Ginger Baker redefined the possibilities for rock drumming. The rest of his life was as intense and uncompromising as his music. Read our tribute to the drummer
was a teenager, his life was transformed in two lasting ways. While at a party around age 15, he was encouraged to sit down at a drum kit and play; classmates had noticed he would drum on his desktop and thought he’d be good at it. Before long he had given up dreams of being a pilot or a championship bicyclist for a musician’s life.
Baker’s music and his volatility are equal parts of his legacy. “He was always a wild creature to me, and obviously very hard to get along with,” says Rush frontman Geddy Lee, who saw Cream live as a teenager in Canada. “But his rhythms were unbelievable, and very few people realize how musical he was and how much influence he had on Cream songs. He was the archetypal rock drummer.”
One of rock’s first supergroups, Cream crystallized Baker’s sound. “For my dad, the drumming was an integral part of the music, like the backward beat in ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’” says his son Kofi, who was taught by his father. “He didn’t play the drums as a backbeat; he would complement the music.
That experience seemed to revitalize Baker, at least artistically, and he went on to make Afrobeat-inspired albums like 1990’sIn the late Eighties, he moved to L.A. in part to pursue acting. According to Laswell, Baker had given up heroin but was still dealing with cocaine addiction and at one point even placed an ad in a local paper looking for drumming work.
By the late 2000s, the abuse Baker had inflicted on himself over the decades began to wear him down. Writer Jay Bulger visited him for a 2009profile [“The Devil and Ginger Baker,” RS 1085] and found him crankier than ever — but also frail. “He was taking all types of morphine and his back was messed up,” says Bulger. “He was just not in good shape.”
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