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Lot Essay
ERIC CLAPTON’S PSYCHEDELIC GIBSON SG STANDARD, USED EXTENSIVELY ON STAGE AND IN THE STUDIO WITH CREAM 1967-1968
The instrument most readily associated with Eric Clapton during his Cream era, this circa 1964 rainbow-coloured Gibson SG Standard was used extensively both on stage and in the studio throughout an intense touring period for the short-lived rock supergroup from February 1967 to the summer of 1968 and features heavily on the Cream albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire, as well as the landmark live albums Live Cream and Live Cream II. The guitar was used to record the singles ‘Strange Brew’, ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and Clapton’s celebrated live guitar solo on Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, when Cream performed the blues number at the Winterland in San Francisco on 10 March 1968. Hand-painted by the artistic duo that would become The Fool, this truly unique guitar represents the physical embodiment of psychedelia in both art and music and strongly evokes the spirit of the Summer of Love.
Having endured the theft of not one, but two, Les Paul Bursts over the past nine months, Clapton evidently decided that it would no longer be sensible to cart these increasingly valuable vintage guitars to and from gigs. What’s more, as he mentioned to Record Mirror when he reported the theft of his Bluesbreakers Burst, there were only about 6 or 7 Les Pauls in the country, so it was not an easy task to track another one down. Instead, he set out at some point in early 1967 to buy a circa 1964 second-hand Gibson SG Standard with Deluxe Vibrola in cherry finish, which would offer a similar construction to his preferred Les Pauls, but with a lighter, double-cutaway body for easier upper-fret access. My guitar is one of the new Gibson S-G’s. I leave my Les Paul home because I don’t mind if the S-G gets stolen, Clapton would tell Hit Parader in March 1968. As identified in Christopher Hjort’s meticulously researched book Strange Brew, Clapton was first pictured with his new SG, still with its original finish, when Cream played at the Woodlands Youth Centre in Basildon, Essex, on 17 February 1967. A photo of Clapton with his new guitar was printed in the Basildon Recorder the following week. It’s possible that he could have picked up the new guitar just the day before the show, when he enjoyed a rare Thursday off. It wouldn’t be long before the unassuming cherry SG would receive a psychedelic makeover and emerge as one of the most instantly recognizable guitars in music history.
That same month, Dutch artists Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma were commissioned by Cream’s manager Robert Stigwood to design stage costumes and produce promotional material for the band’s upcoming US debut. Koger and Posthuma would later form the design collective The Fool – which gives the guitar its name – and become best known for their work with the Beatles, which included designing the tunics worn by the band for their 1967 television broadcast of ‘All You Need Is Love’, decorating John Lennon's piano and George Harrison's Mini, painting a circular mural at the Harrisons' Surrey home Kinfauns, designing the inner sleeve of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP and, most famously, painting a three-story psychedelic mural on the facade of the Beatles' short lived Apple Boutique in London's Baker Street, which was subsequently painted over by order of the local council. The duo had moved to London during 1966 and established themselves in St. Stephens Gardens, Bayswater.
Koger and Posthuma had befriended Simon Hayes, then owner of the Mayfair Public Relations agency that represented Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood. Stigwood was looking to promote the power trio’s upcoming American tour in a bold and new way and had seen the poster I designed for Epstein’s Saville Theatre’s Sunday night rock concerts, which intrigued him and indirectly led to a commission, writes Koger on her website blog. When I suggested to Stigwood that it would be really cool to paint their instruments as well, he was delighted and commissioned the lot on the spot. The design duo then met with Clapton, Bruce and Baker at their studio and produced a rough sketch for the decoration of the instruments which was approved by all involved. Koger described the process of hand-painting this guitar over the course of two weeks: Simon had roughened up the surface of the SG and put some primer on it after which I painted the cherubic angel playing a triangle, a universe of stars and wavy undulating outlined multi colored shapes all over the body, fire flames licking the bottom part of the SG, suggesting the fires of transition, leaving space for Simon’s graduating spectrum fan shape on the front of the guitar and the big spectrum circle on the backside, symbolic of the Cosmic Light. On the pick guard I painted a rustic country scene with a footpath receding to a red sunset, reminiscent of Paradise, with a touch of kitsch that made it pop-art.
The pair painted a similar design on Bruce’s Fender VI bass, before painting the neck and fingerboard of each guitar to match, all with smooth-flowing oil-based enamels. To complete the overall look, Koger applied the Cream logo she had designed to Baker’s bass drum head. Once Koger’s costume designs had been made up in colorful silk, satin and velvet by a neighboring seamstress, the band dressed up in their new stage gear for a psychedelic photo shoot with Karl Ferris, who would soon go on to shoot the US cover art for Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. The vibrant images, shot before the freshly painted instrument had even left the studio, serve as an excellent reference point for how the guitar first looked, with its sublime rainbow fingerboard that would soon be stripped away when the paint interfered with Clapton’s playing. Clapton later wrote in his 2008 autobiography that the artistic duo had turned his guitar into a psychedelic fantasy. Clapton would remove the cover plate from the Vibrola almost immediately, presumably to reveal more of the artwork, and soon disengaged it altogether.
The Fool SG made its debut on Sunday 26 March 1967 at the RKO Theater in New York as part of DJ Murray the K’s “Music in the Fifth Dimension” extravaganza, which crammed ten acts into five 90 minute shows a day. It was Cream’s first show in the United States, and they would end up playing only eight days of a nine-day stint alongside the Who, after travel delays and a lack of equipment caused them to miss the first night of the revue. The SG became Clapton’s principal guitar from this date and would be played almost exclusively through to April 1968. When asked by Guitarist magazine’s David Mead in 1994 whether he had any particular favorite Gibson from the Cream era, Clapton replied I think that SG went through the Cream thing just about the longest, it was really a very, very powerful and comfortable instrument because of its lightness and the width and the flatness of the neck. It had a lot going for it – it had the humbuckers; it had everything I wanted at that point.
