Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Jack Bruce's 1974 album, Out of the Storm.

IT was February 1977 and the great bass guitarist, Jack Bruce, was talking to journalists and looking back at his eventful recent career.

Bruce had been the bassist and singer in the hugely influential trio Cream, playing alongside guitarist Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker. When they broke up in 1968, after some 35 million album sales, Bruce’s restless musical spirit saw him join the great jazz-rock outfit, Tony Williams’ Lifetime, where his dazzling talents were paired with those of Williams on drums, the organist Larry Young, and the guitarist John McLaughlin.

Bruce went on to make two records as part of the blues-rock power trio, West, Bruce & Laing and, starting in 1969, he had released a succession of studio albums under his own name: Songs for a Tailor (which reached number six on the UK charts), Things We Like, Harmony Row, and Out of the Storm. When he spoke to Barbara Charone for the music weekly, Sounds, in 1977, the latest album – How’s Tricks – was about to be released.

The Seventies had been a fertile time for Bruce, creatively speaking, and he had worked with a succession of musicians. His most recent group had included the former Rolling Stones guitarist, Mick Taylor. Live, they were formidable, but there had been tensions between Bruce and Taylor, and the break-up of that particular line-up had been “soul-destroying” for the Scot.

Read more about Jack Bruce

Bruce had also been struggling to escape from under the shadow of Cream, despite his own, firmly-stated belief that everything he had released since his time with Clapton and Baker had represented a step forward.

“It’s been difficult to live with,” Bruce admitted to Charone. “Cream was only one of the many bands I’ve been with. Other things have been more important, like Lifetime. Even though it was short-lived that band was like going to school. People tend to dismiss these things because they weren’t tremendous commercial success. There’s a tendency with me to do things that might be a little bit ahead of the time. But that’s past. Not anymore. People had too many memories before. This is a new beginning. Again”.

Of the latest incarnation of the group he noted: “We cover the whole spectrum, from adolescence to senility. There’s no wheelchairs yet! But I’m going for a face lift,” he quipped. “No, I’m proud of all my battle scars. I carry them like a banner”.

Of his solo albums recorded in the Seventies, Out of the Storm, which was released in 1974, remains many people’s favourite. “Overwhelmingly intense, the record was filled with volcanic proportions of anguish, frustration and despair”, is how Charone describes it.

“I’ve always been unsuccessfully looking for a band”, Bruce told her. “Some of my material isn’t the easiest to play. It’s all very personal to me. I think I did scare some people when we recorded Out Of The Storm. I was so energetically intense Jim Gordon dropped his drum sticks.”

In an earlier profile of Bruce, in March 1975, Charone described Out of the Storm as signalling an end to difficult moments, many of them caused by drugs, and as a return to the sophisticated rocking exhibited on Songs for a Tailor. It was also, she wrote, a work rife with images of the artist as a recluse. “It has been a bad period for me,” Bruce told her then, “and I’m glad it’s over. The past year has been rather strange and long, and the record, well, it had to be done. Finishing the album was like a giant sigh of relief. It was a hard record to make for purely physical reasons.”

Out of the Storm was recorded in LA and San Francisco. Alongside Bruce were the in-demand session drummer Gordon (who shared the drumming duties with another, Jim Keltner) and the guitarist, Steve Hunter. The engineer and co-producer was Andy Johns, who had worked on the Rolling Stones albums, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street and on three Led Zeppelin albums.

A key figure in all of this, however, was Pete Brown. The poet, lyricist and counterculture figure had first worked with Bruce when he was in Cream, the duo co-writing such classics as Politician, I Feel Free, Deserted Cities of the Heart, White Room, and (with Clapton) Sunshine of Your Love. The Bruce-Brown partnership had successfully continued on Bruce’s solo albums.

Read more On The Record

Brown flew out to the West Coast on what was his first trip to America in order to work on the new album. “It would be”, he writes in his memoirs, White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns, “a very long haul”.

“During the process of writing the songs (some of which were not yet complete), Jack and I had become a lot closer, although his heroin addiction was causing him some self-doubt, and causing me some apprehension”.

He recalled that Bruce and others involved in the recording took angel dust at one point, while the moving party that capped the recording sessions were often destructive.

