A long time ago in a country far far away… Nettie and I found we were ruminating over the same idea: how to communicate the Ginger Baker story, without the frills? We shared a good part of that story and knew it had to be told– and somewhere people wanted to hear it.
In 2008, Nettie took on the daunting task of writing Ginger’s autobiography, a feat she accomplished in just 4 months, going out to South Africa to sit with Ginger and work through it. She completed the editing herself the night before she was due to go into hospital for surgery…
Nine months later, Nettie organized a book signing and a gig at the Jazz Café in Camden, London to launch the book and celebrate Ginger’s 70th birthday – we thought this would be the end, the story was told. But as time went by we knew something was missing…
It wasn’t until Nettie met Mickey Banks (of Jimmy and the Destroyers) at a gig in London that the plan began to take shape. Mickey, a long time fan of Cream and Ginger Baker, immediately saw great potential in the idea.
So we started the Ginger Baker Facebook Group to find out if there were still some die hard fans out there and got Mr. Baker involved. The response was incredible! We hit the Facebook limit of 5,000 friends within a month and grew to over 9,000 in the following month, with Ginger’s profile quickly hitting the 5,000 friends limit; he still has over a 1000 (probably disappointed) fans waiting to be his Friend …
To be free of all the limits we finally created the Ginger Baker Fan Page.
Running the group and fan pages proved to be a lot of fun for all of us; reading the daily responses, posts, comments, and messages – then we KNEW we had to make a website. At last, there in the Facebook pages we’d found the answers we’d been looking for.
In earnest, we began bashing out our initial ideas and designs, and started the work that continues today – www.gingerbaker.co.uk
As we continue this journey, we want to include you in it as much as possible, to add your experiences of Ginger, Cream, and Blind Faith to our archives, read your posts on the Drummers’ forum and your comments on these blogs.
Most of all, we look forward to reading Ginger’s posts on the Blog and his answers to your questions on the Drummers’ Forum.
Looking forward to some cool times ahead!
Leda