Before the band returned to the UK, they booked into Manhattan’s Atlantic Studios with the intent of recording a new single, which they achieved when the blues cover ‘Hey Lawdy Mama’ morphed into ‘Strange Brew’ with the help of producer Felix Pappalardi. I was impressed by the way Felix took what we had and polished it into something more saleable, writes Clapton. On the very first night he took home with him the tape we had previously recorded of ‘Lawdy Mama’, which was a standard twelve-bar blues, and came back the next day having transformed it into a kind of McCartneyesque pop song, complete with new lyrics and the title ‘Strange Brew’. I didn’t particularly like the song, but I respected the fact that he had created a pop song without completely destroying the original groove. In the end he won my approval, by cleverly allowing me to include in it an Albert King-style guitar solo. Numerous photographs from the sessions, including those published in the March 1968 issue of Eye magazine, indicate that the SG was Clapton’s only guitar present in the studio and was used to record the single ‘Strange Brew’, which would be released as a single on 26 May 1967. Clapton would play the psychedelic SG when Cream performed the song on the German television show Beat Club on 19 May 1967. When the single was played to Jimi Hendrix as part of his Blind Date spot in Melody Maker on 10 June, he remarks Oh, I know who that is all right, by the first note. Oooh, that’s nice. Those voices and the guitar sound so good together. It has a strange sort of West Coast and San Francisco sound. I like this record because I like the way [Clapton] plays anyway… Eric’s guitar is sounding funkier and more relaxed.
With a full complement of guitars and equipment, including their Marshalls, Cream returned to Atlantic Studios in New York to finish recording their next album Disraeli Gears over the course of four days from 12-15 May 1967. The recording of Disraeli Gears took place back in New York at the beginning of May, writes Clapton. Ahmet had his top people in the studio to record us: a hot young producer called Felix Pappalardi, and one of his most experienced engineers, Tom Dowd. We recorded the whole album in a space of a week. The record would be infused with the sound of The Fool and include the defining Cream song, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. This was the guitar on which Clapton would develop the sound he had first introduced with his Les Paul on ‘I Feel Free’ – his celebrated “woman tone”. So-called for its apparent resemblance to a female voice rather than a stringed instrument, the sound was achieved by rolling the tone control back to zero and playing with a sensitive touch on the high strings through an overdriven Marshall amplifier. When asked about his guitar sound in the August 1967 issue of Beat Instrumental, Clapton replied I am playing more smoothly now. I’m developing what I call my “Woman Tone”. It’s a sweet sound, something like the solo on “I Feel Free”. It is more like the human voice than a guitar. You wouldn’t think that it was a guitar for the first few passages. It calls for the correct use of distortion. Speaking to Guitar Player’s Barry Cleveland in 2004, Clapton elaborated: I used the bridge pickup, but with the tone control all the way off, so it was all just bottom end, and then I played on the high strings, getting a really fat tone and feeding back. I just played like that all the time.
Guitar World’s Chris Gill notes that for ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ Clapton used his standard stage rig – the SG and a Marshall half-stack. His solo, played through the neck pickup with the volume at 10 and the tone control rolled down to 1, observes Gill, is the most frequently cited example of Clapton’s “woman tone.” Co-written by Clapton and his flatmate Martin Sharp (who also designed the album cover), the song ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’, featured one of the earliest uses of a wah-wah pedal and would make famous the hitherto unknown effect, which boosted the high and low-midrange frequencies of the guitar signal as the pedal was rocked up and down. Pappalardi told journalist Paul Williams that they went out to Manny’s Music that afternoon to buy the wah-wah. From that point on, Clapton remarked to Cleveland, he was full tilt on the wah pedal for a year-and-a-half. British guitarist Dave Gregory notes that ‘World of Pain’, features more of the SG’s woman tone, this time double tracked to dizzying effect, against a sombre wah-wah backing and some powerful, exhilarating rhythm guitar in the choruses… while ‘Outside Woman Blues’ gives the Clapton tonsils an outing on a back-to-basics blues romp, laced with more woman-toned hooks. On release in November 1967, Disraeli Gears was an instant critical and commercial success, reaching no. 5 on the UK albums chart and no. 4 in the US. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch hailed Clapton’s guitar as menacing almost like a machine gun, sometimes eerily and overpoweringly persuasive as it reaches serpent-like deep into the Cream's varied and hypnotic musical journeys.
The band performed at the 1st International Festival of Pop Music at the Palais des Sports, Paris, on 1 June 67, which was filmed for television broadcast and features Cream performing a live version of ‘I Feel Free’. By the time the trio headlined the last day of the 7th National Jazz & Blues Festival in Windsor on 13 August, Clapton had replaced the SG’s Kluson tuners with Grovers. Cream opened their first American tour with a two week run at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco from 22 August to 3 September 1967, where they were met with ecstatic audiences who goaded the group into extended jams which saw their sets frequently run up to two hours, marking a significant shift in the evolution of the band, and of rock music in general, as they began to focus more on free improvisation.
