vale pete brown

Pete's teeth were probably not better than Jack's but he knew to cover them up

As usual a range of feelings and opinions wash over me when I hear about the death of someone who impacted on me from an early age but who was very old and had a good life as far as I can tell (albeit one which apparently ended with a patchwork of different varieties of cancer). Pete Brown was an interesting man to me and while his lyrics for Cream weren't so important as far as I was concerned the lyrical content of the first two Jack Bruce albums (or at least the first two with singing on them) was top notch.* Apparently the high opinion of PB's lyrics is one of the probably many opinions I share with Martin Scorsese, or so I gather from PB's obituary. 

I am also just plain appreciative of a man who was happy to be depicted in this manner on the cover of his own record. (He made a few. I have only ever heard this compilation of various releases 1969-1970something. I like a lot of it, but it would have been better with someone who can sing singing on it - this is something I almost never say, so I guess I really don't like PB's singing style). 

And then, I got this off the shelf and flicked through it and wow, it's actually pretty terrible, mostly. Sort of arrogant horny 'chicks eh' tossed off nonsense. And when I say 'sort of', I really say it only as two words that would redundantly start a sentence tempering the reality of the situation. I see that in Washington State there is a bookshop that will sell you this book for almost US$400. If it's signed or has been dipped in gold or something they don't mention that in the description. My recommendation is that if you are walking down the street really bored and you're like me, terribly short attention span, and you see this book lying on the ground, you should pick it up, flick through it for as long as it takes your mind off stuff, then put it somewhere convenient for the next person like us. 

But anyway, I think he was on balance actually pretty good. 

* To save you looking it up I'll tell you that JB recorded an instrumental jazz album, Things We Like, in 1968 but it wasn't released until after his first post-Cream recording, Songs for a Tailor, in 1970. The subsequent LP, Harmony Row, was in the Songs for a Tailor vein.