My brother gave me a video DVD as a gift, the Cream reunion concert,
taped at London's Royal Albert Hall in 2005. I just got around to
playing it last night, the audio piped directly to my big Bose sound
system.

The boys were in rare form, they had obviously rehearsed well, and
they sounded technically much better than when the band was in its
prime some forty odd years ago. It's not surprising, they were
terrific to begin with, as young men they were the zenith of the
British electric blues, and they've had decades to completely master
their instruments. They played all their old standards ("we'll play
everything we can remember", joked lead guitarist Clapton), but not
note-for-note the way I remembered from the old vinyl LPs. Most of
it, like all good rock and roll, was improvised, as if by men who
could still read each other's minds after almost forty years. They
brought the sensibility and maturity that only a hard, long life in
the music business during most of the last half of the twentieth
century can give.

Eric Clapton on lead displayed his usual virtuosity and his baroque
complexity, his fingers flying so fast across the frets of his
intstrument it was impossible to follow them at times. Jack Bruce,
normally in the background, the poetry of his lyrics and his solid
bass lines providing the foundation to each piece, yet now not just
sensed subliminally but fully visible to the listener as the cameras
helped the eye guide the ear and finally reveal how much he had
contributed to this remarkable music. He can blow a mean harp, too!
And Ginger Baker, the mad drummer, still athletic and remarkably
supple for a man who must be close to seventy by now, using his drum
kit to provide percussive melodies that no rock band has ever since
been able to duplicate. And they all sang, too, proud and powerful
masculine voices, perhaps not always reaching the high notes they
once could, but with the musical knowledge and experience to be able
to gracefully approach them and provide the same power at lower, more
accessible registers.

But they were so old, not little old pensioners, surely, but men who
are well past their primes, men with the cold breath of their own
mortality on the backs of their necks. Old, just like their old fans
in the audience, mixed in with the trendy youngsters and the
celebrities were the frumpy middle-aged Londoners swaying to the
music and silently mouthing the lyrics, a tear in their eyes for this
vanishing genius and and their own fading youth. With a start, I
realized I must have looked just like them.

The artist has a hand in molding his times, he communicates a
sensibility that changes the world in some small way. But his
audience also helps creates that art to some extent. By their
approval and by their selection and choice, they change the culture
by allowing those artists which express the times to rise to the top,
and by suppressing those which are their negation. Cream helped
change the world in the Sixties, but their fans and the sensibility
they represent also deserve some credit for making them possible.
This music does not exist in isolation, it has a cultural context
going back centuries, traceable to America and then Africa--the Blues
of the American Negro, lovingly preserved by the British working
class, played for the suburban children of the post-war generation
throughout the world. It is gone now, but its influence remains, and
it still matters.

After the concert and the obligatory encore ("Sunshine of Your Love")
the three players, arms about each other's waists, thanked the
audience for their thunderous applause with a deep and simultaneous
interlocked bow, a gesture perhaps reminiscent of the Elizabethan stage.

Good-Bye, Cream.