We were told by [promoter] Bill [Graham] that we could play anything we liked, for as long as we liked, even if this meant us playing till dawn, and I think this is where we started openly exploring stuff, revealed Clapton in his 2008 autobiography. Playing in the Fillmore, we soon realized that no one could see us because they were projecting light shows on to the band… it was very liberating. We could just play our hearts out, without inhibition… I’m sure a good deal of [the audience] were out of their heads, half of them maybe, but it didn’t matter. They were listening, and that encouraged us to go to places we’d never been before. We started doing extended solos and were soon playing fewer and fewer songs but for much longer. We’d go off in our own directions, but sometimes we would hit these coincidental points in the music when we would all arrive at the same conclusion, be it a riff or a chord or just an idea, and we would jam on it for a little while and then go back into our own thing. I had never experienced anything like it. It was nothing to do with lyrics or ideas; it was much deeper, something purely musical. We were at our peak during that period. Clapton admits that some of the time he was actually playing on acid, adding I don’t really know how I got through it, because sometimes I didn’t know if my hands were working, what the guitar was that I was playing, or even what it was made of. On one trip it was in my head that I could turn the audience into angels or devils according to which note I played.
Their first American tour lasted seven weeks, culminating in twelve nights at the Café Au Go Go in New York, where Clapton would jam with one of his musical heroes B.B. King in mid-September. The band would spend the next twelve months almost constantly on the road. In between shows the group returned to Atlantic Studios with producer Felix Pappalardi and engineer Tom Dowd to begin work on their third album, recording cover versions of Howlin' Wolf's ‘Sitting on Top of the World’ and Albert King's ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’. While Cream were recording ‘Anyone For Tennis’ at the New York studios in December, Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun invited Clapton to play lead guitar on an Aretha Franklin session for the bluesy ‘Good To Me As I Am To You’ for her Lady Soul album, for which he very likely used the SG. I have to say that playing on that album for Ahmet and Aretha, writes Clapton, with all of those incredible musicians, is still one of the highlights of my life.
In January 1968, Cream were filmed in glorious full color playing a short set at the Revolution Club in Mayfair, planned for broadcast on French television. Featuring exceptional footage of Clapton on the dazzling psychedelic SG, the film was eventually made available on the 1993 VHS release (and later DVD) Fresh Live Cream. By this point, Clapton has removed the Vibrola arm and mechanism, leaving only the bridge and tailpiece. When paint began to flake from the back of the neck, it appears that he had much of that paint permanently removed, leaving a bare wood finish at one time. In early February, Cream spent two days filming in Copenhagen for the Danish movie, Det Var En Lordag Aften (On A Saturday Night), in which they are seen performing ‘World of Pain’ on a flatbed lorry as part of a street parade – with Clapton playing The Fool.
Ten days at Atlantic Studios in mid-February saw the group finish recording the majority of their third album, although several tracks would be completed in June. As the SG was still Clapton’s principal guitar at this time, we can be pretty certain it was once again used heavily on the album, although there was little of the celebrated woman tone this time around. Gregory notes that the closing solo lines on ‘Pressed Rat and Warthog’ resemble some fabulous songbird warbling in the psychedelic twilight; that ‘Politician’ features no fewer than three lead-guitar tracks playing simultaneously; and highlights the euphoric ‘Crossroads’-style solo section on ‘Those Were The Days’ and the long feedbacked guitar notes on ‘White Room’. The emphasis on live improvisation was reflected in the band’s studio work, as Clapton told Chris Welch the previous December: The stuff we’re writing now is really more a series of jumping-off points rather than just songs. Personally, I’ve written a lot of things that have a lot of different sections and I’d like to… improvise freely on each section… I mean, you’ve got to have that bit of room to move about a bit – which is what you do on stage anyway – so why not do it on record? I suppose we could do a double LP! As it turned out, Wheels Of Fire would be a double album, with one disc recorded in the studio and one to be recorded live when the band played The Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom in March.
Cream’s second US tour kicked off at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on 23 February 1968 and would run for four months. Although the set allowed for extended improvisation, the lengthy jams would center on a few key numbers, namely: set opener ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’, classics ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, the new riff-based ‘Politician’, the blues covers ‘Sleepy Time Time’ or ‘Sitting On Top Of The World’, and the rearrangement of Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, ending with a technical showcase for each member on ‘Stepping Out’, ‘Traintime’ and ‘Toad’. Film director Tony Palmer engaged Clapton in an on-camera conversation about his guitar playing before the show at the Winterland on 2 March, during which he demonstrates the controls, wah-wah pedal, and various tonal possibilities on his psychedelic SG and explains his sought-after woman tone. The woman tone is produced by using either the bass pickup, or the lead pickup, but with all the bass off, states Clapton. In fact, if you use both pickups, you should take all the bass off on the Tone control. That is, turn it down to 1 or 0 on the Tone control, and then turn the Volume full up. He goes on to demonstrate some of the stock phrases he works from and observes the advantage of being able to play out his aggressions on the guitar by being aggressive in the way that he plays. At the time, Palmer was collecting footage for his 1968 music documentary All My Loving, however the Clapton interview would ultimately feature in Palmer’s 1969 film of the Cream: Farewell Concert, released on DVD in 2005.
The 7 March show at the Fillmore Auditorium and the six shows over Cream’s three-night residency at the Winterland on 8-10 March 1968 were all officially recorded by Pappalardi and engineer Bill Halverson on a mobile 8-track unit for the band’s forthcoming double album. Highlights would eventually be spread over three official live albums: Wheels Of Fire, Live Cream, and Live Cream Volume II. Edoardo Genzolini’s 2023 book Cream: Clapton, Bruce & Baker Sitting on Top of the World, San Francisco, February-March, 1968, meticulously documents these shows with numerous audience photographs, confirming that Clapton played the SG exclusively throughout the 7-10 March 1968 San Francisco live recordings, including for his legendary guitar solo on Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, recorded at the Winterland on 10 March and released on Wheels Of Fire, which is widely regarded as one of the best live guitar solos of all time and one of the finest live blues performances on record.
