Composed by drummer Ginger Baker, the piece is a five-minute drum solo (with a brief guitar and bass introduction and ending).
On the piece, Baker often produced complementary rhythms on the hi-hat, ride cymbal, double-bass drums and tom-toms simultaneously.
[2] An extended sixteen-minute live version (of which 13 minutes is drum solo) appears on Cream's 1968 album Wheels of Fire.
A slightly longer version of this recording, with some additional guitar and bass edited into the introduction from another performance, appears on Cream's four-disc compilation album Those Were the Days (1997).
[8] In a review of Cream, Life magazine said that "Toad" "features sustained, imaginative drumming that would knock out a Carnegie jazz audience".