Disraeli Gears by Cream is one of my favorite albums of all time. Such tracks as “Sunshine of Your Love,” “Strange Brew” and “Outside Woman Blues,” find Eric Clapton at his absolute best, when he was making the name that would support him for the next 30 years.

The last song on Disraeli Gears, however, is not a classic. It is called “Mother’s Lament” and is a classic only in the sense that all Cream fans know about it. It’s about a skeletally-thin baby who falls down the plug-hole of a bathtub. It is a terrible song in all ways, and a terrible ending to an otherwise superb album.

In this respect Disraeli Gears resembles life, for often in life we find a thing that is good most of the way through, but then suddenly turns to bad and ruins everything.

Consider drinking, for example. The album Drinking is good all the way through. The songs are tame at first, but in time their energy increases and presently they are all magnificent. Yes indeed, the best songs on Drinking are all near the end.

But Drinking has a secret song. If you play the last song of Drinking and then go to sleep, when you wake up you’ll hear another song — an appalling song, worse than “Mother’s Lament” — a song of headache and cottonmouth and misery.

So, Drinking is good until the very end, at which point it sucks. Are there any other albums that fit into this category?

How about the album Love? I don’t pretend to be any expert on this one, but I do know that relationships can be good or bad.

So let us consider a good relationship. In the ideal case, you meet someone you are totally in love with and spend the rest of your life with her or him. In this case the album Love would be full of long, wonderful songs and would end only with the death of both parties.

However, if one party should die before the other (which is quite probable, as couples rarely die at the same time), the album Love will have a very sad song at the end, to be sung for an unknown number of months or years. So darn it, we find sadness at the end of this, too! We seem to find sadness at the end of every pleasure.

Let us next consider the album Yummy Food. Yummy Food is a wonderful album, without doubt. There are so many different titles on Yummy Food, so much to choose from. And that album can go on and on and on.

But Yummy Food does one of the worst things that could possibly be done to a person — it makes that person unattractive. Most of us would like to be sexually attractive, if we could, and as sexually attractive as possible, but Yummy Food makes this difficult. Some men can listen to Yummy Food and get away with it, depending on who they are; but with women it is different.

I am glad I am a man.

How about the album United States of America? That album is getting worse, I am afraid; the last two tracks have been spoiled by a number of things, not the least of them Sept. 11 or the election of our president on the basis of his last name. Our president is not a bad man, but he is not especially intelligent, not penetrating, not confident and has not the required grasp of affairs of men. He is nice and likeable, but there is no spark about him like Clinton had.

But I digress. Nobody knows what the last song of America is, but it is a song of defeat and cannot possibly be good.

The last album I’d like to consider is the album Calculus of Complex Variables. This album will do as well as any similar. The album Calculus of Complex Variables, in contrast with Love, Yummy Food and the others, sucks at the beginning. Calculus of Complex Variables is a terrible album all the way through, except at the very end. Two days after the final exam, when I log on and see my grade, Calculus of Complex Variables is … still a terrible album! Ah, the joys of studenthood.

The point of this column is that all goods must be paid for, either before or after. There are rare exceptions — sleep, soccer, artistic creation — but in the main it is true.

E-mail Jeff at [email protected]