Genzolini backed this up in an interview with MusicRadar, explaining: The dozens upon dozens of photos I have discovered unarguably support this information: photos taken by the late Jim Marshall from 10 March clearly show the band playing a venue that’s unquestionably the Fillmore. Also the black and white negatives of Frank M. Stapleton from the Fillmore show display a sequence of songs that’s easily recognizable by Clapton's finger positions on the fretboard, and which match the official setlist of 10 March from the Atlantic Records logs. It undoubtedly is one of the best solos ever conceived for its lyricism, and its recognizable structure building up to a unique climax, and what makes it one of the best is the fact that it was captured live on stage. It was clearly a good night for Cream, and we are lucky that Bill Halverson and Felix Pappalardi were there to record it. Released on 14 June in the US and 9 August in the UK, Wheels Of Fire was an instant blockbuster success, charting at no. 3 in the UK and no. 1 in the US, Canada and Australia, and becoming the world's first platinum-selling double album.
The Fool’s long-running streak as Clapton’s principal guitar ended when he acquired a Gibson Firebird on 13 April and immediately put it into regular stage use. The Fool SG was last seen on stage at the Cream’s show at Anaheim Convention Center on 17 May 1968. By the time the tour came to an end on 18 June, the band had agreed to split up, although it would be kept under wraps until after the release of Wheels Of Fire and they would stage a farewell tour before ultimately calling it a day. Whistle-stop touring was the beginning of the end for Cream, writes Clapton, because once we started constantly working in such an intense way, it became impossible to keep the music afloat, and we began to drown. Clapton remembered the time warmly when speaking to Paul Lester for Classic Rock in 2016: Looking back, the best thing about Cream, for me, was the amount of fun we had, while other people were taking it extremely seriously. And we weren’t! We were really just having the time of our lives, driving around America, playing three songs in two hours. It was crazy! And yet people lapped it up. So we thought, well, they like it, we like it, we don’t know what it is and we don’t care, so let them call it whatever they like.
There has been much speculation about the SG’s post-Clapton history and how the guitar ultimately ended up in the possession of American musician Todd Rundgren. It’s generally accepted that at some point in the summer of 1968, Clapton left the psychedelic SG with good friend George Harrison, who in turn passed the guitar on to Merseybeat guitarist and Apple Records’ artist Jackie Lomax. Both Clapton and Harrison were working with Lomax at the time – Harrison was producing his forthcoming album Is This What You Want? under the Apple Records label, and Clapton was playing lead guitar during the London sessions for many of the album tracks, including Lomax’s 1968 single Sour Milk Sea. However, Apple released a mysterious photograph in the liner notes to the 2010 reissue of Lomax’s debut solo album, dated March 1969, which appears to show Lomax and Harrison in conversation during a recording session, with Clapton in the background playing The Fool. If Apple’s dates are correct and relate to one of the March 1969 Lomax sessions for his 1969 single ‘New Day’ and its B-side ‘Thumbin’ A Ride’, this could indicate that Clapton held onto the psychedelic SG longer than previously thought.
We know Lomax was in possession of The Fool SG by May 1969, when he was featured in publicity photographs with the guitar in that month’s issue of Hit Parader. Lomax still had the guitar in 1971 when he met Todd Rundgren in Woodstock, NY. Short of money, Lomax agreed to hock the guitar to Rundgren in exchange for a $500 loan. At some point in the 1980s, Lomax approached Rundgren with $500 to reclaim the guitar but was refused, as by that point Rundgren had incurred significant expenses in restoring the guitar. When Rundgren had originally received the guitar from Lomax, the wood of the upper neck and headstock had deteriorated, either through simple neglect or exacerbated by the cumulative effects of sweat on the unprotected wood. Wanting a playable instrument, Rundgren arranged for Ralph Legnini to oversee the restoration of the guitar.
Legnini repaired a neck crack and replaced the headstock and a portion of the neck, which was then repainted to approximate the original. Legnini leveled and crowned all the frets, shelled the compartments, repaired the electronics, fabricated a new nut, and replaced the remains of the Vibrola with a stop tailpiece and an incongruous Schaller 'harmonica' bridge. The pickup switch and pots appear to be original, while the control knobs have likely been replaced. Artist Jane Millet matched and restored any damaged paintwork. Michael Aylward then sealed the guitar with a number of clear coats to protect the oil-based enamel paints. No serial number is present on the guitar as it was lost with the original headstock, which is currently in the collection of Perry Margoullef. Todd played the ex-Clapton SG until the mid-'90s. When Clapton auctioned part of his guitar collection in 1999 to benefit his Crossroads charity, he asked Todd to donate the SG. Todd declined at that time due to tax complications, however the following year he sold the guitar in an online auction and gave a percentage of the proceeds to Crossroads. The guitar reappeared at auction in 2023, where it was acquired by Jim Irsay.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
J. Hendrix, ‘Blind Date’, Melody Maker, 10 June 1967.
C. Welch, ‘The Creation of Pure Energy from the Cream’, Melody Maker, 11 November 1967.
C. Welch, Melody Maker, 30 December 1967.
P. Lester, ‘The Many Faces Of Eric Clapton: ‘God’ speaks!, Classic Rock, 10 June 2016. https://classicrockreview.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/the-many-faces-of-eric-clapton-god-speaks-2016/.
