Sunshine of Your Love

The song began as a bass riff by Jack Bruce. His biographer Harry Shapiro wrote that Bruce played it, in a fit of desperation, after a night of failing to write with Pete Brown, who looked out of the window and came up with the line "It's getting near dawn and lights close their tired eyes." Clapton said in a 1988 interview that Bruce wrote the riff after seeing the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Saville Theatre on 29 January 1967, as a dedication to Hendrix. Clapton wrote the refrain that gave the song its title. Baker rates it his favorite Cream song, in particular a live recording.

It was among the first songs cut at Atlantic Studios in New York. Dowd was struck by how loud the trio played through their Marshall stacks. Clapton's solo is in the dark, singing tone known as the woman tone, on a 1964 Gibson SG nicknamed the Fool, and it quotes the pop standard Blue Moon. Ahmet Ertegun disliked the song, but Booker T. Jones and Otis Redding praised it, and Bruce later said the riff was seen as both musically interesting and commercial.

Atco issued an edited single in December 1967, cut from 4:08 to 3:03, with SWLABR on the B-side. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on 13 January 1968 and reached number 36, then re-entered in July and peaked at number 5 on 31 August 1968. The RIAA certified it gold on 26 September 1968. In Britain the single came out in September 1968 and reached number 25. Rolling Stone placed it at number 65 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it among its 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

On 4 January 1969, during the live BBC television show A Happening for Lulu, the Jimi Hendrix Experience stopped their number and dedicated a song to Cream, then played this one until the broadcast faded out. Ella Fitzgerald sang it live from the late 1960s, and Living Colour recorded it for the 1994 film True Lies. Cream played it at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 November 1968 and again at the reunion on 3 May 2005.