The big drummer boy

Polo player, olive farmer, former heroin addict and self-confessed hard man of rock, Ginger Baker has led an extraordinary life. David Jeffcock met him

NOT EVERY rock drummer has been shot at by members of the Nigerian police, even if many have deserved to be shot at by someone. One who has is Ginger Baker. But then most things have happened at one time or another to Baker, who is now 56, and living in Denver, Colorado. An afternoon in his company can be an unsettling experience. At his ranch, surrounded by his 20 polo ponies and five huge hounds, with a jeroboam-sized jar of pipe tobacco by his side, and bearing, in moments of belligerence, an uncanny resemblance to Albert Steptoe, the self-confessed hard man of rock has lost none of his fire. Or ire. When I arrived he had been playing Scrabble against his computer. Who says they aren't as intelligent as humans? It had the sense to lose.

After five hours on camera, even the Ancient Mariner might be feeling a bit talked out. Not Baker. It's his life and he's telling it his way. Interviewing him for a series called Rock Family Trees, I had naively assumed that rock might form the greater part of our conversation. I was wrong. Polo, tax wrangles, olive-tree husbandry, polo, the iniquities of microwaved tea, visa problems. And polo. All got equal weight. The skilled interviewer can usually steer his quarry away from matters irrelevant to his purpose. It quickly became clear that this was not going to be an option.

Many a musician from the Sixties has his "I Was Threatened By Ginger Baker" story. Here's one I heard several times, a kind of rock urban myth: a band arrives at a package show to find Baker's vast kit already set up, leaving them a tiny piece of stage to play on. A glowering Baker, arms crossed, doesn't even wait for them to ask the question: "I don't move my drums for nobody."

Early in the conversation I make the mistake of using the word "musician" loosely to describe the class of people who play rock music. He stops in mid-pipe refill and fixes me with a stare that would stop Jonah Lomu in his tracks. "I hope you're using the word 'musician' lightly! Because how many musicians are there in rock?"

Pop icons fare no better. The Beatles - "I never was a fan of them people." Elvis Presley - "I thought Elvis Presley was one of the biggest berks that ever lived. And still do."

He has fond memories of the Stones though. In the early days of Blues Incorporated, "Alexis Korner persuaded me and Jack Bruce to give up our break and play with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. So we were playing around with it, going 'Go on Mick, try and sing to this,' hur hur. Brian Jones had to go 'One, two, three, four,' and tell Mick where the beat was." The Stones were popular, Baker thinks, because they were so bad: people liked seeing them trying so hard. It's a point of view.

Not every musician gets slagged off. Just most of them. But he talks with great affection of his mentor, the drummer Phil Seaman, of the late Graham Bond, of Stevie Winwood, of Eric Clapton - "I liked him as a person. And his playing was just very unusual. He had time." To be praised by Ginger Baker is to join an elite club indeed.

His fierce pride in his own ability is not without some substance. He paid his dues in the competitive world of British jazz in the Fifties, hanging round Soho to pick up gigs, playing at Ronnie Scott's and at after- hours all-nighters. His first kit was a toy one, costing three pounds ten. Three weeks later he arrived at an audition for the Storyville Jazzmen pretending that his real one was being mended. He passed.

In those uncomplicated days he often travelled to a gig by bus, kit and all. He couldn't have done that 10 years later. Shortly after he started playing, aged 17, he handed in his notice to the sceptical boss of the graphic-design studio where he worked: "I'm going to be a professional musician, man." This was in 1956. The week before he'd earned pounds 12 gigging around the jazz circuit. The week he went professional, he earned 10 shillings. His rent, by a pleasing piece of arithmetic, was 10 shillings too.

He played with some of the top British jazz bands of the day, including top trad jazzer Terry Lightfoot. "It was like stardom, you know. Sixteen quid a week - huge money then." Ginger Baker can tell you exactly how much he got paid for every gig of his career.

Lightfoot eventually chucked him out for trying to pull Max Roach bebop stunts on the bass drum. And by 1962, along with a like-minded corps of renegade jazzers that included Dick Heckstall-Smith, Graham Bond and Manfred Mann, Baker had switched to R&B.

Success in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated and the Graham Bond Organization followed. Bond started to introduce him as "the best drummer in Europe". That must have annoyed him. And it was here that his legendary love-hate relationship with bassist Jack Bruce began in earnest. Eventually Baker, who had taken over the band from the increasingly heroin-ridden Bond, fired Bruce, having already disposed of John "Mahavishnu" McLaughlin in a less than mystical manner.

Despite the claims of conspiracy buffs, who like to suggest that Bruce's exit from the Graham Bond Organization was stage-managed to facilitate the formation of Cream, Baker was not pleased when Eric Clapton, whom he had "invited to join my band", suggested Bruce. Baker wasn't keen, but eventually relented. "I suppose Jack's ... all right" was his less than rave encomium.

They weren't short of confidence. There was the name, for one thing. "We came over to the States and said, we'll show these Yanks. Any band that tried to play with us we used to go, OK, cop this, bang, and just blow them away."

But despite the group's rapid rise, the Cream was curdled from the beginning as far as Baker was concerned. He never forgot that it was supposed to be his band. When Bruce and Clapton made it clear that it had to be a co-operative, he tried to insist that the lucrative song-writing credits should be co-operative as well. After all, his rhythmic contribution was as important to the finished product as the chord changes or the lyrics. But the Tin Pan Alley tradition of "Words and Music By" prevailed.

