A little more than two months after seeing Cream at Yale’s Woolsey Hall in New Haven, the second time I had seen them live in about six months, the group was booked to play two shows — afternoon and evening — at the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, Connecticut on June 15. It was the next-to-last show of an exhausting five-month tour of the States that started in February and turned the group into mega-stars.

The Oakdale was a summer theatre in-the-round with a circular stage and a canvas roof. Where the theatre stood is now the lobby of the new Oakdale (now named the Chevrolet Theater, sacrilege!). It booked mostly summer stock, traveling Broadway musical companies and shows of that ilk along with traditional singers from Tony Bennett and Engelbert Humperdink to Ray Charles and many more. I even saw the figure skater Perry Fleming perform there once, when they flooded the stage area with ice. She was actually quite good.

But by 1966, it was also booking rock acts. Because of its size — it was quite small by today’s standards with a seating capacity of no more than about 2,000 if that — and intimacy, it was an outrageous place to see bands such as Cream, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and The Who, all of whom played there, among many others.

Because my friend and band mate in Pulse, Beau Segal, had an in there, we scored excellent seats in the front row for the evening show. I turned up for the afternoon concert as well, which didn’t appear to be sold out, and stood in the area between the theatre and dressing rooms, which was an open-air walkway.

When I arrived Cream was already into their solo section of the set, which featured Train Time and Toad (again no Steppin’ Out!), but my head was turned around by something else. It might be more accurate to say I was shocked by a conversation on that walkway with Lance Drake, the former singer for an excellent Connecticut band the Bluebeats and who was also a DJ in Waterbury.

Lance was writing a piece for Hit Parader and had spoken with Ginger Baker before the afternoon show. He told us that Baker said Cream was breaking up. Although we followed the band closely, we had no clue this was in the offing. Evidently, there had been rumblings in the early spring, probably as early as that Woolsey Hall gig, that the band wasn’t going to last much longer.

The combination of Eric Clapton’s penchant for changing musical vehicles and his being stunned by a very unfavorable article in Rolling Stone by Jon Landau along with the enmity between Baker and bassist Jack Bruce, which dated to their Graham Bond Organisation days, all conspired to put an end to this extraordinary band that had literally changed the face of rock.

So, at least from our perspective, that took the air out of what we thought was going to be another outstanding show. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem to affect the band much. Perhaps because this was the end of a trying tour and they were relieved it was almost over, Cream was in great form for the night show.

They played a fairly standard set, which included N.S.U., Spoonful, Sunshine Of Your Love and Sweet Wine. From there it was the long solos by Bruce and Baker. This was one of the last shows I remember at Oakdale before a revolving stage was installed. This came about for a number of reasons, but certainly at rock concerts during which many groups were using Marshall stacks for amps, nearly half the audience was cut off from a clear view of the band. I believe the Led Zeppelin show about a year later was one of the first with the moving stage, which by the way mucked up the sound terribly.

But that night I was within about 15 feet of Jack Bruce’s side of the stage, so I was quite satisfied in contrast to the somewhat distant seats at Woolsey Hall. This was more like the Psychedelic Supermarket, only I was sitting in a chair. Cream sounded excellent in the tent and were typically creative, innovative and playing with each other, not against each other as has been reported so many times since those days.

Watching Bruce up close was, of course, for me a treat. He was playing the Gibson E-3 and would occasionally lean back slightly on his Marshall stack for support while furiously driving the band on with Baker. Clapton was now playing a Firebird, a guitar he would later use on the Farewell Tour, as opposed to the SG. Being so close to the stage, his sound was still big, but with more high end to it. It was an inspirational night on many levels from their sound to their look to their professionalism, they didn’t disappoint.

The Wheels Of Fire album was released in August, quite a sensation, first double LP to go platinum and instantly No. 1. Strange, it took them two years to make it to the top as the first true power trio, but were now planning a Farewell Tour in the fall.

The last Cream gig I went to from this era was on that Farewell Tour at the New Haven Arena October 11th, and it was decidedly the worst, for a number of reasons. Our seats were poor, distant, up high and on the side of the stage. The sound was awful, like a cavern, very indistinct. The band evidently played some good shows during that tour since there are recorded documents of it, for instance the Oakland show, which has its moments despite some obvious mistakes, and the L.A. Forum show, from which a lot of material was used on either the Goodbye album or Live Cream Vol. II, released nearly three years later. But this one wasn’t one of them.

They were good at times but having seen them on three prior occasions, they lacked the passion that drove them in each of the other performances. The feeling one got was they were just running through the numbers and looking forward to a quick getaway. Clapton played the Firebird, and the difference in sound at this venue was quite noticable, thinner, not as fat. He wasn’t filling as much space as he usually did for the three-piece band.

They did play White Room, the first time I’d heard that live, but Spoonful was barely 10 minutes if that, a song that usually went closer to 20. In fact, all the solos were uncharacteristically short, something their critics may have liked but wasn’t really what the experience of seeing this band was all about. The rest of the list included Sunshine, Tales Of Brave Ulysses and the solos. It was short and bittersweet that the experience of seeing a band I had such great respect for ended on such a sour note.

Still, they had given me not only many unforgettable memories but also were and are an unending source of inspiration musically. Cream produced some of the great music of the ’60s, but seemed to have been forgotten to some extent over the decades despite their great influence. The reunion in 2005 at Royal Albert Hall and later Madison Square Garden rectified that somewhat.

The band wasn’t heavy metal but a lot of that came out of the place where Cream started, although you can probably attribute more to Led Zeppelin. They were a blues-based rock band, hard rock if you prefer, which introduced extended live improvisation, much like a jazz group, into the rock genre and produced some unusual and distinctive songwriting, some of which is anthemic of the ’60s.

I was lucky to be there and to have seen them as often as I did. The next time would be nearly 40 years on.