The instrument most readily associated with Eric Clapton during his Cream era, this circa 1964 rainbow-coloured Gibson SG Standard was used extensively both on stage and in the studio throughout an intense touring period for the short-lived rock supergroup from February 1967 to the summer of 1968 and features heavily on the Cream albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire, as well as the landmark live albums Live Cream and Live Cream II. The guitar was used to record the singles ‘Strange Brew’, ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and Clapton’s celebrated live guitar solo on Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, when Cream performed the blues number at the Winterland in San Francisco on 10 March 1968. Hand-painted by the artistic duo that would become The Fool, this truly unique guitar represents the physical embodiment of psychedelia in both art and music and strongly evokes the spirit of the Summer of Love.
Having endured the theft of not one, but two, Les Paul Bursts over the past nine months, Clapton evidently decided that it would no longer be sensible to cart these increasingly valuable vintage guitars to and from gigs. What’s more, as he mentioned to Record Mirror when he reported the theft of his Bluesbreakers Burst, there were only about 6 or 7 Les Pauls in the country, so it was not an easy task to track another one down. Instead, he set out at some point in early 1967 to buy a circa 1964 second-hand Gibson SG Standard with Deluxe Vibrola in cherry finish, which would offer a similar construction to his preferred Les Pauls, but with a lighter, double-cutaway body for easier upper-fret access. My guitar is one of the new Gibson S-G’s. I leave my Les Paul home because I don’t mind if the S-G gets stolen, Clapton would tell Hit Parader in March 1968. As identified in Christopher Hjort’s meticulously researched book Strange Brew, Clapton was first pictured with his new SG, still with its original finish, when Cream played at the Woodlands Youth Centre in Basildon, Essex, on 17 February 1967. A photo of Clapton with his new guitar was printed in the Basildon Recorder the following week. It’s possible that he could have picked up the new guitar just the day before the show, when he enjoyed a rare Thursday off. It wouldn’t be long before the unassuming cherry SG would receive a psychedelic makeover and emerge as one of the most instantly recognizable guitars in music history.
That same month, Dutch artists Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma were commissioned by Cream’s manager Robert Stigwood to design stage costumes and produce promotional material for the band’s upcoming US debut. Koger and Posthuma would later form the design collective The Fool – which gives the guitar its name – and become best known for their work with the Beatles, which included designing the tunics worn by the band for their 1967 television broadcast of ‘All You Need Is Love’, decorating John Lennon's piano and George Harrison's Mini, painting a circular mural at the Harrisons' Surrey home Kinfauns, designing the inner sleeve of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP and, most famously, painting a three-story psychedelic mural on the facade of the Beatles' short lived Apple Boutique in London's Baker Street, which was subsequently painted over by order of the local council. The duo had moved to London during 1966 and established themselves in St. Stephens Gardens, Bayswater.
Koger and Posthuma had befriended Simon Hayes, then owner of the Mayfair Public Relations agency that represented Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood. Stigwood was looking to promote the power trio’s upcoming American tour in a bold and new way and had seen the poster I designed for Epstein’s Saville Theatre’s Sunday night rock concerts, which intrigued him and indirectly led to a commission, writes Koger on her website blog. When I suggested to Stigwood that it would be really cool to paint their instruments as well, he was delighted and commissioned the lot on the spot. The design duo then met with Clapton, Bruce and Baker at their studio and produced a rough sketch for the decoration of the instruments which was approved by all involved. Koger described the process of hand-painting this guitar over the course of two weeks: Simon had roughened up the surface of the SG and put some primer on it after which I painted the cherubic angel playing a triangle, a universe of stars and wavy undulating outlined multi colored shapes all over the body, fire flames licking the bottom part of the SG, suggesting the fires of transition, leaving space for Simon’s graduating spectrum fan shape on the front of the guitar and the big spectrum circle on the backside, symbolic of the Cosmic Light. On the pick guard I painted a rustic country scene with a footpath receding to a red sunset, reminiscent of Paradise, with a touch of kitsch that made it pop-art.
The pair painted a similar design on Bruce’s Fender VI bass, before painting the neck and fingerboard of each guitar to match, all with smooth-flowing oil-based enamels. To complete the overall look, Koger applied the Cream logo she had designed to Baker’s bass drum head. Once Koger’s costume designs had been made up in colorful silk, satin and velvet by a neighboring seamstress, the band dressed up in their new stage gear for a psychedelic photo shoot with Karl Ferris, who would soon go on to shoot the US cover art for Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. The vibrant images, shot before the freshly painted instrument had even left the studio, serve as an excellent reference point for how the guitar first looked, with its sublime rainbow fingerboard that would soon be stripped away when the paint interfered with Clapton’s playing. Clapton later wrote in his 2008 autobiography that the artistic duo had turned his guitar into a psychedelic fantasy. Clapton would remove the cover plate from the Vibrola almost immediately, presumably to reveal more of the artwork, and soon disengaged it altogether.
The Fool SG made its debut on Sunday 26 March 1967 at the RKO Theater in New York as part of DJ Murray the K’s “Music in the Fifth Dimension” extravaganza, which crammed ten acts into five 90 minute shows a day. It was Cream’s first show in the United States, and they would end up playing only eight days of a nine-day stint alongside the Who, after travel delays and a lack of equipment caused them to miss the first night of the revue. The SG became Clapton’s principal guitar from this date and would be played almost exclusively through to April 1968. When asked by Guitarist magazine’s David Mead in 1994 whether he had any particular favorite Gibson from the Cream era, Clapton replied I think that SG went through the Cream thing just about the longest, it was really a very, very powerful and comfortable instrument because of its lightness and the width and the flatness of the neck. It had a lot going for it – it had the humbuckers; it had everything I wanted at that point.
