Pete Brown, a British Beat poet who wrote the lyrics to songs by the rock supergroup Cream, together with the hits “White Room,” “I Feel Free” and “Sunshine of Your Love,” and who after the band’s breakup collaborated for practically 5 many years with Jack Bruce, its lead vocalist and bassist, died on Friday at his dwelling in Hastings, on the southeast coast of England. He was 82.
His supervisor, Peter Conway, stated the trigger was most cancers.
Mr. Brown entered Cream’s circle on the request of Ginger Baker, the band’s drummer. They knew one another as a result of Mr. Brown carried out his poetry backed by jazz musicians and Mr. Baker had gotten his begin in jazz combos; Mr. Baker requested Mr. Brown for assistance on the lyrics to the group’s debut single, “Wrapping Paper,” which preceded the discharge of “Fresh Cream,” its first album, in 1966.
Mr. Brown shortly found a career-long writing accomplice in Mr. Bruce, whose fluid and propulsive enjoying offered counterpoint to Mr. Baker’s explosive drumming and the guitar pyrotechnics of Cream’s third member, Eric Clapton.
In a brief documentary concerning the making of “White Room” seen on Dutch tv in 2018, Mr. Brown recalled, “It became evident that Jack and I had a chemistry, and when we wrote ‘I Feel Free,’ which was a big hit, so everyone went, ‘OK, that’s a team, let it roll.’”
Mr. Brown didn’t present the lyrics to all of Cream’s songs, however he was the group’s primarily lyricist. On its second album, “Disraeli Gears” (1967), he wrote the phrases to “Sunshine of Your Love,” a collaboration with Mr. Bruce and Mr. Clapton, in addition to “Dance the Night Away” and two different songs.
“White Room,” considered one of 4 songs he wrote with Mr. Bruce on the band’s third album, “Wheels of Fire” (1968), rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. It was the second-highest rating a Cream single achieved; “Sunshine” had peaked at No. 5 earlier that yr.
“White Room” started as a poem Mr. Brown wrote, impressed by his keep some years earlier in an precise white room, in an condo.
“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 advised the tradition web site Please Kill Me in 2022. In the Dutch documentary he added that he had stopped ingesting and taking medication within the room and determined to be a “songwriter rather than an itinerant poet.”
“White Room,” begins with these strains:
In the white room with black curtains close to the station
Black roof nation, no gold pavements, drained starlings
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your darkish eyes
Dawn gentle smiles on you leaving, my contentment
I’ll wait on this place the place the solar by no means shines
Wait on this place the place the shadows run from themselves
Peter Ronald Brown was born on Dec. 25, 1940, in Surrey, England, with World War II underway. His mother and father had moved there after fleeing London throughout the Blitz. His father, Nathan Brown, whose beginning identify was Nathan Leibowitz, and his mom, Kitty Cohen, offered footwear.
Peter began writing poems as a youngster, fired up by the works of Dylan Thomas, Federico García Lorca and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But he detoured, at the very least quickly, to journalism, which he studied for 9 months in 1958 on the Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) in London.
He returned to verse and revealed his first poem in 1961 in Evergreen Review, the boundary-breaking literary journal primarily based within the United States that crammed its pages with work by luminaries like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.
In one early poem, “Few,” composed underneath the concern of nuclear struggle, Mr. Brown wrote:
Alone and half drunk hopeful
I staggered into the bogs
at Green Park station
and located 30 written on the wall.
Appalled I lurched out
Into the windy blaring Piccadilly evening
pondering absolutely,
Surely, there should be extra of us than that.
Over the following few years, he was a working poet. He was a part of the First Real Poetry Band, which included the guitarist John McLaughlin, and he had a jazz poetry residency on the Marquee Club in London.
In 1965, he and greater than a dozen different poets from around the globe, together with Mr. Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael Horovitz and Andrei Voznesensky, learn their work on the International Poetry Incarnation, which crammed Royal Albert Hall in London. On its web site, the venue recalled the occasion as one “where beatniks met the emerging hippie culture.”
The name for assist from Mr. Baker jump-started an extended songwriting profession, first with Cream after which, when Cream break up up after two years, with Mr. Bruce on his solo work. He wrote the lyrics to songs on practically all of Mr. Bruce’s albums, from “Songs for a Tailor” (1969) to “Silver Rails” (2014). One of their collaborations, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” grew to become a staple within the repertoire of the band Mountain.
“I was in awe of Jack,” Mr. Brown advised The Guardian in an interview final month. But, he stated, “Sometimes we had to have a rest from each other — two very big personalities in the same room sometimes wasn’t good, plus his addictions got in the way.”
Mr. Brown discovered his personal voice, as a singer, within the decade after Cream broke up. He carried out with the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments, Piblokoto!, Back to the Front, Flying Tigers and Bond & Brown, which he fashioned with the British rock and blues musician Graham Bond. He additionally started an extended songwriting collaboration within the early Eighties with the keyboardist Phil Ryan, a former member of Piblokto!, that produced a number of albums by way of 2013.
He additionally helped write a lot of the songs on “Novum” (2017), Procol Harum’s final studio album. (He changed Keith Reid, Procol Harum’s longtime lyricist, who died this yr.)
Mr. Brown’s autobiography, “White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns: On the Road With Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream — An Anarchic Odyssey” (2010), is being tailored as a documentary by the director Mark Aj Waters however has not but been completed. Mr. Brown had lately been engaged on an album, “Shadow Club”; considered one of his collaborators was Mr. Bruce’s son Malcolm, an electrical bassist like his father. (Jack Bruce died in 2014.)
“We’ve naturally gravitated to each other,” Mr. Brown advised The Guardian, including that he was planning to put in writing songs with Malcolm Bruce for his subsequent album “as long as I can stay alive for a reasonable amount of time.”
Mr. Brown is survived by his spouse, Sheridan MacDonald; his daughter, Jessica Walker; his son, Tad MacDonald; and a grandson.
Even after he started singing, Mr. Brown stated, his admiration for Mr. Bruce initially led him to keep away from singing the Cream songs he had helped write.
“You know, ‘I’m not good enough,’” he advised Dutch tv. “Then I suddenly thought, ‘OK, I wrote those songs as well,’ and I thought, ‘It’s kind of about time I started singing some of these songs.’”
