If Keith Moon had lived, he could not have turned out more horrible and hilarious than Ginger Baker, the Cream and Blind Faith drummer who today lurks in a South African compound terrifying visitors with a sign reading “Beware Mr. Baker” and beating a visiting documentarian on the nose with a crutch. If Clapton was God, guess who was the devil?
“Beware of Mr. Baker” is a fantastically entertaining biography of the originator of the drum solo and first wild man of the skins. Writer-director Jay Bulger, who met the drummer “Almost Famous”-style by falsely posing as a writer for Rolling Stone (which wound up publishing his profile anyway), mixes archival footage, contemporary interviews with the snarly survivor and chats with other rock legends to conjure up a vision more feral than Animal of “The Muppet Show” and more combustible than any of the beat-keepers from “This Is Spinal Tap.” Baker’s requirements backstage were exacting: “Ginger wanted a case of beer, two black hookers and a white limo, or he wouldn’t play,” says one witness.
Baker is still among the 10 best rock drummers of all time according to a recent Rolling Stone survey. In an interview, ex-bandmate Clapton (who over the course of this film ages like Dorian Gray as Baker turns startlingly into a rat-faced geezer) scoffs at comparisons to Moon or Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, calling Baker the true musician of the three. But Clapton steered clear of him for many years, calling the flame-haired demon “threatening to me and what I would call, I suppose, my sobriety.”
Baker himself, reminiscing, provides a rare perspective on the London Blitz of his infancy (“the bombs going off to me was great. I still love explosions to this day”), though he confesses to missing his father, who was killed during the war. The old man left the boy a letter meant to be read on his 14th birthday: “Be a man at all times. Hold your own ground. Use your fists, they are your best pals.” Baker not only stood his ground, but chased everyone else off it, alienating a series of wives, children, bandmates and even the maker of this film. In the meantime, he did enough drugs to make Keith Richards wince.
It’s comforting to learn that Baker fully personified his hellfire drumming in “White Room.” If Baker was not the greatest drummer of all time (though two who surpassed him, Neil Peart of Rush and Stewart Copeland of the Police, here credit him with being the archetype) he was — is! — a magnificent wreck. This, boys and girls, is rock.