Cream - Goodbye (1969)

It was the wrong goodbye.

Cream, rock and roll's first power trio, produced four albums, one a double set, within a quarter of a decade before they broke up over musical differences and sensitive egos.  Such a track record in a brief period seems impressive on first glance, but when you notice that their latter two albums (including Wheels of Fire, their 1968 double album) were supplemented by live versions of blues songs that were either hit or miss, you understand why Cream split - all that soloing distanced the members of Cream from the music, each other and themselves.  

Goodbye, released a few months after Cream's farewell concert at Royal Albert Hall in London, is a haphazard attempt at throwing their audience one last morsel before the breakup.  They produced an album much like a commuter running late for work would brew a cup of instant coffee - quickly, on the fly, with little regard for the quality of the result.  Each member of Cream - bassist Jack Bruce, guitarist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker - contributed a new song to record in the studio and then augmented them with live versions of songs they'd done in the studio on previous albums, the live remakes all taken from their October 1968 Los Angeles Forum concert.  The final product is rather disappointing.  "I'm So Glad" doesn't sound so great the second time around, the Skip James classic beng extended with soloing.  The Bruce original "Politician" and the cover of the blues standard "Sitting On Top Of the World," both originally recorded in the studio for Wheels of Fire, do sound menacing and gritty in concert, as blues rockers should, but the sonic quality isn't up to snuff.

The studio cuts are erratic, to put it charitably.  Bruce's "Doing That Scrapyard Thing" is an embarrassing blend of of American honky-tonk barroom piano and British music-hall posturing, and Baker's "What a Bringdown" is appropriately titled as an appropriate album closer.  Only Clapton's "Badge," which he wrote with George Harrison, is up to the Cream standard.  The lyrics are an enigmatic, Dylanesque look at relationships, romantic and otherwise, and it has one of Clapton's most elegant and direct solos with sincere backing on rhythm guitar from the guest artist, Italian jazz guitarist L'Angelo Misterioso (kidding, it's George Harrison appearing under a pseudonym).  It's the first inkling of Clapton's new direction toward simpler, more basic material in the style of the Band.  

Goodbye isn't a terrible album, but it's barely a cut above meh.  If Cream were the catalyst for future rock trios such as Rush and Nirvana, showing their successors how a power trio works, they also provided to future rock trios a lesson of what doesn't work in a three-person dynamic.  When a trio is focused and respectful of value for money, it can produce something as spellbinding as Rush's Permanent Waves (which, like Goodbye, has six tracks) or as influential as Nirvana's Nevermind.  Otherwise, oh, well . . .