Sounds as if David could use a little blue pill... Love the bird’s expressions. “What the hell?”
The updated site is settling in nicely. There are tons of new features I’ve yet to roll out, and will do some here and there. I’ve got a cool little random quote rotation widget that I’m going to load up with all the “you rock” emails I get. Amazingly, I don’t get many “you suck” emails… now don’t start sending them just because I said so… I know you guys.
😛
Clapton may have been God in the day (still is, the old fart) but of his earlier works, it is Cream that I’m drawn to. For only having like, what, three studio albums, they made quite the mark on rock history. The certainly set the standard for power trios, that’s for sure. “Sunshine” is not my favorite song, that belongs to “White Room” and “I’m So Glad”. I love Jack Bruce’s voice and the fact that he plays a Gibson EB0 bass (apparently Bud does too).
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UPDATE: Okay, it seems I have once again shown my age with the mention of the Free Clinic. Maybe it’s a USA thing too, but it’s a free medical clinic. The first free clinic was founded in 1967. The Haight Ashbury Free Clinics during the summer of love in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco helped those tree-huggin’ hippies get over whatever it was they had just smoked or swallowed. In my era, if you got a sexual disease from some sleazy bar maiden, and you didn’t want Mom and Dad knowing about it, you went to a free clinic for some help. Here’s the Wikipedia article on it: click here. Don’t they teach this in History classes? Hmm…
Lol, nice strip today. Clapton was great in Cream. I actually preferred that John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers album if you really want to hear him rip. GREAT stuff! 🙂
Clapton always seemed better as a second banana, just sitting quietly in the background then suddenly emerging with these insanely great solos/riffs. He has appeared on a number of video specials honoring other artists and he just shines. His moments in the spotlight in George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh” were really good too considering what he was going through at the time.
I can take solo Clapton in small doses but they’re great doses just the same. “Motherless Children” ranks up there of my favorite solo work.
I remember seeing Concert for Bangladesh in some cinema in some USA town during a tour. When it came to While My Guitar… (surely one of the great slow rock songs of all time and space!), there was Clapton, sweating and straining and giving his all and wringing buckets of pedestrian lead note out of his fretboard…and then George stepped in and cut him to shreds with a tiny, spare handful of notes than were pure soul and pure sex and sounded like a guitar that *really was* weeping. Nuff said.
Now, George has always been my hero and he’s always over-looked.
Clapton was *always* an old fart 😛 As Brogan says, though, he still showed some signs of life with Mayall. And Sunshine of Your Love, for all its pretentious wankiness, did have that memorable riff that lives to this day…
Forget the birds – I love the snow-David’s expressions! Well done 🙂
LOL! Yeah, David’s expressions were fun to work on.
Speaking of famous riffs… most folks bring up this song or “Smoke on the Water” as the riffs they try to emulate on guitar when first learning an axe. Me? It was “Heartbreaker” from Led Zeppelin. Great opening riff and teaches you how to modulate the riff up at the same time.
I must be from a different universe – most of the people I came across were trying to play the intro to Stairway to Heaven 😀
Oh, *that* crowd… 🙂
Yeah, there were folks on that one too, or the intro to “Roundabout” by Yes. I had a guy in college who would play the riff from “Don’t Fear the Reaper” all freakin’ night. To this day I hate that damn song…
😀
ROFL! I still don’t know how I feel about Don’t Fear the Reaper after all these years – it’s amazing how ‘hypnotic’ and ‘dead boring’ can be so close to each other o_O
Also, speaking of classic Zep riffs: Livin’ Lovin’ Maid. Now there was a simple, clean twelve-noter, DUM duh-duh-duh-duh-duh DUH duh-duh-duh-DUM-DUH, that still works to this day. Just smooth enough and just urgent enough. JP has played a lot of mediocre shite in his day, but he’s also had some diamond moments 🙂
Darn…I was just thinking of a “you suck” email and then I read the next line. Sigh. I guess I’ll stick with my “you Rock” notion.
You suck… no, you suck… no, *you* suck…. no, YOU suck… HEY! YOU BOTH SUCK! NOW SHUT UP!
That was how my Dad ended those types of arguments in the car. He was such a role model.
Great Cream songs? Those would be Badge (for the phenomenal bass riff from Jack Bruce) and their incredible live take on Crossroads.
When people use the term “supergroup”, I always think of Cream first.
Ah, “Badge” where Clapton and Harrison were trading off songs and collaboration. I was so upset to learn Clapton had played the lead on “While My Guitar…” as I’m a big Harrison fan and loved that riff and song. Oh well…
Oh, and Jack Bruce played a mean bass. So many role models when I first started playing bass back in ’73.
Love the facial expressions on the sculpture today as it melts away. The birds are priceless. Great strip as always. Maybe David needs a little blue snow to help get his snow cone factory back in shape. 🙂
Just don’t eat the yellow snow…
🙂
Cream will always be singing “I Feel Free” in my head.
I saw ’em do the song on Top of the Pops when I was about 11 or so. Ginger baker was dressed as a Roman Legionary and was “playing” the drums with one stick and a short-sword. Ridiculous, but the harmonised bit in the middle is aces.
Nice bird expressions. Been studying old “Heckle and Jeckyl” artwork? (inspiration note, not plagiarism accusation there). David’s changing expression was great. I didn’t even see it on my first read-through. Very well done on the subtlety controls!
Cleverness abounds. Well done.
Heckle and Jeckyl were certainly an influence on me as a kid watching cartoons for hours on end on a Saturday morning. To say the birds remind you of them is a high compliment to me and I know you weren’t pointing fingers.
