Atlantic 204
Producer: Jimmy Miller
Track listing: Had to Cry Today / Can’t Find My Way Home / Well All Right / Presence of the Lord / Sea of Joy / Do What You Like
September 20, 1969
2 weeks
Following the dissolution of Cream, guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker joined forces with Steve Winwood, the boy-wonder keyboardist/vocalist formerly of the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. Winwood had played with Clapton briefly in the 1966 studio group Powerhouse. Rick Grech, from the popular British folk-rock outfit Family, rounded out Blind Faith.
“Eric and I put the band together, because musically we thought we had something to offer,” says Winwood. “But things started to escalate a little out of our hands. I still think the album was a great album and it stands up by itself as a great album, by a great band.”
The material recorded at the sessions held in February, May, and June of 1969 at Morgan and Olympic Studios in London, alternated between well-rehearsed songs and free-form jams. The former resulted in such tracks as Winwood’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” and Clapton’s “Presence of the Lord,” the first non-instrumental recording he’d ever written alone; the latter was most evident in Baker’s 15-minute “Do What You Like,” most notable for the drummer’s percussive attack. As Winwood puts it, “Ginger Baker’s drumming tends to be rather unforgettable.”
Following the completion of the album, the band played its only U.K. date on June 7, 1969, at London’s Hyde Park, where it was joined onstage by Donovan. On July 12, the band made its American debut at Madison Square Garden in New York, kicking off its U.S. tour.
Blind Faith wasn’t only known for the instrumental prowess of the group’s players. The album’s cover was one of the most controversial in rock history. It featured a photo of a nude 11-year-old, falsely rumored to be Baker’s daughter, holding a phallic-shaped metallic model of a futuristic airplane. The cover was deemed too controversial for the American market, but was later reinstated on a subsequent reissue. “At the time I didn’t think anything of it at all,” admits Winwood. “But now I can see how controversial it is, because I have children of my own.”
Six weeks after Blind Faith‘s August release, the album hit the peak of the Top LP’s chart, but by that time the band, which was wrapping up its first and only tour, was ready to call it quits. Says Winwood, “I don’t think it could have gone on beyond that. There was a lot of pressure on the band to play in various different ways. There was too much business pressure. We probably should have stuck to our guns a little tighter than we did. We tended to do Cream songs and Traffic songs when we played live, rather than forging our own identity. We called it quits because we didn’t feel we were able to continue on with the same integrity that we had when we started.”
Following the band’s split, Winwood reformed Traffic with Jim Capaldi and Grech, before emerging as a successful solo artist; Clapton worked as a session player for Delaney and Bonnie, the opening act on the Blind Faith tour, and for George Harrison, before forming Derek and the Dominos and later launching an acclaimed solo career. Following the demise of Ginger Baker’s Airforce in 1970, which included Winwood and Grech, the drummer moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where he built a recording studio later used by Paul McCartney & Wings. Baker resurfaced in the early 1990s as a member of blues-rock outfit Masters of Reality.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of September 20, 1969
1. Blind Faith, Blind Faith
2. At San Quentin, Johnny Cash
3. Blood, Sweat & Tears, Blood, Sweat & Tears
4. Hair Original, Cast Recording
5. Green River, Creedence Clearwater Revival