Brown believed he had helped a lot with the record and even with the production, “and was constantly on hand to change lyrics”, but he began to feel uncomfortable, especially as the budget was spinning out of control. He left after three weeks, bound for New York: “Nobody”, he writes, “seemed that bothered”.

The album, however, was released to enthusiastic reviews. Writing in Rolling Stone magazine, Loyd Grossman said: “Bruce is one of the great rock vocalists and as a musician and writer he is expressive, melodic and inventive without often being self-indulgent. His music sometimes has a drifting, dreaming quality – it can drift too much at times – and at other times tends toward the heavy side. But with the attractively crazy lyrics of Pete Brown, Bruce records some of the most distinctive and refreshing music around these days".

Grossman noted that although a singer and musician of brilliance, Bruce was consistently overshadowed in Cream by the rather more charismatic Clapton and the altogether more bizarre personality of Ginger Baker.

Cream posed at Fleet Studios in London in 1966. Left to right: drummer Ginger Baker, guitarist Eric Clapton and bassist Jack BruceCream posed at Fleet Studios in London in 1966. Left to right: drummer Ginger Baker, guitarist Eric Clapton and bassist Jack Bruce (Image: Mark and Colleen Hayward)

"His subsequent solo recording career failed to attract much attention and the musically ill-fated West, Bruce and Laing can hardly have helped to increase Jack's stature on the music scene. But all seems to be well again as Bruce's newest album shows him to have emerged unscathed from the Sturm und Drang of the last few years. Bruce's first album, Songs for a Tailor, was so outstanding that his other albums almost always suffer by comparison. But his records have all been excellent and Out of the Storm continues that tradition".

Looking at the album from the vantage-point of nearly half-a-century later, music journalist Sid Smith made the point that Out of the Storm bears the hallmark of Bruce’s unerring ear for bold, serene melodies underpinned by his rhapsodic flurries on bass guitar and keyboards.

In his liner notes for last year's Bruce boxset, Smiles & Grins: Broadcast Sessions 1970-2001, Smith went on: “An adventurous composer, he’s unafraid to employ intriguing chord sequences that sometimes trail off into unconventional territories in an almost off-hand, absent-minded way, as though he’s forgotten he’s supposed to be a ‘rock star’ belting out the crowd-pleaser”.

He praised the “mature harmonic sophistication" of tracks such as the "eerie Satie-esque beauty” of Running Through Our Hands, Golden Days, and the "luscious major-minor shifts of One that could easily be three distinct songs packed into one". On paper, he continued, Pete Brown's lyrics were terse jump-cuts juggling times past, giddy optimism, and wry people-watching episodes. "Filtered through Bruce's fervent voice they're transformed into expansive elegies, torrents of confessional indiscretion, and fierce arguments between tawdry experience and chaste naïveté".

The album was originally due to be called Into the Storm, after one of its tracks, but Smith writes that both Bruce and Brown amended the title to Out of the Storm: after emerging from a blizzard of drugs, relentless partying, and in-studio acrimony with Andy Johns, they felt that 'Out of the Storm' "offered a better description of them having survived something potentially ruinous and destructive. In this context alone", Smith concludes, "the fact that the album is as intelligent and as nuanced as it is represents borders on the miraculous".

Pete Brown himself furnishes an interesting postscript. The album still needed to be finished but Bruce wanted to escape for a while. His solution was too try out his newly-acquired 30ft motor cruiser, which was moored near Greenock. The two men arrived at Brodick, though they missed the harbour and had to anchor in the bay.

Read more On the Record

They went ashore in the dinghy but unwisely decided to return to the boat in a storm.

"On the way there in a growing swell, the dinghy capsized", Brown writes. "Jack, who couldn't swim at the time, clung to the top of it while I swam to the cruiser. Unfortunately there was no ladder at the back and I couldn't get on to it. I found myself hanging from a rope with my hands slowly going numb in the cold water, shouting to Jack to hold on.

"Luckily, people either saw our predicament or heard us shouting, and we were picked up quite quickly. We stayed the night at a local hotel, exhausted from our dice with death".

Two "old salts" helped them back onto the cruiser in the morning and they made it back to Greenock.

The album was re-named, says Brown, "to reflect our more upbeat mood after surviving". Eventually, it was completed to their satisfaction. "It had nearly done for both of us", writes Brown, "and I'm not sure that it was worth that kind of risk, but it's a beautiful record nonetheless".

  • jack bruce.com