Launched onto the classic rock'n'roll treadmill, there was very little time for Cream to write. In any case, Clapton at this stage wasn't into his stride as a songwriter. But Jack Bruce (who once wrote the music for an entire album in an afternoon) and his writing partner, poet Pete Brown, were. Without them, Clapton says, Cream would have been sunk.

If Bruce was the leader in the studio, Clapton was the leader on stage, his charisma and status as a rock god already established. Arguments between Bruce and Baker carried on from where they'd left off in the Graham Bond Organization, Baker accusing Bruce of being too loud, or too busy, or both. Certainly the distorted sound of the early Marshall stacks has left both with ear problems. Baker now refuses to play, or even listen to loud music.

It may be going too far to say that beneath Baker's tough exterior beats a heart of gold - Dick Heckstall-Smith describes him as a black-hearted villain, and he's a friend - but there certainly beats a sensitive and vulnerable one. Jack Bruce's confidence and prolific ability at turning out songs intimidated Baker, and he lost confidence in his own writing abilities. Not many people have intimidated Ginger Baker.

Cream folded with some relief in November 1968. Bored with heavy rock, Clapton decided to form a group with Stevie Winwood of Traffic. Clapton thought that the addition of keyboards would provide more harmonic possibilities. Just as he had managed to foist Jack Bruce onto a reluctant Baker, so Winwood, a great admirer, now managed to force Baker onto Clapton.

Overhyped, and with no Jack Bruce to come up with material in short order, Blind Faith soon deteriorated into the highest-paid covers band in the world, trotting out blues, Cream and Traffic standards. To Baker's dismay, Clapton folded Blind Faith and formed Derek & the Dominoes. Baker was hurt by Clapton's desertion. "I didn't understand it. Now I do. I can be pretty aggressive at times, I suppose. I think Eric just wanted to get away from me."

Cream was the high point for Baker. After the band's demise he formed Ginger Baker's Airforce, which remained stubbornly earthbound. It wasn't a felicitous period, either musically or personally, and his behaviour became increasingly self-destructive. Things, as he put it, "went awfully awry".

He needed to get away, and embarked on a spiritually rewarding but financially disastrous odyssey in Africa. Still flush with cash from Cream, Baker sank it into a recording studio in Nigeria. But the venture failed, and with it went a large slice of Baker's wad. Worse was to come, as connections in the volatile Nigerian government went bad, accusations of rip-off flew back and forth, and Baker found himself looking down the wrong end of a Nigerian police pistol.

Marriage breakdown and a Strange Interlude as an olive-tree farmer in Tuscany followed, but fate was yet again shaping up to play a bum note. A severe storm wiped out most of his trees, and The Greatest Rock Drummer In The World found himself working as a day labourer on a Tuscan building site. Unspecified trouble with the local mafia led to Baker's departure from Italy.

He couldn't return to Britain, however. His estranged wife at this period was chucking all his mail on the fire, and amongst it was a speculative tax demand for around pounds 80,000 - considerably more than he'd earned in the period. Had he appealed - it was an estimate - it would no doubt have been reduced. Because he didn't, it was legally enforced. But by this point Baker was broke anyway.

For two years he hadn't touched a drum kit. Then, a call from producer Bill Laswell led to Baker's return to music. He returned trepidatiously, because one of the reasons for going to Africa, and then Italy, was to kick a 20-year heroin addiction. The prospect of going back to LA - "the drug capital of the world" - was a daunting one.

He had first used heroin at the end of the Fifties. Dicky Devere, a notorious junkie drummer, "laid some on me. I did a gig that night and at the end of the gig, the band said, man, you played so well tonight it was amazing. And I thought that I'd found the answer."

By the mid-Sixties the solution had become the problem. He "saw the light" and was trying to get straight, but that wasn't easy when his reputation as the rock junkie nonpareil - before he handed the mantle to Keith Richards - went before him. "I'd bump into someone who was a fan and a smack dealer and they'd give it to me for nothing." It was the ultimate endorsement, like getting Zsa Zsa Gabor to wear your frocks.

With few other options, he went to LA. After another Strange Interlude working as an actor, he settled down to work he enjoyed with John Lydon's PiL, Jonas Hellborg and The Masters of Reality. And he survived, dope free. But not problem free. Thanks to two drug busts in the early Seventies, he is denied a residency visa in the US, despite having an American wife.

But Baker wouldn't know where he was if life was easy. "I'm just one of these people that things happen to. It's a miracle I'm still here." He looks to his wife. She nods, with feeling.

He still plays, though a recent stint with Jack Bruce and Gary Moore in BBM ended in tears. A return to jazz, with Bill Frizell and Charlie Haden, has restored him to the faith. He no longer faces the barriers he thought he needed drugs to overcome. The only barriers are arthritis and stiff joints.

He now divides his time between local jazz groups in Denver and his Magnificent Obsession - polo. You do have to be mad to play it, but it doesn't help. He is presently engaged in the modest ambition of changing the rules of the game in America.

Having got straight, he has gained a measure of self-knowledge. He was, in his junk days, "not terribly pleasant". A lot of his problems were down to his own "crazy behaviour". But there are deeper reasons: "If you come from a poor background, and suddenly get to a situation where rightly or wrongly you achieve millionaire status, a lot of things can go wrong." Lottery winners are finding out the truth of that.

But they can go right, too. If his bike hadn't come off worse after a collision with a taxi in the mid-Fifties, he'd probably have been a racing cyclist. Living the quiet life in New Eltham. Drinking tea. Polishing the bike. Listening to The Archers. Not easy to imagine.

! Ginger Baker is featured in 'Rock Family Trees - The British R&B Boom', directed by David Jeffcock, on Sat 29 July at 9 pm on BBC2.