Ginger Baker's Air Force - 1970 - Ginger Baker's Air Force

Ginger Baker's Air Force

1970 

Ginger Baker's Air Force

01. Da Da Man
02. Early In The Morning
03. Don't Care
04. Toad
05. Aiko Biaye
06. Man Of Constant Sorrow
07. Do What You Like
08. Doin' It

Alto Saxophone – Graham Bond
Bass, Violin – Rick Grech
Drums – Ginger Baker
Drums – Remi Kabaka
Guitar, Vocals – Denny Laine
Percussion – Phil Seamen
Tenor Saxophone, Flute – Chris Wood
Tenor Saxophone, Flute – Harold McNair
Vocals – Jeanette Jacobs
Vocals, Organ – Steve Winwood

On a purely musical level, Ginger Baker's Air Force was arguably the pinnacle of the legendary drummer's achievements of the 1960s. Even allowing for the many and varied virtues of the Graham Bond Organisation, Cream, and Blind Faith, they didn't approach the breadth or ambition that characterized the Air Force sound. Sadly, despite their prodigious musical attributes, Ginger Baker's Air Force are mostly remembered in the music business as one of the great non-starters among the heavily press-hyped supergroups of the late '60s and early '70s. Air Force essentially grew out of Ginger Baker's six-month stint with Blind Faith, a supergroup that collapsed after generating one album and finishing one tour. Baker's ex-Cream bandmate Eric Clapton abandoned that venture in favor of the vastly different (yet more rewarding) musical styles of Delaney & Bonnie, but Baker persuaded Steve Winwood and Rick Grech, the other members of the band, to stay on with him. Baker planned to put together a new band that would explore music on a new scale, and in new directions than Blind Faith or Cream. The projected band, christened Air Force, would embrace jazz, R&B, blues, folk, and African music.

Baker's old bandmate Graham Bond came aboard on saxophone, joined by legendary jazz drummer Phil Seaman, whom Baker regarded as a mentor and inspiration, along with Traffic's Chris Wood, and Harold McNair, both on sax and flute. As a guitarist and singer, the new group featured Denny Laine, the former lead singer and guitarist of the original Moody Blues. Singer Jeanette Jacobs and African percussionist Remi Kabaka were also in the lineup that played two extraordinary gigs at Birmingham's Town Hall and London's Royal Albert Hall at the end of 1969. Baker's initial plan hadn't extended beyond the two shows, but the first one was so successful musically and critically that he began laying bigger plans, including the recording of the Royal Albert Hall show and keeping the band going. By January of 1970, events were starting to break both inside and outside of the band that would have a profound effect on its future. The reviews from Birmingham were so good that the Royal Albert Hall show turned into one of those press events that became the talk of the entire music trade in England and, by extension, America. The fact that the show had been recorded made it even better -- there was proof on hand that the press enthusiasm was justified. The recordings were extraordinary, with the Air Force thundering along amid blazing sax, organ, guitar, and bass virtuosity, fiery solos, and extended jams that, for a change, actually went somewhere, while three percussionists were busy all the way through playing several layers of rhythm. At its best -- and the Royal Albert Hall tapes were their best -- the Air Force's music was like this wonderful, huge array of Chinese boxes, each opening to reveal a smaller but more beautifully ornate box inside.

The live album Ginger Baker's Air Force was issued by Polydor in Europe and Atlantic Records in America. In keeping with the excesses of the times, Ginger Baker's Air Force was a double LP, an extraordinary debut for a band that had yet to play a regularly scheduled concert. Devised with artwork that seemingly reversed the design of the Cream Wheels of Fire double set, and released amid extraordinary press fanfare, the live album reached number 33 in America and 37 in England, a long way from Cream or Blind Faith's chart-scaling days, but not bad (or, at least, it wouldn't have been if Atlantic, in particular, hadn't pressed hundreds of thousands of copies more than would ever be needed, which turned Ginger Baker's Air Force into a perennial bargain-bin cutout in America) for a group that had only played two gigs. Those were the days of supergroups and all-star jams, all of them heavily advertised and discussed in the rock press, and Air Force, in contrast to a lot of their rivals, delivered the goods.

The biggest problem facing the group, however, was that three key members, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Chris Wood, left -- as Baker knew they had to -- in early 1970. Graham Bond took over on organ and vocals for Air Force, and new members Steve Gregory and Bud Beadle joined on saxes, while Colin Gibson took over on bass. Neemoi Acquaye came in on African percussion, and Catherine James, Aliki Ashman, and Diane Stewart sang. It was Baker's plan to be an old-style bandleader in the traditional sense, opening up Air Force to experimentation by the bandmembers while he hung back, concerning himself as much as possible with the drums. He hoped to play a role akin that which Count Basie or Duke Ellington did in their respective bands, with his members. The problem was that keeping an 11-piece group going was a difficult and expensive proposition under the best of circumstances, and without a hit single or a hugely successful album to their credit, it proved impossible for Baker and Air Force. In addition, bands like Basie's supported themselves by getting lots of outside work, supporting singers on record and in concert, even touring as part of rock & roll shows in Basie's case in the late '50s, to keep the money coming in around their less lucrative gigs; that was clearly not a role that Air Force were ever going to play. And Ellington had income from his huge and vastly successful songwriting catalog to guarantee him the money needed to sustain the band during the lean times, if there were any. Baker, by contrast, had only a tiny smattering of songs to his credit, none of them very successful on their own terms except to the degree that the Cream and Blind Faith catalogs kept selling. And then there was the American tour.