I think of my style as an improved Hanna Barbera/Filmations Studios cartoon style. Not as cheesy (or crappy sometimes) but fun.
I’d love to see that clip of Cream playing with Baker as a Roman… what a riot. It was the 60s…
😀
Panels 2 and 3 have be bowled over in stitches!! *LMAO* …that BIRD!
Thanks! I really wanted to be subtle and not hit you on the head with what was happening. Makes you look it over two or three times to get it all.
🙂
Clapton “modern” – “Bad Love” strikes me as one of the greats, with a classic riff too. “Forever Man” and “She’s Waiting” too. I think his modern stuff is equally as good, although more refined and mature (well we all get older and slower eh?) as his early stuff.
And Cream are still one of my all time fave’s. 😀
Though for some reason I find Strange Brew sticks on my mind a lot. Must be all that Gluten-free ale I drink, now that IS a strange brew! 😉
You and me both have had our share of “strange brews” over the years it sounds…
I’ll try anything once. If I puke, I didn’t drink it again. Good rule in life in general.
🙂
Bob — She’s Waiting is just about the only thing Clapton ever did that sounds like he was awake. For that matter, the whole Behind the Sun album. It was just the right ‘soundtrack’ for a Lost Summer of surfing in Cornwall 🙂
But yes, there’s something about Strange Brew. It’s got a weirdly wonky charm. The corners don’t meet, as it were, and it seems to be going too fast and too slow at the same time – like being on the ancient traditional cocaine-Jack Daniel-diazepam seesaw during an open-ended jam session. Ah, those were the days…if I had to choose a couple of Cream tracks that I liked enough to keep, I’d choose Strange Brew and White Room.
Just out of interest but does anyone remember the soundtrack that Clapton did with Eric Kamen (IIRC) to the BBC TV series “Edge of Darkness”?
I had the 12″ Single (Vinyl – remember those? 😉 ) and it was a fantastic haunting tune that really evoked all kinds of emotional responses, especially when combined with the amazing TV series itself. Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker starred.
I am aware that they’re remaking Edge of Darkness, but I can’t imagine it’ll be as good, nothing ever is eh?
Ah now, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be! 😉
Correction, just Googled it, Michael Kamen co-wrote the music.
I love the expressions on both David, and the birds’ faces. Brilliant.
However, although I get the gist of it, I’m not entirely sure what is meant by ‘free clinic’. Am I just grossly undereducated, or is it an American term? Perhaps it’s both.
See my update at the bottom of the comic post above for what a Free Clinic is. Yes, it probably is an American term. I always forget what’s common to me is not always common to all you readers!
🙂
Without the services of the Free Clinic back in Ago, there would have been no Golden Age of Rock and Roll in Hellay. Just saying 😀
man, i honestly find it hard to believe that this joke is sailing right over the heads of some of the readers here … considering the multitudes of ‘free clinic’ jokes that have been made over the **decades** since their inception on comedy records, television programs and above all, MOVIES, it positively doesn’t make sense to me that this joke is totally lost on parts of the audience…
and considering that a different form of those free clinics still exist today in this country, it really does make ya wonder…i can’t have been THAT long that people stopped calling them by that nickname…
–dee!
That’s why I’m here… a historian of sex, drugs & Rock and Roll. I was fairly sure most would get the reference, but live and learn.
Also, with all the nasty STDs out there now, I’m glad my readers aren’t familiar with the Free Clinics!
🙂
perhaps some viagra? or is that what you meant by “free clinic”?
No, Lorraine is referring to the fact that his penis is melting and looks like he could use some medical help, which is what Free Clinics did/do.
You “kids” today don’t know what you’re missing. The worst thing we got back in the day was a case of gonorrhea or VD. Now that free/open sex can kill you, well, that’s put a damper on it for us 70s folks.
🙂
“I Feel Free” is the Cream song for me, altho as much as I loved them, I’ve never been a huge EC fan…
I do, however, think that if there was an Olympia inhabited only by bass players, Jack Bruce would be Zeus, absolutely… (couldn’t ya just see that? Maybe Chris Squire as Poseidon, Geezer Butler as Hades, Roger Glover as Hermes, John Entwistle as Hephaestus, John Paul Jones as Ares…)
I think that virtually everything that Bruce lent his playing & vocal talents to, was solid gold. My particular faves were BLT – his collaboration with Robin Trower & Bill Lordan in the early 80’s, & if you’re any kind of JB fan at all, check out BBM – “Around the Next Dream”: a lovely piece he did with Ginger Baker & Gary Moore on guitar from 1994. It rivals anything he did with Cream & I think is the best of anything he’s done.
Okay, let’s not forget West, Bruce and Laing… hot damn what a couple of rock and roll albums they put out before splitting (is it me, or were there only about 12 or so real rock stars and they just moved from band to band…).
Bruce most certainly is an Olympian for sure. And you knew those names way too well for this old fart to ever remember. Of course, I can remember the names of all the guys who were ever in Bachman Turner Overdrive, so it’s what you decid to learn.
🙂
Really like this one, but I think it reads even funnier backwards:
http://djbogtrotter.co.uk/images/2010-03-03.jpg
LOL at Bogtrotter!
You’re right of course!
And how many of us ended up the evening with two birds on our “icicle”??
😀
Bet he lost his balls too if only he could talk saying Oh my balls oh my balls along with no weewee at least Lorraine can use an icicle as a strap on ride the snowman wooooo.