Never heard of him?
Don’t worry, you’ve heard him, nevertheless.
Unless you’ve managed to go your entire life without listening to Cream, and if you’ve never heard “Sunshine of Your Love,” and “White Room,” let’s just say it’s debatable that you’re even alive.
In addition to being the prime lyricist for the short-lived supergroup Cream, he had a long and interesting career (in and outside the music biz) and his obit from the New York Times is well worth reading.
Of course, when all’s said and done, for this music fan and critic, his finest moment is also Cream’s finest moment: the imperishable “White Room,” which –while there are other serious contenders for #2– is the ideal distillation of this insanely talented band’s music and ability to create a decidedly psychedelic mood, with words (and vocals, always, courtesy of the ever-underrated Jack Bruce. More about him here, more about his running mate and on-again/off-again (mostly on) nemesis Ginger Baker here, and my take on Cream’s top 10 seminal tracks here). It’s not like poetry; it is poetry, and it’s (eight) miles high, standing above what just about every other band was doing, lyrically, circa 1968.
From that list, here’s my 2014 assessment of “White Room”:
Perhaps the ultimate commentary on this remarkable song as that, overplayed as much as it has been over the years, it still manages to defy becoming stale. In fact, it still manages to confound expectations and is capable of the thrill of surprise. Or the simple shock of recognition: this is what it sounds like when some of the best musical minds of their time are clicking on all cylinders. Boasting career-best work by all involved, “White Room” cemented the post-Sgt. Pepper proposition that rock music could be art; rock music could matter. Clapton is on-point, using his wah-wah more ingeniously than anyone not named Hendrix, Baker offers “Bolero” drum rolls, and Bruce, in addition to his typically supple bass playing, turns in what may be his ultimate vocal performance. Making the most of principal lyricist Pete Brown’s surreal poetics, “White Room” is a decidedly darker slice of psychedelia (see: “Where the shadows run from themselves”). It squeezes the last drops of Summer of Love whimsy and pours it into a simmering cocktail of bad trips, wrecked dreams, and fear. It is intense and unremitting; it sums up happier and/or headier times and peeks, presciently, at the disillusion waiting around the corner. And, in spite of how heavy it is, the prevailing vibe is one of resilience, not despair. “White Room” compresses the sounds, colors and feelings of an era and manages to make it all into something beautiful.
Indeed, taken as a trio of songs recorded in the late autumn of ’67, “White Room,” (along with “The Red Telephone” from Love’s Forever Changes, and “Jugband Blues” from Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets) could and perhaps should have been an art-sponsored PSA for the dangers lurking post-Summer of Love, once the real and for many –including Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett– permanent effects of reckless acid indulgence began to manifest. (More on how Forever Changes is practically a treatise on this dark hangover, here, and more thoughts on Syd Barrett’s music and legacy here.)
From the obit:
“White Room” began as a poem Mr. Brown wrote, inspired by his stay some years earlier in an actual white room, in an apartment.
“I had been semi-destitute, a semi-bum, living on people’s floors, and eventually I began to earn some money from songwriting, and the white room was the first place I moved into,” he told the culture website Please Kill Me in 2022. In the Dutch documentary he added that he had stopped drinking and taking drugs in the room and decided to be a “songwriter rather than an itinerant poet.”
“White Room,” begins with these lines:
In the white room with black curtains near the station
Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.
There are a lot of better-known and more-celebrated poets who can’t claim writing words as haunting and enduring as that. Peter Brown left us with a lot to enjoy and think about, and he’s earned his rest.