The assumption, based on the media blitz out of England, was the Ginger Baker's Air Force would be another Blind Faith, an arena act whose tickets would disappear as fast as they were put on sale. In point of fact, the new group was two or three times more complex musically than Blind Faith and a lot more surprising. Without Eric Clapton or Steve Winwood in the lineup with Baker, however, and without a single that clicked as a popular track on the radio, it was discovered that Air Force were a phenomenon that many potential ticket-buyers could pass up. The tour was in trouble from the start, and it got worse as advance ticket sales to vast halls were far below what anyone anticipated. The whole thing collapsed just about the time that the group was completing its second and final album. By the end of 1970, after a short tour and a very short spurt of press interest in Air Force 2 -- which had some rewarding moments, but was really little like the first album -- the second album disappeared without a trace, as did the Air Force. Baker went on to a career as a solo artist, starting with Stratavarious the following year, which featured a far smaller band and steeped in African rhythms, while Laine joined Paul McCartney's new group Wings and, after a rough start for the group, did a decade of arena shows and became a household name. Ginger Baker's Air Force lingered in the memory for one great album and one decent album, but also as a classic non-event. Their final indignity came in 1972 when National Lampoon released their comedy album Radio Dinner, one highlight being a commercial for "Greatest Hits of the '60s," with (supposedly) Bob Dylan as the announcer hawking it and Blind Faith and Ginger Baker's Air Force as two of the specific groups mentioned on the K-Tel-type record. In the late '80s, Polygram reissued the live album on CD, and that record, Air Force 2, along with Stratavarious, were later pressed as a double-CD entitled Do What You Like.

Standing in stark contrast to the power trio format he'd explored with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce in Cream — or the expanded four-piece employed by Blind Faith on their one and only album — Bruce went big for his next project, a huge 11-member outfit he called Ginger Baker's Air Force. As he insisted to Disc and Music Echo in the spring of 1970, it all happened because he was lied to by Clapton, who departed Blind Faith to join up with the band's onetime opening act, Delaney and Bonnie.

"I was very bitter after the U.S. tour with Blind Faith. You know, I was so shattered, I had to go away for two months' rest," said Baker. "When I came back, I had been led to expect that we’d tour Britain with Delaney and Bonnie second on the bill – which is where they belong. I’m afraid I have no respect for a band that has to resort to good old rock and roll to get an audience interested. Anyway, instead of that I came back to find that Eric had got into the D&B thing and there was no tour and no Blind Faith."

It was, according to Baker, another example of shoddy treatment from musicians he'd tried to help. "At the start, Cream was mine. I took a drop in salary to start Cream, whereas Jack and Eric took a step up. Cream was always my baby. Musically, it was great and I think we said all we could, the way things were at the time," he noted in the 1970 interview. "I'm not an easy person to get on with, I know, but I don't bear people grudges, and as I'd been talking about getting a big band together one day, I thought I might as well go ahead."

That big band received its introduction to record stores with Ginger Baker's Air Force, a two-LP collection of performances from the group's sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall on Jan. 15, 1970. Released mere weeks later during the final days of March, it found Baker working with an illustrious lineup that included his former Blind Faith bandmates Steve Winwood and Ric Grech as well as ex-Moody Blues member (and future Wings guitarist) Denny Laine, U.K. R&B legend Graham Bond, and Winwood's fellow Traffic member Chris Wood.

Nearly 80 minutes long, Air Force blended original material with new arrangements of traditional songs, all of which were given plenty of room to grow; the shortest song on the album, a version of "Man of Constant Sorrow" featuring Laine on lead vocals, was the only cut to come in under four minutes, while five others passed the 10-minute mark. While traction at Top 40 radio was understandably hard to come by, the album itself performed respectably, reaching No. 33 in the U.S. and No. 37 in the U.K.

Telling Record Mirror he'd been imagining a project like this "for a long time," Baker insisted that as annoyed as he might have been by Clapton's defection, the Air Force's lineup came together easily and organically. "There didn’t seem to be much happening Blind Faith-wise," he recalled. "I got together with Chris and Stevie at the cottage, and a few sounds were very nice. Then Rick got interested, and I just got together a lot of people who could do it. They were all people I'd worked with before. I have difficulty getting my ideas over to some musicians, but not to these people; they sort of help."

Understandably reluctant to make any grand promises about longevity after the way Cream and Blind Faith had flamed out, Baker projected a casual attitude toward the Air Force's future prospects, telling Record Mirror it would "depend on circumstances." And as he explained in his conversation with Disc and Music Echo, the band had actually started out as something that was only supposed to last for a pair of concerts.

"We'd spent so much time rehearsing and we all had such a ball at the Albert Hall that everyone except Stevie Winwood and Chris Wood decided to carry on," said Baker. "It was a great surprise to me and a tremendous compliment. In fact I think it's the nicest thing that's ever happened. They're all friends of mine, but I knew they had their own things going for them, and I didn't think they'd want to stick. Their decision has given me an enormous amount of confidence — just at the time I needed it most."

Ultimately, however, Ginger Baker's Air Force would prove to be another short-lived outing for the mercurial drummer. After releasing Ginger Baker's Air Force 2 with a revamped lineup later in 1970, he left the U.K. to begin what ended up becoming a six-year stay in Nigeria, sitting in with Fela Kuti for a spell before joining up with Paul and Adrian Gurvitz to form the Baker Gurvitz Army for three albums later in the '70s.

That restless spirit, which has largely defined Baker's career during his brief tenures with various bands and sporadic forays into solo work, was evident even in the afterglow of the first Air Force album. "Of course I don't think I've reached my best yet. The day I don't move on I stop playing," he told Disc and Music Echo, incorrectly predicting he'd only keep drumming for another five years. "I'll have nothing left to give physically after that. I use both feet the way I play and to be honest it's shattering. After 35 or so, I won't he able to keep it up even if I want to."