Before the band returned to the UK, they booked into Manhattan’s Atlantic Studios with the intent of recording a new single, which they achieved when the blues cover ‘Hey Lawdy Mama’ morphed into ‘Strange Brew’ with the help of producer Felix Pappalardi. I was impressed by the way Felix took what we had and polished it into something more saleable, writes Clapton. On the very first night he took home with him the tape we had previously recorded of ‘Lawdy Mama’, which was a standard twelve-bar blues, and came back the next day having transformed it into a kind of McCartneyesque pop song, complete with new lyrics and the title ‘Strange Brew’. I didn’t particularly like the song, but I respected the fact that he had created a pop song without completely destroying the original groove. In the end he won my approval, by cleverly allowing me to include in it an Albert King-style guitar solo. Numerous photographs from the sessions, including those published in the March 1968 issue of Eye magazine, indicate that the SG was Clapton’s only guitar present in the studio and was used to record the single ‘Strange Brew’, which would be released as a single on 26 May 1967. Clapton would play the psychedelic SG when Cream performed the song on the German television show Beat Club on 19 May 1967. When the single was played to Jimi Hendrix as part of his Blind Date spot in Melody Maker on 10 June, he remarks Oh, I know who that is all right, by the first note. Oooh, that’s nice. Those voices and the guitar sound so good together. It has a strange sort of West Coast and San Francisco sound. I like this record because I like the way [Clapton] plays anyway… Eric’s guitar is sounding funkier and more relaxed.
With a full complement of guitars and equipment, including their Marshalls, Cream returned to Atlantic Studios in New York to finish recording their next album Disraeli Gears over the course of four days from 12-15 May 1967. The recording of Disraeli Gears took place back in New York at the beginning of May, writes Clapton. Ahmet had his top people in the studio to record us: a hot young producer called Felix Pappalardi, and one of his most experienced engineers, Tom Dowd. We recorded the whole album in a space of a week. The record would be infused with the sound of The Fool and include the defining Cream song, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. This was the guitar on which Clapton would develop the sound he had first introduced with his Les Paul on ‘I Feel Free’ – his celebrated “woman tone”. So-called for its apparent resemblance to a female voice rather than a stringed instrument, the sound was achieved by rolling the tone control back to zero and playing with a sensitive touch on the high strings through an overdriven Marshall amplifier. When asked about his guitar sound in the August 1967 issue of Beat Instrumental, Clapton replied I am playing more smoothly now. I’m developing what I call my “Woman Tone”. It’s a sweet sound, something like the solo on “I Feel Free”. It is more like the human voice than a guitar. You wouldn’t think that it was a guitar for the first few passages. It calls for the correct use of distortion. Speaking to Guitar Player’s Barry Cleveland in 2004, Clapton elaborated: I used the bridge pickup, but with the tone control all the way off, so it was all just bottom end, and then I played on the high strings, getting a really fat tone and feeding back. I just played like that all the time.
Guitar World’s Chris Gill notes that for ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ Clapton used his standard stage rig – the SG and a Marshall half-stack. His solo, played through the neck pickup with the volume at 10 and the tone control rolled down to 1, observes Gill, is the most frequently cited example of Clapton’s “woman tone.” Co-written by Clapton and his flatmate Martin Sharp (who also designed the album cover), the song ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’, featured one of the earliest uses of a wah-wah pedal and would make famous the hitherto unknown effect, which boosted the high and low-midrange frequencies of the guitar signal as the pedal was rocked up and down. Pappalardi told journalist Paul Williams that they went out to Manny’s Music that afternoon to buy the wah-wah. From that point on, Clapton remarked to Cleveland, he was full tilt on the wah pedal for a year-and-a-half. British guitarist Dave Gregory notes that ‘World of Pain’, features more of the SG’s woman tone, this time double tracked to dizzying effect, against a sombre wah-wah backing and some powerful, exhilarating rhythm guitar in the choruses… while ‘Outside Woman Blues’ gives the Clapton tonsils an outing on a back-to-basics blues romp, laced with more woman-toned hooks. On release in November 1967, Disraeli Gears was an instant critical and commercial success, reaching no. 5 on the UK albums chart and no. 4 in the US. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch hailed Clapton’s guitar as menacing almost like a machine gun, sometimes eerily and overpoweringly persuasive as it reaches serpent-like deep into the Cream's varied and hypnotic musical journeys.
The band performed at the 1st International Festival of Pop Music at the Palais des Sports, Paris, on 1 June 67, which was filmed for television broadcast and features Cream performing a live version of ‘I Feel Free’. By the time the trio headlined the last day of the 7th National Jazz & Blues Festival in Windsor on 13 August, Clapton had replaced the SG’s Kluson tuners with Grovers. Cream opened their first American tour with a two week run at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco from 22 August to 3 September 1967, where they were met with ecstatic audiences who goaded the group into extended jams which saw their sets frequently run up to two hours, marking a significant shift in the evolution of the band, and of rock music in general, as they began to focus more on free improvisation.
