For Jack Bruce, the wonder is that he made it. Really, that any of his former bandmates in Cream did. “Especially,” he says in the new issue of Classic Rock, “the way we carried on. We all had our demons, if I can put it that way — yet, here we all are, so many years later.”
Asked what advice he would give his younger self, Bruce says: Stay away from drugs. And, hire a good attorney. These days, the resurgent bass-playing legend credits wife Margrit with helping him to finally sort out his tangled financial past. “It took many, many years,” Bruce says, “for me to get just some of my bread back.”
Much was wasted, of course, on rock-star distractions. But Bruce has found himself a country home, and now stays busy — when he’s not putting out new music — puttering around as an apprentice farmer. “Doesn’t sound very rock ‘n’ roll,” he muses, “but I’ve done all that.”
And Bruce, who has issued a pair of terrific recent albums in 2012’s Spectrum Road and 2014’s Silver Rails, has the battle scars to prove it. “I had a liver transplant about 10 years ago,” the heroin survivor adds, “and a lot of the damage that necessitated the operation was down to the methadone I took to treat my addiction.”
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