Between the release of Disraeli Gears and the recording process for Cream’s third album, Wheels of Fire, is just shy of two months. The Eric Clapton-featuring group hoped for short bursts of recording over a year and a supplement selection of strong live material to build their third album. That’s what they offer, but the eighty-minute epic promised by White Room onwards doesn’t come together as smoothly as expected. Cream is rock royalty and appears to be part of the 1960s instrumental furniture, but each member would provide better work elsewhere. They showcase just as much with the studio work here. Each note feels like a staggering achievement. White Room and wider parts of Wheels of Fire are simply that good. But Cream is defined by this and Sunshine of Your Love from Disraeli Gears. A passing listener can get everything necessary from the band in those two songs. But for those diving deep into Clapton’s career, there are moments within Cream where his sound is developed, pushed, and challenged in ways that never happened again.
He’s put to the test by Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in a way that profiles his playing, but is also keen to pull him out of the spotlight. Baker has some excellent moments on White Room while Clapton wails away on his guitar, the fade out and push into Sitting on Top of the World managed well. All Cream has to do is rein in Clapton’s guitar work, which they succeed at when it matters most. It still overwhelms much of Wheels of Fire, and the instrumental quality is an overwhelming part of this one. Lyrically, it’s nothing all that staggering. Burnt out on flower power and looking for a route through to the rock and roll of the future, it’s a transitional album that feels a big heavier and lopsided in parts, perhaps because it was recorded in bursts. Influences come and go over that year and, if anything, it’s more an interesting patchwork occasion for the band as they pool together what had been around them at that time.
An excellent A-side and a relatively tame B-side is what Wheels of Fire has on offer. Politician outlines the promise of comment and never delivers, ironically like a politician, but no songs before or after are ever set to back up this sniping moment. Clapton chooses a few blues covers to throw into place, while the rest of the work sounds as though poet Pete Brown has convinced bassist Jack Bruce that all he needs to do is hammer home the obvious. It may have spawned White Room, but it also gives us the decent but forgettable As You Said. Frankly, another album of Clapton and company detailing their excesses through blues-rock covers, is surplus to requirement. White Room sounds positioned solely on those jam sessions but never quite pulls itself together because of how fractured the recording is. Born Under a Bad Sign never quite pulls off the cool blues-rock tone it’s gunning for. It sounds much the same as the material preceding it.
But at least those studio efforts are what was popular at the time, and Wheels of Fire remains a time capsule for such a sound. Deserted Cities of the Heart has a thumping thrill to it, where every instrument comes together wonderfully and stands out well, but it misses something that can’t be explained. On paper it’s as technically magnificent as it is wonderful to listen to, but there seems to be a bit of a barrier between what the band can do and what their intentions are for this release. Their double album features a live performance that hardly inspires much difference from the studio work. Their Fillmore show has a staggered, blues-rock tone that never quite takes. Spoonful is the best of it but even that falls considerably short of what Clapton, Baker, and Bruce would get up to after Cream. Even before Wheels of Fire, they had made far better work together that explored the heavy instrumental riffs and influential tones they deploy here that much deeper.
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