“I had just put together Cream – and they were already rehearsing!”: Manfred Mann frontman reveals how he inadvertently rumbled Eric Clapton’s biggest secret
When Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker joined forces to form Cream in 1966, the rock world was forever transformed. The combination of talent made for the very first supergroup, who had quietly rehearsed together in secret before exploding onto the scene. But 60s contemporary Paul Jones nearly blew the lid off the whole thing, entirely by accident…
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In a new interview with Mojo, the Manfred Mann frontman recalled a time he was asked to form a one-off band to feature on the Elektra collaborative album, What’s Shakin’. “They had The Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Butterfield, Al Kooper and Tom Rush. Joe Boyd [American record producer] said, ‘Look, we can’t do this without one British act,’” Jones says. “‘We’ve asked The Yardbirds and so on, and they all say no… could you put together a band?’”
Jones started brainstorming – and the first person he called up to join his new band was bassist Jack Bruce. “I said, ‘Look, would you be up for it?’ and he said, ‘yeah, I certainly would. Who else are you thinking of?”
Jones mentioned that his preference was the then-unattached Eric Clapton on guitar. “Yeah, of course – he would be anybody’s first choice. Anybody else?” Bruce responded. And that’s when Jones would utter the final piece of the Cream puzzle, suggesting: “it’d be great if we could get Ginger Baker on drums.”
“There was a silence.,” Jones recalls. “Then, Jack said, ‘How much do you know?’ I said, ‘about what?’ – ‘Oh, nothing…’”
Without realising, Jones had pieced together the next band that would define rock history. “I had just put together Cream – and they were already rehearsing!” Jones laughs.
The ad-hoc band, which would be listed on the album as ‘Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse’ recorded three songs, including an iconic Clapton cut, Crossroads. In the end, Baker would decide to opt out as he didn’t want to dilute the power of what was going on behind the scenes. “I’m not doing it,” Baker apparently said. “It’s really stupid if all three of us do this project together when we’re about to burst onto the world.”
In the end, Clapton, Bruce and Jones would be joined by Steve Winwood and drummer Pete York. The band was completed with “Ben Palmer, a great blues piano player I’d met in Oxford,” as Jones explains.
Due to the fact that many of the members of the band were under contract with other labels, including Jones, many of them performed under aliases. As Jones explains, he was credited as ‘Matthew Jacobs’ on the record, named after his two sons, while Winwood went under the alias of ‘Steve Angelo’.
Sadly, the band never recorded together again – though let’s face it, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce were rather busy over the next couple of years…
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