Cream was built on a feud. Ginger Baker had once fired Jack Bruce from the Graham Bond Organisation, Bruce kept showing up anyway, and Baker eventually pulled a knife to force him out. So when Eric Clapton agreed to form a trio during a car ride in Baker's Rover in 1966, on the condition that Bruce play bass, Baker nearly crashed the car. This episode explores how three chemically incompatible musicians produced genre-defining music in barely three years while guaranteeing their own destruction.

We trace the early gigs of blues covers, the October 1966 jam where an unknown Jimi Hendrix stunned Clapton, the humiliating New York shows where they were cut to one song per set, and the turnaround of Disraeli Gears and Sunshine of Your Love. The conversation breaks down how jazz improvisation let a three-piece stretch a two-minute blues into a 20 ...