, Disraeli Gears, Wheels of Fire, and Goodbye—but disbanded in 1968.

Bruce’s first solo album came out in 1969. He released several albums over the decades, his most recent being Silver Rails, which came out last March. (Watch a documentary about that record below.) He was also involved in several groups, including Lifetime with John McLaughlin and Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. He also did session work for artists including Lou Reed and Frank Zappa.

In 1993, Cream were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They received a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in 2006. In 2005, the band reunited for a tour.

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