In Concerts Vol. 3, I wrote about the single concert performance that was probably the best out of hundreds I’ve attended and certainly the most influential: Cream at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, September, 1967.

That wouldn’t be the only time I would see this amazing trio. I was lucky enough to see them three more times in a little more than a year. The second opportunity came in April, 1968. I was still going to school in Boston at Berklee School of Music and coming home on weekends to rehearse and/or play the Connecticut club scene with Pulse.

Cream was scheduled to play at Boston’s Back Bay Theatre in April, but they were also going to play near my hometown in New Haven at Yale’s Woolsey Hall on April 10th and I decided to come home for that, mainly because I had a new girlfriend who was still in school in New Haven. This would be our first big concert date. That made sense.

The intact ticket above is from that date. I didn’t  hold on to many tickets or stubs from that period, but I kept this one tucked away in an old wallet. I’m glad I did. The reason it’s intact is that the Yale students didn’t take or rip any tickets, they just looked at them. Thank you, Yalies.

After playing for a week of a scheduled two-week engagement in Boston in September, 1967, Cream cut short its stay there over money problems with the owner of the Psychedelic Supermarket, not to mention they disliked Boston because of the discrimination and derogatory comments on the streets they endured, and moved on to play New York at several venues, including the Cafe Au Go Go and Village Theatre (later Fillmore East).

They also played two shows in Michigan, the second at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom in a much booted performance with fairly decent sound, a pretty good example of what they sounded like that fall. From there, they toured Europe fairly extensively, leading up to the release of their second album, Disraeli Gears (November, U.K., December, U.S.), the record that really started to break them as a big act.

Cream came back to America in late February to the West Coast to play, among others, a string of concerts at the Fillmore West. Some of those performances are preserved on the Wheels Of Fire live album, along with a good many boots. They toured the States relentlessly during the spring and early summer in support of Disraeli Gears for a reported scant $5,000 a show, even then not a princely sum. This was part of a strategy by their manager, Robert Stigwood, to make the band a big name. It did but it also completely burned them out.

Add to that Eric Clapton’s reaction to a Rolling Stone article by Jon Landau early in the year that basically labeled his playing as a blues cliche and the writing was on the wall for Cream. Rolling Stone was evidently his bible at that point.

So by the time they reached New Haven, after playing Boston on the 5th, among many other dates in March and April, the group was perhaps somewhat jaded. It didn’t affect their performance but it was quite a different experience than at the small club in Boston. This particular concert was also a lost one of sorts, absent from tour lists on the web, particularly Graeme Paddingale’s definitive list at his site Those Were The Days, and bios that included tour itineraries. But with the help of Canadian collector Bob Elliott, we restored the date to the history of the band.

The photo here by Art Kane, which ran in Life Magazine in late June as part of his piece The New Rock, is one I have always believed came from somewhere near New Haven. The main reason is this is precisely how they looked at the Woolsey Hall concert, particularly Clapton. That is exactly what he was wearing. His hair was pulled back in a pony tail, he wore shades on stage and had on the black leather-fringed jacket he has on in the photo. With the New Haven Railroad near by, it seems quite possible. For the other portrait Life published from this session, check out this page.

Woolsey Hall is one of the worst venues for a rock concert because as beautiful as it is, it was built for classical, unamplified music. Acoustically it’s very alive with all hard surfaces. No doubt Cream would be loud in there. They were and their set was relatively brief in comparison with the two-set club date I had witnessed. We sat about 26 rows back on the left side of the hall, which was merciful given the volume of the show.

The show was opened by a New Haven-area folk-rock performer, Randy Burns, and his band, a very popular local artist at the time, particularly with the college crowd. His set was very good, a difficult task to pull off opening for such a different style band. Pulse would play a show with him later that year at The Product in New London.

Cream opened with Spoonful, which was now a 20-to-30 minute opus. Despite the poor acoustics, the band’s dynamics were excellent with the song starting out at low volume, building to a swirling cavern of sound and then winding down to an almost spooky sounding ending with a lot of space.

The only song from Disraeli Gears came next, Sunshine Of Your Love. It was the first time I had heard it live and it was monstrous. It included a long tag on the end, not present on the studio cut, on which Clapton soloed over an A chord that usually ended the chorus with Bruce and Baker working furiously underneath him. That was worth the price of admission and highlight of the concert.

I’m So Glad followed with an extended improvisation and then to our surprise the solo section of the concert with Train Time and Toad, again no Steppin’ Out, Clapton’s solo spot. I knew the solo section marked the beginning of the end of the concert, having seen them before, but it seemed to come up quickly. And when Toad was finished, which featured Ginger’s rolling double-bass drum climax (twice), complemented by a flurry of cross-handed stick work on his tom toms, it was over, just more than an hour.

I was definitely left wanting more. I would get it in full in June, when Cream would return to the New Haven area to play the penultimate concert of their five-month tour extravaganza at the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford with two shows. We would also find out some disturbing news at the afternoon gig of that date. That and the final concert of the four I went to in 1967-68 on the Farewell Tour I leave for another post.