The tortured and tumultuous life of the late Ginger Baker

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

If you know Ginger Baker only as the then drummer in Cream, you really don’t know Ginger Baker at all. Yes, it was in Cream that Baker became the world’s first superstar rock drummer, was the first to play an extended rock drum solo (on Toad, from Cream’s debut Fresh Cream) and solidified the rock drummer archetype of the crazy bastard at the back.

But that’s not where Baker’s reputation really lies. This is the guy who routinely dismisses his peers out of hand. According to Ginger, “[John] Bonham had technique but he couldn’t swing a sack of shit. The same with [Keith] Moonie.” The guy who said: “I won’t go within ten miles of a Rolling Stones gig.” Ginger Baker is the drummer who even hated his own band, claiming he would never play with them again, even after he’d just done seven reunion shows in 2005. Why? “We’ve done it.”

Baker would throw his drum sticks at Cream bassist Jack Bruce’s head during shows, get up and fight him during others, and even fired him once, when they were both in the Graham Bond Organization. Bruce told me before his death: “Ginger Baker had the idea [for Cream] with Eric Clapton, but Eric said: ‘Yeah, I’ll play with you but we’ve got to have Jack as the bass player and the singer.’ Ginger was like: ‘No problem.’ What he didn’t tell Eric was that the last time he’d seen me he pulled a knife on me and told me if he ever saw me again, the knife would be waiting for me.”

A few hours before his death in 2014, Bruce phoned Baker and told him: “I’m dying, Ginger, fuck you,” then slammed the phone down. Musically, Baker was, as Rush drummer Neil Peart put it, “a revolutionary… He set the bar for what rock drumming could be. I certainly emulated Ginger’s approaches to rhythm – his hard, flat, percussive sound was very innovative. Every rock drummer since has been influenced in some way by Ginger – even if they don’t know it.”

Peter Edward Baker was born in London on August 9, 1939, the son of a bricklayer who was killed in the Second World War when Ginger was just four. In his teens he was a keen cyclist and wanted to be a rider in the Tour de France, pedalling his bike like crazy, mile after mile – until one day a taxi knocked him over, crushing his bike.

At a party shortly afterwards, for a dare he sat at a set of drums – and tore into them as though he’d been playing all his life. “The hi-hat, the bass drum, the cymbals… I don’t know how, but I could do it all,” he recalled.

He got his first pro gig at 17, beating the skins in a trad-jazz band. He spent the late 1950s hanging with the cool cats in Soho, picking up tips from English jazz drumming legend Phil Seamen. He was one of the first to dig heavily what are now called ‘world rhythms’, where syncopated jazz met Afro-polyrhythms – and heroin.

In 1962, Baker replaced his pal Charlie Watts in Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, where he met keyboard player Graham Bond, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and bassist Jack Bruce.

Deciding to “go commercial” and make some money, they formed the Graham Bond Organization, an R&B group that were soon considered one of the hottest on the scene, and also featured a young and already fully crazy John McLaughlin on guitar.

The GBO were full-tilt fuck-ups. Too much smack, too many egos, but by God could they play. The kind of group that made pop schlock like I Saw Her Standing There sound like an acid trip.

Then Bond got Baker to fire Bruce, and the GBO’s weird blend of proto-prog and before-itstime jazz-fusion rock eventually fizzled out. Bond later fell under a train and died amid whispers of black-magic curses. Baker got his own dose of bad-karma payback when Clapton insisted on Bruce joining them in Cream.

Cue pious tales of rock’s first supergroup, Sunshine Of Your Love, 15 million record sales, first ever platinum-selling double album (Wheels Of Fire), yadda yadda… Albert Hall farewell.

“My brother and I used to listen to those Cream records, trying to emulate them,” Alex Van Halen would later recall.

So was everyone else that formed a heavy rock band at that time. Not that Baker gave a fuck. “People try to say that Cream gave birth to heavy metal,” he once observed in Rolling Stone. “If that’s the case, we should have had an abortion.”

After Cream split, he went with Clapton to form Blind Faith, yet another supergroup, along with Steve Winwood from Traffic, and they released one of the biggest-selling albums of 1969, full of soul, country, folk, blues, jazz, yet melded together to make something… else.

