新鲜奶油 (1966)

Fresh Cream is the debut studio album by the British rock band Cream, consisting of bassist Jack Bruce, guitarist Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker. A mix of blues covers and originals, the album was a pivotal release in the history of blues rock, inspiring many further bands in the genre, as well as being instrumental in the development of jam rock and, later, heavy metal music. In 2012, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 102 in their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Songs and recording

Almost as soon as Cream were formed in July 1966, they entered Rayrik Studios at Chalk Farm, London, to begin work on their debut single and album with Robert Stigwood producing and John Timperley as engineer. Clapton later noted that the budget was minuscule, working with four-track machines and basically running each song a few times through until they got a satisfactory take, with minimal overdubbing afterward. The first sessions at Rayrik on 3 August produced the outtakes "The Coffee Song", "You Make Me Feel" and "Beauty Queen", followed later in the month by the group's debut single "Wrapping Paper", a music hall influenced piece designed to showcase the group's stylistic versatility, but which was received with puzzlement upon its October release by fans expecting a blues-oriented sound.

After the band moved to Ryemuse Studios (now known as Mayfair), the bulk of the album was recorded between September and November, neatly divided between old blues covers ("Spoonful", "Cat's Squirrel", "Rollin' And Tumblin'", "I'm So Glad", "Four Until Late") and original material penned by bassist Jack Bruce, with two contributions by Ginger Baker ("Sweet Wine" and his groundbreaking extended drum solo "Toad") and two by Bruce's first wife Janet Godfrey, who co-wrote "Sleepy Time Time" with Jack and "Sweet Wine" with Ginger. A session in September also produced the single "I Feel Free" (included on the US version of the album), the first product of the songwriting team of Jack Bruce and bohemian poet Pete Brown which proved a more typical representation of their sound than "Wrapping Paper"; released on the same day as the album, it climbed to No. 11 in the UK charts.

Bruce later said that the opening song "N.S.U." was written for the band's first rehearsal. "It was like an early punk song... the title meant "non-specific urethritis. It didn't mean an NSU Quickly – which was one of those little 1960s mopeds. I used to say it was about a member of the band who had this venereal disease. I can't tell you which one... except he played guitar." The mellow pop of "Dreaming" showcased Bruce's ghostly falsetto vocal style, which was also used on "I Feel Free" and would become more prominent on later releases. Clapton's lengthy, swirling solos on "Sweet Wine" and "Spoonful" pointed toward psychedelia and heavy metal, with Clapton employing much echo, fuzz and feedback, which had been directly inspired by his first meeting with Jimi Hendrix on 1 October. Overall, the group's fusion of blues with hard rock and improvisational jazz on this record proved seminal on the development of rock music from that point forward.

Release

Fresh Cream was released in the UK on 9 December 1966, as the first LP on the Reaction Records label, owned by producer Robert Stigwood. It was released in both mono and stereo versions, at the same time as the release of the single "I Feel Free". Interest in the supergroup's first album was intense, and it peaked at No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart. Over two years later, around the time of the band's final album Goodbye in February 1969, the album saw another surge in the charts that placed it as high as No. 7. The album was released in a slightly different form in January 1967 by Atco Records in the US, also in mono and stereo versions, where it peaked at No. 39.

The mono versions went out of print not long after release, and for many years only the stereo recordings were available. The UK mono album was reissued on CD for the first time in Japan, by Universal Music, in late 2013 as part of a deluxe SHM-CD and SHM-SACD sets (both editions also contain the UK stereo counterpart).

In January 2017, the album was again reissued, by Polydor, in a 4-CD box-set containing mono and stereo versions of the original UK and US release along with singles and B-sides. In April 2017, Polydor followed up with a corresponding 6-LP box set.