We were told by [promoter] Bill [Graham] that we could play anything we liked, for as long as we liked, even if this meant us playing till dawn, and I think this is where we started openly exploring stuff, revealed Clapton in his 2008 autobiography. Playing in the Fillmore, we soon realized that no one could see us because they were projecting light shows on to the band… it was very liberating. We could just play our hearts out, without inhibition… I’m sure a good deal of [the audience] were out of their heads, half of them maybe, but it didn’t matter. They were listening, and that encouraged us to go to places we’d never been before. We started doing extended solos and were soon playing fewer and fewer songs but for much longer. We’d go off in our own directions, but sometimes we would hit these coincidental points in the music when we would all arrive at the same conclusion, be it a riff or a chord or just an idea, and we would jam on it for a little while and then go back into our own thing. I had never experienced anything like it. It was nothing to do with lyrics or ideas; it was much deeper, something purely musical. We were at our peak during that period. Clapton admits that some of the time he was actually playing on acid, adding I don’t really know how I got through it, because sometimes I didn’t know if my hands were working, what the guitar was that I was playing, or even what it was made of. On one trip it was in my head that I could turn the audience into angels or devils according to which note I played.
Their first American tour lasted seven weeks, culminating in twelve nights at the Café Au Go Go in New York, where Clapton would jam with one of his musical heroes B.B. King in mid-September. The band would spend the next twelve months almost constantly on the road. In between shows the group returned to Atlantic Studios with producer Felix Pappalardi and engineer Tom Dowd to begin work on their third album, recording cover versions of Howlin' Wolf's ‘Sitting on Top of the World’ and Albert King's ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’. While Cream were recording ‘Anyone For Tennis’ at the New York studios in December, Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun invited Clapton to play lead guitar on an Aretha Franklin session for the bluesy ‘Good To Me As I Am To You’ for her Lady Soul album, for which he very likely used the SG. I have to say that playing on that album for Ahmet and Aretha, writes Clapton, with all of those incredible musicians, is still one of the highlights of my life.
In January 1968, Cream were filmed in glorious full color playing a short set at the Revolution Club in Mayfair, planned for broadcast on French television. Featuring exceptional footage of Clapton on the dazzling psychedelic SG, the film was eventually made available on the 1993 VHS release (and later DVD) Fresh Live Cream. By this point, Clapton has removed the Vibrola arm and mechanism, leaving only the bridge and tailpiece. When paint began to flake from the back of the neck, it appears that he had much of that paint permanently removed, leaving a bare wood finish at one time. In early February, Cream spent two days filming in Copenhagen for the Danish movie, Det Var En Lordag Aften (On A Saturday Night), in which they are seen performing ‘World of Pain’ on a flatbed lorry as part of a street parade – with Clapton playing The Fool.
Ten days at Atlantic Studios in mid-February saw the group finish recording the majority of their third album, although several tracks would be completed in June. As the SG was still Clapton’s principal guitar at this time, we can be pretty certain it was once again used heavily on the album, although there was little of the celebrated woman tone this time around. Gregory notes that the closing solo lines on ‘Pressed Rat and Warthog’ resemble some fabulous songbird warbling in the psychedelic twilight; that ‘Politician’ features no fewer than three lead-guitar tracks playing simultaneously; and highlights the euphoric ‘Crossroads’-style solo section on ‘Those Were The Days’ and the long feedbacked guitar notes on ‘White Room’. The emphasis on live improvisation was reflected in the band’s studio work, as Clapton told Chris Welch the previous December: The stuff we’re writing now is really more a series of jumping-off points rather than just songs. Personally, I’ve written a lot of things that have a lot of different sections and I’d like to… improvise freely on each section… I mean, you’ve got to have that bit of room to move about a bit – which is what you do on stage anyway – so why not do it on record? I suppose we could do a double LP! As it turned out, Wheels Of Fire would be a double album, with one disc recorded in the studio and one to be recorded live when the band played The Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom in March.
Cream’s second US tour kicked off at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on 23 February 1968 and would run for four months. Although the set allowed for extended improvisation, the lengthy jams would center on a few key numbers, namely: set opener ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’, classics ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, the new riff-based ‘Politician’, the blues covers ‘Sleepy Time Time’ or ‘Sitting On Top Of The World’, and the rearrangement of Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, ending with a technical showcase for each member on ‘Stepping Out’, ‘Traintime’ and ‘Toad’. Film director Tony Palmer engaged Clapton in an on-camera conversation about his guitar playing before the show at the Winterland on 2 March, during which he demonstrates the controls, wah-wah pedal, and various tonal possibilities on his psychedelic SG and explains his sought-after woman tone. The woman tone is produced by using either the bass pickup, or the lead pickup, but with all the bass off, states Clapton. In fact, if you use both pickups, you should take all the bass off on the Tone control. That is, turn it down to 1 or 0 on the Tone control, and then turn the Volume full up. He goes on to demonstrate some of the stock phrases he works from and observes the advantage of being able to play out his aggressions on the guitar by being aggressive in the way that he plays. At the time, Palmer was collecting footage for his 1968 music documentary All My Loving, however the Clapton interview would ultimately feature in Palmer’s 1969 film of the Cream: Farewell Concert, released on DVD in 2005.
The 7 March show at the Fillmore Auditorium and the six shows over Cream’s three-night residency at the Winterland on 8-10 March 1968 were all officially recorded by Pappalardi and engineer Bill Halverson on a mobile 8-track unit for the band’s forthcoming double album. Highlights would eventually be spread over three official live albums: Wheels Of Fire, Live Cream, and Live Cream Volume II. Edoardo Genzolini’s 2023 book Cream: Clapton, Bruce & Baker Sitting on Top of the World, San Francisco, February-March, 1968, meticulously documents these shows with numerous audience photographs, confirming that Clapton played the SG exclusively throughout the 7-10 March 1968 San Francisco live recordings, including for his legendary guitar solo on Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, recorded at the Winterland on 10 March and released on Wheels Of Fire, which is widely regarded as one of the best live guitar solos of all time and one of the finest live blues performances on record.