Blind Faith should have been the start of another musical revolution. But then Clapton bailed after realising that Baker was rapidly becoming lost down the heroin rabbit hole.

“I took one look at his eyes and was sure he was back on it,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Baker, meanwhile, maintains he was straight throughout Blind Faith. “I only got fucked up at the end of the US tour!” he said, adding: “I was an evil person back then. Eric just wanted to get away from me.”

Everybody did.

Almost dying of an OD after shooting up a speedball – a lethal mix of cocaine and heroin – on the very same night that Hendrix died, Baker fled London and drove – yes, drove – to Nigeria.

In the capital Lagos he opened West Africa’s first 16-track studio and toured with local hero Fela Kuti, performing to crowds of 150,000 and becoming famous throughout Nigeria as the ‘Oyinbo’ – Kuti’s ‘white’ drummer.

There were occasional forays back into the rock mainstream throughout the 1970s, firstly fronting Ginger Baker’s Air Force – a ‘floating’ line-up of more than 18 musicians including Winwood, Denny Laine, Alan White, Rick Grech and Phil Seamen – who released two jazz-rock-fusion albums.

That was followed by the Baker Gurvitz Army, which was aimed more at the post-Cream Robin Trower crowd. They released three albums, none of which really hit. Mainly, though, Ginger did his thing, living on an olive ranch in Italy in the early 80s and getting into polo. Yes, polo. He became a lifelong member of the all-white Lagos Polo Club, where members of Nigeria’s military dictatorship held court. Baker was eventually kicked out for fielding a team of black polo players from Nigeria – who promptly beat the whites.

I met Ginger briefly in 1980 when he was the drummer for a spell in Hawkwind, for whom I was then doing the PR. I recall going backstage on tour one night and enquiring whether I might be allowed to introduce him to a journalist from Melody Maker who had expressed an interest in meeting him.

“Fuck off,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said. “But the journalist says he’s met you before and knows you.”

“Fuck off, you little c**t. I don’t know any journalists. And I don’t want to.”

In 1986 John Lydon got Baker in to play drums on the extraordinary Public Image Ltd album Album (which also featured Steve Vai on guitar), and in 1992 Baker played quite brilliantly on the Masters Of Reality album Sunrise On The Sufferbus. After that he formed the short-lived Ginger Baker Trio.

Mainly, though, what Baker did was sell cocaine, take prescription morphine, and sue a former servant/lover in Nigeria who he claimed had stolen 60,000 dollars from him. He also became ill with various ailments including lung disease and heart problems.

Oh, and he formed a power trio, BBM, a ‘Cream Mk.II’, with Gary Moore and – ye gods! – Jack Bruce. Then, against all the odds, in 2005 Cream reunited and he played four shows with them at the Albert Hall and three at Madison Square Garden. All of which were transcendent in their depiction of a modern-day drummer of quite extraordinary talent, boldness and sheer balls. The latter ended when Baker and Bruce began fighting on stage in New York.

Along the way there were also four marriages, three children, various affairs, an autobiography called Hellraiser, a documentary film called Beware Of Mr. Baker that won the Grand Jury award at the South By Southwest festival in Texas in 2012, disputes with the local mafia in Tuscany, and a couple of ‘experimental’ albums called Horses & Trees and Middle Passage that merged jazz and world music.

He was hounded by the tax man in Britain and America. He began to lose his hearing in latter years – something blaming Jack Bruce for after the years he spent having to share a stage with Bruce’s excessive amplification. He once recalled of the Cream reunion shows: “Jack was playing so fucking loud. And he’s shouting at me, saying that I’m playing too loud. On stage – in front of everybody! And Eric got pissed at both of us.”

Before the 2016 heart ops that for a period left him too weak to play, he had been touring a new group, Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion, who released one album, Why?, in 2014.

“God is punishing me for my past wickedness by keeping me alive and in as much pain as he can,” Baker said.

Even though he always “hated rock’n’roll”, Ginger Baker was the greatest rock (and jazz) drummer of them all. Just ask all the rest