Jay Bulger
The Cream drummer Ginger Baker in his South African home in 2010, part of the film “Beware of Mr. Baker.”
By FRANZ LIDZ
Published: November 22, 2012
Ginger Baker documentary, "Beware of Mr. Baker" SXSW Preview from Jay Bulger on Vimeo.
AT the impetuous age of 16, Jay Bulger learned the hard way that chutzpah has its limits. In short order this future filmmaker got a driver’s license, a Volkswagen Corrado and, with Tupac Shakur’s “Me Against the World“ cranking full blast, took a joy ride on the streets of Washington.
The joy ended when the police clocked him at more than 100 miles an hour and the arresting officer held a pistol to his head. Though a model of contrition in court, Mr. Bulger was sentenced to 500 hours of community service at the National Zoo, where every Saturday at dawn he and an elderly zookeeper shoveled exotic-animal dung.
On a recent afternoon near his Tompkins Square apartment in Manhattan, Mr. Bulger recalled the elephant house with a twinkle of mischief in his blue-gray eyes. “The job seems like it would have been a cakewalk,” he said. “But elephant piles don’t smell like any cake I’ve ever walked by.”
In the 15 years since, Mr. Bulger has been a Golden Gloves boxer, a fashion model, a demolition worker and, under the name Dr. Mindbender, a music video director. Along the way he’s learned to talk his way out of scrapes nearly as fast as he gets into them.
“I’m pathologically optimistic,” said Mr. Bulger (pronounced BULJ-er), a tall, rakish fellow with a flop of brown hair and a Borsalino set at a jaunty angle. “I convince myself that things are happening even when they’re not because then I have to make my lie come true.”
Mr. Bulger’s latest true lie is “Beware of Mr. Baker,” the movie he made about the drummer Ginger Baker, a rock demigod, by inveigling his way into his home and the pages of Rolling Stone. Winner of the grand jury award for best documentary feature at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, “Beware” begins a two-week run at Film Forum on Wednesday before SnagFilms takes it to select theaters around the country on Jan. 25.
Once voted the rock star least likely to survive the ’60s, the 73-year-old Mr. Baker is best known as the wildly beating heart of Cream, the blues-based power trio that fused hard rock, psychedelia and free-jazz drumming. The band was so named because Mr. Baker, the guitarist Eric Clapton and the bassist Jack Bruce considered themselves the cream of Britain’s rock elite.
Despite, or perhaps because of, a string of hits (“White Room,” “Crossroads,” “Sunshine of Your Love”) Cream quickly curdled, and, in 1968, at the height of their fame, the musicians separated in a bitter pudding of heroin, fistfights and loud, seemingly infinite improvisations.
The rest of Mr. Baker’s résumé reads like a picaresque novel featuring drugs, guns, jails, broken marriages, burned bridges, squandered fortunes, and tax and immigration problems, with pit stops in Britain, Nigeria, Italy, the United States and South Africa. There were also collaborations with pioneers of Afrobeat (Fela Kuti) and punk (Johnny Rotten), drum battles with jazzmen (the bebop drummer Art Blakey and the postbop Elvin Jones) and lots and lots of polo ponies. Mr. Baker insists polo is his only weakness.
Mr. Bulger’s film chronicles this rolling cavalcade through archival footage, scruffy animation and interviews with everyone from Mr. Clapton to Johnny Rotten, who commands viewers, “Love and appreciate, no matter how awkward this character may appear to you.”
Renowned for his extravagant temper, Mr. Baker says that life is a two-way street in which he has the right of way. “I was advised to stay clear of Ginger,” Mr. Bulger said. “I’d heard he was manic, dangerous, unapproachable. He sounded like Grendel from ‘Beowulf.’ ”
In “Beware” Grendel’s lair is a wood-paneled living room furnished with a leather recliner from which Mr. Baker, plagued by osteoarthritis, retails anecdotes and pulls on a morphine inhaler. His lips are tight; his rheumy eyes look like day-old oysters; his once flaming red hair has turned Ancient Grecian Formula gray.
Formidable and occasionally terrifying, he berates, belittles and besmirches Mr. Bulger, and, in a paroxysm of rage, breaks the director’s nose with a cane. Still, there is something oddly poignant about him weeping as he conjures up the jazz drummers who are his heroes.
“With Ginger there’s not a lot of analyzing, just raw emotion,” said the bassist Bill Laswell, his onetime producer. “My favorite thing about the movie is that he’s still alive.”
Mr. Bulger didn’t know Mr. Baker existed until six years ago, when he watched a documentary involving a 1971 road trip he took across the Sahara to kick heroin. “I thought: Wow! I have to meet this madman,” he said.
In 2008 he finally tracked Mr. Baker down and phoned him under the pretense of profiling him for Rolling Stone. Mr. Baker was not unreceptive, and after a dozen more calls he invited Mr. Bulger to fly to South Africa and move in with him. Which Mr. Bulger did. For three months.
Reached by e-mail for his take on the house guest, Mr. Baker replied: “oh god! jay appeared unannounced. ... he seemed to be a good chap and we let him stay with us. ... //we got on quite well. ... i see no similarities between myself and jay. ... there done. ... ginger.”
At some point during Mr. Bulger’s visit Mr. Baker asked when the article would run in Rolling Stone. Rather than confess, Mr. Bulger compounded the lie. “Basically I called an editor I knew at the magazine and said, ‘I’m living with Ginger Baker, and assassins want to kill him,’ ” he said. While Mr. Baker roared in the background, Mr. Bulger pleaded, “If the assassins don’t get Ginger first, he’s going to chop off my head with a sword.”
Evidently this did the trick. Mr. Bulger was asked to write a feature, which was published the next summer. “Jay is probably not the first person to try that,” said Sean Woods, an assistant managing editor. “But he’s probably the first to pull it off.”
Mr. Bulger parlayed the assignment into a movie deal and a return visit to the monster’s den. “My initial attraction to Ginger was figuring out what happens when you live by your own rules without compromise, artistically, spiritually, socially,” he said. “Here’s what happens: You wind up alone at the end of the world.”
thx
Dr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/movies/a-documentary-looks-at-the-drummer-ginger-baker.html?ref=arts&_r=1&
