Cream was built on a feud. Ginger Baker had once fired Jack Bruce from the Graham Bond Organisation, Bruce kept showing up anyway, and Baker eventually pulled a knife to force him out. So when Eric Clapton agreed to form a trio during a car ride in Baker’s Rover in 1966, on the condition that Bruce play bass, Baker nearly crashed the car. This episode explores how three chemically incompatible musicians produced genre-defining music in barely three years while guaranteeing their own destruction.

We trace the early gigs of blues covers, the October 1966 jam where an unknown Jimi Hendrix stunned Clapton, the humiliating New York shows where they were cut to one song per set, and the turnaround of Disraeli Gears and Sunshine of Your Love. The conversation breaks down how jazz improvisation let a three-piece stretch a two-minute blues into a 20-minute marathon for San Francisco audiences, and how the Volume Wars, with Bruce stacking Marshall amplifiers and Baker suffering permanent hearing damage, deteriorated the band. We cover the platinum double album Wheels of Fire, the scathing review that called Clapton a master of exhausted cliches, the grim farewell tour, the 1993 Hall of Fame performance, and the 2005 reunion that fell apart at Madison Square Garden when the same volume fight erupted again.

• The knife-point history between Baker and Bruce that Clapton knowingly walked into
• How Hendrix’s London jam session forced Clapton to evolve beyond blues purism
• Three soloists fighting for sonic territory: the mechanics of Cream’s extended jams
• The Volume Wars, Marshall stacks and the night Clapton stopped playing and nobody noticed
• Music from Big Pink, the Goodbye album, and why the 2005 reunion ended for good