First of all - a Warning. I am a huge fan of Ginger Baker, former drummer with Cream, Blind Faith, Baker Gurvitz Army, Ginger Baker's Air Force, and a number of other bands that bravely allowed him in, until they couldn't stand him any longer.
Therefore, this film will either be for you a wonderful story of the world's best rock drummer - if you're like me - or the tale of a walking disaster area, who proved to be impossible for most people to work with.
The film revolves around interviews conducted by Rolling Stone journalist Jay Bulger with the sour, spiteful, emotionally and physically scarred, once ginger but now grey-haired greatest living percussionist in his current home in South Africa. Baker lives there with his fourth wife, and his string of 30 polo horses. The scars come mostly from his decades long addiction, to heroin and a variety of other drugs, but one can't help feeling the basic curmudgeonly ingredients must have been there in the first place.
The effects from working with him were described in a 2009 interview with Jack Bruce - Cream's bass player and vocalist: "It's a knife-edge thing between me and Ginger. Nowadays, we're
happily co-existing in different continents [Bruce lives in Britain,
Baker in South Africa]...although I was thinking of asking him to move.
He's still a bit too close".
There's enough electrifying action from Baker to provide heavy relief from his griping about Bruce - who Ginger claims took credit for all the great arrangements he engineered for Cream; about other, "lesser" drummers like Led Zeppelin's John Bonham "Oh, he had good technique, but he wasn't in the same league as me" or Keith Moon "No way was he as good as me!"; and about his various business and musical alliances.
It's hard to escape the fact that Baker is now, and may have been for his entire career, a bitter and essentially unpleasant character. But boy, could he play the drums.
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