By Troy Pozirekides

The late Jack Bruce — coequal with Eric Clapton at the helm of the supergroup Cream.

For four years I worked as an usher at the Hollywood Bowl. In my final year, during the last night of the Playboy Jazz Festival, a four piece act called Spectrum Road took the stage. The crowd by now had sunken in their seats, gorged on a diet of relatively unchallenging music. Suddenly, things changed. This band, in short, disrupted. Odd meters, dissonance, frenzied solos. Loud on a level unheard over the entire weekend. The crowd began to file out. I was standing by a staircase on the third promenade, waiting for my shift to end, tired from two days largely spent dealing with drunks. But this band gripped me. An old guy stood off to the side: gray hair, trenchcoat. He was playing the shit out of a beat-up fretless bass.

They were infelicitously scheduled as the closing act, and were by now emptying an 18,000 seat amphitheatre at an alarming rate. But they played on. Louder. Faster. Cruising toward weirder tempos, harsher harmonies. Eventually the first song ended, or maybe it didn’t: this group shirked resolution as much as the departing crowd denied them applause. But at some point the bass player stepped up to the mike at the center of the stage, and the group’s jangling, frantic rhythm settled into an eerily familiar 4/4 lurch. He sang:

Hey now baby, get into my big black car.

It became clear in an instant who I was watching, or rather, witnessing. Jack Bruce, thundering dynamo of the bass guitar, singer of unmatched power and clarity, coequal with Clapton at the helm of the supergroup Cream. And playing one of their greatest songs, no less. I pushed through the crowd, abandoning my post entirely, and ran toward the stage.

Hey now baby, get into my big black car.

I stared up at him from the back of the pit. A smile stretched across my face, unbroken. Wholly enveloped in sonic bliss, head bobbing to the song’s strong pulse. How many times had I played along to this song, hunched over a guitar on the edge of my bed? How many times had I delighted in the winking turn of the verse, even when I was too young to grasp the innuendo?

I want to just show you what my politics are.

In my years working at the Bowl I got to see countless big-name acts, even Clapton himself. But this memory has held steady in my mind, the fondest, the most powerful. The closest I will ever come to seeing Cream was how I thought of it, since I was unable to attend their abortive efforts at a reunion tour. Now Jack Bruce is dead, and I have to accept the thought’s solidifying into cold fact. But I will always have that memory, and we will always have the music: from his own impressive oeuvre, in the works of those he’s already influenced, and in the hearts of countless players still to come.

Troy Pozirekides is a freelance writer and critic. He divides his time between Boston and Los Angeles, and his writerly pursuits between literary fiction and screenplays. He is also a musician, playing trumpet and guitar. Follow him on Twitter at @tpozirekides.