Ginger Baker: a master and monster who split rock music apart
The drummer fought his bandmates, alienated his children and lived a life of turmoil – but had an utterly new vision for what rock music could be
The 2012 documentary film Beware of Mr Baker is a profoundly discomfiting watch. The adjective regularly used to describe its subject is “cantankerous”, but that isn’t really right. Cantankerous sounds like a word you would append to a beloved but grumpy old relation, and – in the film at least – there’s nothing lovable whatsoever about Ginger Baker.
Sequestered in his South African compound, he seems authentically horrible: rude, obnoxious, arrogant, dismissive, violent. It doesn’t seem to be an act put on for the camera. His children’s relationship with him is clearly strained – on one occasion, his son recounts, they played a gig together that entailed his father giving the 15-year-old a line of cocaine, then absconding with their fee, leaving him stranded. His latest partner stares blankly and silently at the camera when asked whether he’s a good stepfather. Even the man he describes as “his best friend in the world”, Eric Clapton, seems to regard him with a very wary eye: he “doesn’t know him well”, he says, before describing him as “scary, threatening … difficult”. It’s hard not to find yourself wondering aloud why anyone would want to have made a film about Baker, simply because doing so would have meant spending time in his company.
The answer, of course, lay in the music Baker made in the 1960s and 70s. By common consent, he helped to redefine the notion of the rock drummer...
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/06/ginger-baker-a-master-and-monster-who-split-rock-music-apart