[Beware of Mr. Baker plays March 1-7 at the Grand Illusion Cinema).]

The cigarette has never left Ginger Baker‘s mouth since he was, oh, about four years old. Watch this thing and tell me I’m wrong. But that’s okay, because Ginger Baker is a member of that very special club: Things that kill ordinary people, don’t kill him. He cannot be a Highlander, because he goes from young to old. But smokes, drinks, heroin, fights, jail cells, brutality of all sorts inflected from both within and without the self…nope, he just keeps muttering, cursing, tossing off bon mots.

His drumming, which you may well know from Cream, and Blind Faith, seems beyond reproach. Oh, he lays into Keith Moon and John Bonham for not being able to swing, but maybe that’s apples and pomegranates. Moon, I submit, transcended swing. Bonham, with his heavy, flat-footed style, was for the metalheads; every thwack had to hit like Mike Tyson, and that’s how metal goes down.

Ginger Baker always wanted to swing, or at least ever since he stole a bebop all-star record featuring Max Roach. So he manifested swing, got sucked into rock and roll anyway, gained and lost several fortunes, went through four (so far) wives, and oh yeah, his son thinks that his father should not have had children. The man’s own flesh and blood thinks it would be better for his father, if the son did not exist.

If you get the impression that Mr. Baker’s story is a sad one, console yourself that he loves horses, dogs, and drumming, and not necessarily in that order. He just can’t relate with, you know, homo sapiens, real well, outside of a stage or a recording studio or a jam session. He goes after it, he gets it, he pisses it away. Of course, he did go after the director of the movie with his cane, and drew blood. Did he know the director was a Golden Gloves boxer? Fuck if he cares.