Had to Cry Today

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a long one this stretch, and if you have been riding with us for a while you already know the feel of it. "Had to Cry Today" opens the only album Blind Faith ever cut, the one they simply called Blind Faith, and it does not ease you in. Steve Winwood wrote it, sang it, and locked horns with Eric Clapton on those twin guitars while Ginger Baker pushed the thing and Ric Grech held the bottom. Eight minutes and change of a riff that feels like a two-lane blacktop at dusk, and the lyric is barely ten lines. Winwood keeps coming back to the same picture: he saw your sign and he missed you there. That is the whole ache of it. You do not need a novel when the groove is doing the talking.

The song was already in the air before the record was finished. Session logs from the 2001 deluxe notes, written up later by John McDermott, put the band back at Olympic Studios in London on June 23 and 24, 1969, recutting "Had to Cry Today" until take 17 became the master. Producer Jimmy Miller was in the chair by then, after an earlier pass with Chris Blackwell had gone sideways. They were not loafing. Morgan Studios and Olympic, February through late June, and then the road. The free show in Hyde Park on June 7 had already put the tune in front of a crowd that some folks still swear was a hundred thousand strong. First public airing, right there in the park, before the album was even in the shops. If you were a Zoo Freak with a transistor and a blanket, that was the summer you heard a supergroup try to be a band instead of a headline.

Clapton has said the name itself was a tell. In his memoir he wrote that his quiet ambition was to build something like The Band on English ground, and that he knew it was a gamble, which is probably why he called them Blind Faith. Winwood told writer Johnny Black he knew it was a hype the minute the name stuck, that the words carried a negative charge, and that he went along because a successful name eventually stops meaning anything and just becomes a label. That is a pretty clear-eyed thing to say about your own group. Baker was not even supposed to be in the room. Clapton and Winwood were up at Winwood's cottage, passing a smoke and feeling their way through songs, when Baker knocked. Clapton later wrote that the knock frightened him, because a knock meant they were a band, and a band meant the old machine. Winwood had to talk him into it. He told Mojo he respected Baker as a drummer and had enjoyed playing with him, and that he did not yet understand how much of Cream had been built on the friction between those two.

Grech came over from Family in May, pulled off a tour that was already rolling, and suddenly there were four. The album that followed topped the charts in the United States and in Britain in the late summer of 1969, platinum in time, and still the band was gone before the leaves turned. Hawaii, August 24, last show. Winwood has been plain about why the live thing curdled. Ginger would take a drum solo and the room would hear Cream, so they would toss in an old Cream song. Then Winwood would slip in a Traffic tune, and whatever new identity they had been chasing was gone. He said they were only human. If you have twenty thousand people on their feet for one familiar number, you play it. That is not a confession you hear from every guitar hero, and it explains why "Had to Cry Today" still feels like the record they meant to make: no old hit hiding inside it, just Winwood's vocal and those guitars answering each other.

The sleeve made its own kind of noise. Bob Seidemann's photograph was pulled in plenty of American shops, and the band photo went out instead. The music did not need the argument. Years later Clapton and Winwood kept finding their way back to the song, at a countryside benefit, on the 2008 run, at Crossroads. Winwood has laughed that his memory of the Madison Square Garden show is foggy. Clapton, he said, remembered it clear as a bell. Different miles, same road.

How the outfit got started is really the story of a kid from Birmingham who was already famous before he was old enough to buy a round. Stephen Lawrence Winwood was born in 1948, sat in with his brother Muff, and by the mid-sixties was the voice out front of the Spencer Davis Group, the one singing "Gimme Some Lovin'" and "I'm a Man" like he had been on the circuit for twenty years. Traffic came next, in 1967, with Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood, and Dave Mason, a band that could wander off into a jam and still land the song. Cream called it quits in November 1968. Traffic went quiet around the same Christmas. Early 1969, Clapton and Winwood started those cottage sessions in Surrey, two players who had already crossed paths back in 1966 in a short-lived studio gang called Powerhouse. Baker invited himself. Grech made four. They had a name, a manager who could smell a gold record, and about enough finished songs to fill one side and then some. Clapton brought "Presence of the Lord," which he had Winwood sing. Winwood brought "Can't Find My Way Home," "Sea of Joy," and this opener. Buddy Holly's "Well All Right" got a ride in the middle. Baker's long jam, "Do What You Like," filled out the second side when the clock ran out. One album, one summer tour with Free, Taste, and Delaney and Bonnie along for the ride, and then it was over. Winwood went back toward Traffic. Clapton tried to disappear into someone else's band. Baker built Air Force. Grech drifted through other lineups until he was gone in 1990. Baker left us in 2019. Winwood and Clapton are the ones still standing.

That is the long way around a short chapter, and it is why the Zoo Crew still pulls this one when the room needs a stretch of road instead of a jingle. Put it on, let the riff do the work, and if you want the rest of the story from the players who lived it, the doors are open. Winwood's official site is Steve Winwood, and the same camp keeps an official Facebook at Steve Winwood on Facebook, an official Instagram at Steve Winwood on Instagram, and an official X account at Steve Winwood on X. Clapton's official site still tells the chapter plain, including the line about founding Blind Faith, over at Eric Clapton, with his official Facebook at Eric Clapton on Facebook. For the listeners who never let the one album go, the long-running fan home Where's Eric keeps the Clapton side of that story tended. We will be right here at THE ZOO when you want the next deep cut. Had to cry today. Saw the sign. Missed you there. Roll it again.