Blind Faith (Blind Faith album)

The band contained two-thirds of the popular power trio Cream, in Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton, working in collaboration with British star Steve Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, along with Ric Grech of Family. They began to work out songs early in 1969, and in February and March the group was at Morgan Studios in London, although the first few almost-finished songs did not show up until they were at Olympic Studios in April and May under the direction of producer Jimmy Miller.

The recording of their album was interrupted by a tour of Scandinavia, then a US tour from 11 July (Newport) to 24 August (Hawaii), supported by Free, Taste and Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. Although a chart topper, the LP was recorded hurriedly and side two consisted of just two songs, one of them a 15-minute jam entitled "Do What You Like". Nevertheless, the band was able to produce two hits, Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home" and Clapton's "Presence of the Lord".

The cover was a photo by Bob Seidemann of a topless 11-year-old girl, Mariora Goschen, holding a silver-painted model of an aircraft, sculpted for the album shoot by Mick Milligan. The cover was mildly controversial in the British press, with some seeing the model airplane as phallic. The American record company issued the album with an alternative cover, with a photograph of the band on the front, as well as the original cover.

The cover art was created by Seidemann, a friend and former flatmate of Clapton, who is primarily known for his photos of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. In the mid-1990s, in an advertising circular intended to help sell lithographic reprints of the famous album cover, he explained his thinking behind the image.

I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a spaceship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare's Juliet. The spaceship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life. The spaceship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweller at the Royal College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?

Seidemann wrote that he approached a girl, reported to be 14 years old, on the London Underground, asking her to model for the cover. He eventually met her parents, but she proved to be too old for the effect he wanted. Instead, the model he used was her younger sister, Mariora Goschen, who was reported to be 11 years old. Goschen recalled that she was coerced into posing for the picture. "My sister said, 'They’ll give you a young horse. Do it!'" She was instead paid £40.

The image, which Seidemann titled "Blind Faith", became the inspiration for the name of the band itself, which had been unnamed when the artwork was commissioned. According to Seidemann: "It was Eric who elected to not print the name of the band on the cover. The name was instead printed on the wrapper, when the wrapper came off, so did the type." That had been done previously for several other albums.

In America, Atco Records used a cover based on elements from a flyer for the band's Hyde Park concert of 7 June 1969.

The album was released on vinyl in 1969 on Polydor Records in the UK and Europe, and on Atco Records in the US. Polydor released a compact disc in 1986, adding two previously unreleased tracks, "Exchange and Mart" and "Spending All My Days", recorded by Ric Grech for an unfinished solo album, supported by George Harrison, Denny Laine, and Trevor Burton.

An expanded edition of the album was released on 9 January 2001, with previously unreleased tracks and 'jams' included. The studio electric version of "Sleeping in the Ground" had previously been released on the four-disc boxed set for Clapton, Crossroads (released 1988, recorded 1963–1987, including several previously unreleased live or alternate studio recordings). The bonus disc of jams does not include bassist Grech, who had yet to join the band, but includes a guest percussionist, Guy Warner. Two live tracks from the 1969 Hyde Park concert not included here, "Sleeping in the Ground" and a cover of "Under My Thumb", are also available on Winwood's four-disc retrospective The Finer Things.

Commercially, Blind Faith charted at number one in both the US and the UK.

The album met with a mixed response from critics. Reviewing in August 1969 for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau found none of the songs exceptional and said, "I'm almost sure that when I'm through writing this I'll put the album away and only play it for guests. Unless I want to hear Clapton—he is at his best here because he is kept in check by the excesses of Winwood, who is rapidly turning into the greatest wasted talent in music. There. I said it and I'm glad." In Rolling Stone, Ed Leimbacher said of the quality, "not as much as I'd hoped, yet better than I'd expected." His colleagues at the magazine—Lester Bangs and John Morthland—were more impressed, especially Bangs in his appraisal of Clapton: "[With] Blind Faith, Clapton appears to have found his groove at last. Every solo is a model of economy, well- thought-out and well-executed with a good deal more subtlety and feeling than we have come to expect from Clapton."

Retrospective appraisals have been positive. According to Stereo Review in 1988, "for 20 years this has been a cornerstone in any basic rock library." AllMusic's Bruce Eder regarded the album as "one of the jewels of the Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and Ginger Baker catalogs". In 2016, Blind Faith was ranked 14th on Rolling Stone's list of "The 40 Greatest One Album Wonders", which described "Can't Find My Way Home" and "Presence of the Lord" as "incredible".

Deluxe edition

Blind Faith

• Steve Winwood – keyboards, vocals, guitars; bass guitar on "Presence of the Lord" and "Well All Right"; autoharp on "Sea of Joy"; bass pedals on "Jam No. 1–4"
• Eric Clapton – guitars; vocals on "Well All Right" and "Do What You Like"
• Ric Grech – bass guitar, violin on "Sea of Joy"; vocals on "Do What You Like"
• Ginger Baker – drums, percussion; vocals on "Do What You Like"

Guest

• Guy Warren – percussion on "Jam No. 1–4"

Production personnel

• Jimmy Miller – producer
• George Chkiantz, Keith Harwood, Andy Johns, Alan O'Duffy – engineers
• Alan O'Duffy, Andy Johns, Jimmy Miller – mixing
• Stanley Miller, Bob Seidemann – cover design and photography
• Chris Blackwell, Robert Stigwood – executive producers
• Margaret Goldfarb – production co-ordination
• Bill Levenson – reissue supervision
• Suha Gur – remastering
• Vartan – reissue art direction

• List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 1969
• List of Canadian number-one albums of 1969
• List of UK Albums Chart number ones of the 1960s
• List of controversial album art