Creativity Quote by Jack Bruce

Grief in rock often shows up disguised as scheduling. Jack Bruce frames his decision with calendar logic - "between now and then", "a long enough period" - because timing is the one part of mourning you can control, especially when the feelings and the history are messier. The line reads like an artist negotiating not just loss, but the politics that surround loss: bandmates, families, fans, estates, old feuds that never quite die. He keeps circling the same point from different angles, as if rehearsal itself might make the act safer.

The most revealing phrase is "I obviously didn't want to hurt anybody". That "obviously" is doing defensive work. It signals he knows the move could be interpreted as opportunistic, invasive, or revisionist - the classic fear when you release a song, mount a tribute, or resurrect material tied to someone who can't approve it anymore. Bruce isn't just mourning; he's managing audience perception and the moral suspicion that clings to public remembrance.

Then he undercuts any grand claim: "memorial or tribute whatever you want to call it". The shrugging taxonomy is intentional. In music culture, labels matter because they imply motives: tribute sounds loving, memorial sounds solemn, cash-in sounds cynical. Bruce refuses the rhetorical purity test. He’s asking for permission to be human: to honor someone through his medium while admitting the act is inherently public, and therefore inherently vulnerable to being misread.

It’s a musician’s version of an ethical disclaimer, but also a quiet confession: he waited until the wound felt survivable, and until the world might let him say goodbye without turning it into a fight.