"White Room" is a song by British rock band Cream, composed by bassist Jack Bruce with lyrics by poet Pete Brown.[2] They recorded it for the studio half of the 1968 double albumWheels of Fire. In September, a shorter US single edit (without the third verse) was released for AM radio stations,[3] although album-orientedFM radio stations played the full album version. The subsequent UK single release in January 1969 used the full-length album version of the track.
Recording and composition
Jack Bruce came up with music for the song as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, and was later surprised when Hendrix visited the group in New York as they were recording it and commented "I wish I could write something like that", only to be told it had been directly inspired by him.[4] Lyricist Pete Brown's original idea for the song revolved around a hippie girl titled "Cinderella's Last Goodnight", but when that didn't work, he dipped into an earlier eight page poem he had written about a new apartment he had moved into with white walls and bare furnishings, where he gave up drinking and drugs.[4] The personal demons he battled while living in the white room spawned the imagery of the poem, which was eventually whittled down to a few verses for the song lyric.
In July 1967, at the initial sessions for Cream's third album (then still unnamed), recording for "White Room" began in London. In October and December work continued at Atlantic Studios in New York City and was completed during three sessions in February, April and June 1968, also at Atlantic.[5][6]
Jack Bruce sang and played bass on the song, Eric Clapton overdubbed guitar parts, Ginger Baker played drums and timpani, and Felix Pappalardi – the group's producer – contributed violas.[7] Clapton played his guitar through a wah-wah pedal to achieve a "talking-effect".[8] The song has an identical chord progression to Cream's previous recording "Tales of Brave Ulysses".[9] Both Bruce and Baker claimed to have added the distinctive 5 4 or quintuple metre opening to what had been a 4 4 or common time composition.[10] Bruce later revealed that the 5 4 opening had made the record company wary that it would do well commercially.[4]
In a song review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that the song has been "covered frequently, and by a bizarre group of artists: Broadway star Joel Grey, the Finnish symphonic metal band Apocalyptica, fusion guitarist Frank Gambale, the Bluegrass-inspired Cache Valley Drifters, and heavy metal band Helloween. That wildly eclectic list proves that 'White Room' is a multi-faceted song, containing equal parts dramatic spectacle, intricate musicality, and hard rock menace. Other artists emphasize different elements in their interpretations, but the original Cream version wrapped it all up in one startling package".[1]
Billboard described the single as a "solid, driving rocker".[11]
^Bacon, Tony (1990). "Guitar Madness". The Marshall Cavendish Illustrated History of Popular Music. Vol. 11 (Reference ed.). Marshall Cavendish. p. 1079. ISBN978-1-8543-5015-2.
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