“Mitch, this is Ginger Baker.” It’s April 7, 1987 and we are at the Cafe Central in Cologne, West Germany. I am on the road with Ronald Shannon Jackson and that was Shannon who just introduced me to Ginger. We got in late last night— 20 hours in a van from Turku, Finland— and there was mayhem in this hotel bar/restaurant when we arrived. But now it’s a cool spring morning and everyone is enjoying a proper German breakfast with plenty of black coffee.
Ronald Shannon Jackson and Ginger Baker: two explosive drummers, game-changing innovators, coming from different worlds and yet huge overlaps as musicians and as bandleaders, both known for owning the room— whatever the size— with a double kick-drum attack. They were born within a few months of each other but an ocean apart, literally and figuratively. Ginger, of course, the first and perhaps the greatest Rok Star drummer of all time. Shannon’s is not a household name but in the world that means the most to Ginger, Shannon’s bona fides are unassailable and Ginger knows it. There is an underlying mutual respect between two men who have always forged their own paths, whatever the cost. That cost, for each of them, has been exorbitant at times.
I’m a huge fan of Ginger’s. I wore out every Cream LP when I was in college, as I did every record I could find that Shannon was on. But where the hell has Ginger been for the last bunch of years? As a radio DJ and as a diehard music fan, I see every new record that comes out and I am out listening to music most nights and I haven’t heard Ginger’s name or seen it in print for… 10 years? Well, in any case, if you’re a fan of powerhouse drumming and it’s capacity to change the world as I am, this is the only table in the world to be sitting at.
Here at the Cafe Central, Shannon seems to take the room’s temperature before he decides if he has something to share. Ginger, on the other hand, is voluble, protean. I start to wonder if this guy always talks this way or maybe he just spends a lot of time by himself and he’s not used to being around people. Whatever the case, I find him to be thoughtful and absolutely forthright. There’s no question that whatever he is saying is exactly what he thinks. We don’t talk about drums or music; we talk about living in this world. Ginger is horrified by the AIDS crisis, the notion that people expressing themselves sexually is now punishable by death; it’s equally appalling to him that the global community does not seem to be responding. He has plenty to say about a lot of things.
The fourth seat at the square table is now taken by (where are my drummers?! JT Lewis, Ben Perowsky, Greg Burrows, Don McKenzie, Will Calhoun, Narada Michael Walden) Alphonse Mouzon, another percussion phenom of enormous magnitude (this is starting to feel like a magazine cover come to life). Mouzon was up late last night watching the Hagler-Leonard fight from Vegas (“Are you kidding me? That was on the hotel cable? I was dying to watch that fight!” Mouzon is just the guy to have been where you wanted to be, doing what you wanted to be doing, and then tell you about it over breakfast. You gotta give it to him).
The conversation at the table has changed and we need to start heading over to the Stadtgarten for sound check. See you guys later.
In the van I ask Shannon what the hell Ginger has been up to and he tells me that he’s been living on an olive orchard in Tuscany, that his bottomless pools of energy get poured into olive farming rather than music. But Shannon thinks he thinks he might be ready to rejoin the world.