Genzolini backed this up in an interview with MusicRadar, explaining: The dozens upon dozens of photos I have discovered unarguably support this information: photos taken by the late Jim Marshall from 10 March clearly show the band playing a venue that’s unquestionably the Fillmore. Also the black and white negatives of Frank M. Stapleton from the Fillmore show display a sequence of songs that’s easily recognizable by Clapton's finger positions on the fretboard, and which match the official setlist of 10 March from the Atlantic Records logs. It undoubtedly is one of the best solos ever conceived for its lyricism, and its recognizable structure building up to a unique climax, and what makes it one of the best is the fact that it was captured live on stage. It was clearly a good night for Cream, and we are lucky that Bill Halverson and Felix Pappalardi were there to record it. Released on 14 June in the US and 9 August in the UK, Wheels Of Fire was an instant blockbuster success, charting at no. 3 in the UK and no. 1 in the US, Canada and Australia, and becoming the world's first platinum-selling double album.
The Fool’s long-running streak as Clapton’s principal guitar ended when he acquired a Gibson Firebird on 13 April and immediately put it into regular stage use. The Fool SG was last seen on stage at the Cream’s show at Anaheim Convention Center on 17 May 1968. By the time the tour came to an end on 18 June, the band had agreed to split up, although it would be kept under wraps until after the release of Wheels Of Fire and they would stage a farewell tour before ultimately calling it a day. Whistle-stop touring was the beginning of the end for Cream, writes Clapton, because once we started constantly working in such an intense way, it became impossible to keep the music afloat, and we began to drown. Clapton remembered the time warmly when speaking to Paul Lester for Classic Rock in 2016: Looking back, the best thing about Cream, for me, was the amount of fun we had, while other people were taking it extremely seriously. And we weren’t! We were really just having the time of our lives, driving around America, playing three songs in two hours. It was crazy! And yet people lapped it up. So we thought, well, they like it, we like it, we don’t know what it is and we don’t care, so let them call it whatever they like.
There has been much speculation about the SG’s post-Clapton history and how the guitar ultimately ended up in the possession of American musician Todd Rundgren. It’s generally accepted that at some point in the summer of 1968, Clapton left the psychedelic SG with good friend George Harrison, who in turn passed the guitar on to Merseybeat guitarist and Apple Records’ artist Jackie Lomax. Both Clapton and Harrison were working with Lomax at the time – Harrison was producing his forthcoming album Is This What You Want? under the Apple Records label, and Clapton was playing lead guitar during the London sessions for many of the album tracks, including Lomax’s 1968 single Sour Milk Sea. However, Apple released a mysterious photograph in the liner notes to the 2010 reissue of Lomax’s debut solo album, dated March 1969, which appears to show Lomax and Harrison in conversation during a recording session, with Clapton in the background playing The Fool. If Apple’s dates are correct and relate to one of the March 1969 Lomax sessions for his 1969 single ‘New Day’ and its B-side ‘Thumbin’ A Ride’, this could indicate that Clapton held onto the psychedelic SG longer than previously thought.
We know Lomax was in possession of The Fool SG by May 1969, when he was featured in publicity photographs with the guitar in that month’s issue of Hit Parader. Lomax still had the guitar in 1971 when he met Todd Rundgren in Woodstock, NY. Short of money, Lomax agreed to hock the guitar to Rundgren in exchange for a $500 loan. At some point in the 1980s, Lomax approached Rundgren with $500 to reclaim the guitar but was refused, as by that point Rundgren had incurred significant expenses in restoring the guitar. When Rundgren had originally received the guitar from Lomax, the wood of the upper neck and headstock had deteriorated, either through simple neglect or exacerbated by the cumulative effects of sweat on the unprotected wood. Wanting a playable instrument, Rundgren arranged for Ralph Legnini to oversee the restoration of the guitar.
Legnini repaired a neck crack and replaced the headstock and a portion of the neck, which was then repainted to approximate the original. Legnini leveled and crowned all the frets, shelled the compartments, repaired the electronics, fabricated a new nut, and replaced the remains of the Vibrola with a stop tailpiece and an incongruous Schaller 'harmonica' bridge. The pickup switch and pots appear to be original, while the control knobs have likely been replaced. Artist Jane Millet matched and restored any damaged paintwork. Michael Aylward then sealed the guitar with a number of clear coats to protect the oil-based enamel paints. No serial number is present on the guitar as it was lost with the original headstock, which is currently in the collection of Perry Margoullef. Todd played the ex-Clapton SG until the mid-'90s. When Clapton auctioned part of his guitar collection in 1999 to benefit his Crossroads charity, he asked Todd to donate the SG. Todd declined at that time due to tax complications, however the following year he sold the guitar in an online auction and gave a percentage of the proceeds to Crossroads. The guitar reappeared at auction in 2023, where it was acquired by Jim Irsay.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
J. Hendrix, ‘Blind Date’, Melody Maker, 10 June 1967.
C. Welch, ‘The Creation of Pure Energy from the Cream’, Melody Maker, 11 November 1967.
C. Welch, Melody Maker, 30 December 1967.
P. Lester, ‘The Many Faces Of Eric Clapton: ‘God’ speaks!, Classic Rock, 10 June 2016. https://classicrockreview.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/the-many-faces-of-eric-clapton-god-speaks-2016/.