Traffic - When a teenager conquered rock

Traffic's music, on the other hand, is easier to pin down. They went through a rollercoaster evolution, but their constant changes always pushed in a direction perfectly suited to their own time. They're one of the most representative bands for the mutations that affected the most advanced strands of rock straddling the Sixties and Seventies, yet this trait has proven to be a double-edged sword. If, back then, their ability to pick up on the vibrations of the moment and render them precisely made them quite popular, today it makes them look dated. Among all the classic names of the era, Traffic is perhaps the one whose average fan is oldest.

Genesis, Yes, and even Jethro Tull have enjoyed, since the 2000s, a sizeable underground cult following among younger music fans. Even a band that sold far less at the time, such as King Crimson, is doing decidedly better these days. Traffic, by contrast, seem trapped in limbo, far removed from all that. While many followed their lead in real time, their influence has shrunk over the years to the point of nearly vanishing. These days it's almost impossible to find an artist willing to rework their sound. Perhaps a few jam bands, like Phish or Dave Matthews Band, but really not much else.

It's not easy to understand why. Music's historical cycles often follow logic with no apparent pattern. Maybe in twenty years Traffic will be hugely celebrated, or maybe they'll sink permanently into oblivion—who can say? What's certain is that right now they deserve far more attention. However rooted in their own era they may be, Traffic's records remain particularly significant. The fact that today they reach fewer people than some of their contemporaries is in no way a demerit, and it doesn't diminish their creative and artistic scope.

The early singles

The adventure begins in a flash. It's January 1967, and Steve Winwood is still part of the Spencer Davis Group, promoting one of the masterpiece singles of blues rock, "I'm A Man". In May, roughly coinciding with Winwood's nineteenth birthday, "Paper Sun" comes out, Traffic's debut single. In those four months, Winwood had: left Spencer Davis, met three talented musicians with whom he formed the new band, rented a cottage to retreat to for writing and playing, and signed a deal with Island. The other three members of Traffic are drummer Jim Capaldi, woodwind player Chris Wood, and multi-instrumentalist Dave Mason, who shared everything else with Winwood, vocals included.

"Paper Sun" is an immediate knockout. Produced by Jimmy Miller, like all their recordings up to their first breakup, and written by the Winwood-Capaldi duo, it rests on a groove that, besides the traditional rhythm section, features Mason's sitar, Wood's pulsing sax, and a flurry of tabla. Not every instrument is tasked with driving the rhythm, though, as the delicate flute flourishes prove.

The vocal arrangement is particularly intricate: Winwood takes the lead, instantly recognizable thanks to his soul-streaked timbre. A distant voice echoes him in the verse, while an ethereal choir enters in the chorus, not unlike those found on Pink Floyd's early singles. Toward the end, as several vocal lines overlap in the background, Winwood unexpectedly rises to a much higher volume than the instrumental backdrop and takes on an almost tragic tone. For a moment, it sounds like Peter Gabriel, a couple of years ahead of schedule.

"Paper Sun" catches on immediately, reaching number five on the British chart. In August another single hits the shops, "Hole In My Shoe", which climbs all the way to number 2, beaten only by "Massachusetts" by the Bee Gees.

The track, written and sung by Mason, left the other three unhappy, though, and immediately exposed the difference in vision that would, within a few months, plunge the band into crisis. The real naivety isn't so much the lyrics, which describe acid-fueled visions entirely understandable for 1967, as much as the spoken-word monologue recited by a little girl in the bridge—perhaps the only grating moment in Traffic's entire discography, if they ever had one. Still, the bed of Mellotron and piano underpinning the little voice says a lot about the track's musical quality, and apart from that aside, the rest is flawless: the obsessively looping flute melody, the reverb-drenched falsetto harmonies, the false ending, with the music resurfacing for a few moments after fading out.

"Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush", the main theme from Hunter Davies's film of the same name, came out in November and peaked at number 8. Sung entirely in unison, with a few solo interjections from Winwood, it's an acrobatic little march full of stops and restarts.

Mr. Fantasy (1967)

The debut album saw the light of day in December, but the three singles that preceded it are absent from the tracklist: they would only find a place later on in the band's compilations, as well as bonus tracks on the many reissues. For this reason, its commercial performance fell short of expectations, and the record didn't spark the hoped-for excitement: at home it stalled at number 16. Still, it was enough to light the spark of their cult following, including in the United States, where, despite a heavily reshuffled tracklist, it cracked the top hundred and paved the way for six consecutive albums in the top 20.

Of course, it's the British version that deserves consideration. The music is credited to Winwood, with occasional contributions from Wood, while Capaldi takes on the role of lyricist. The exception is three tracks penned by Mason alone, confirming that the rift sparked by "Hole In My Shoe" was no accident.

"Heaven Is In Your Mind" is an emblematic track, explaining the early-album Traffic better than words ever could. The mood is indeed overexcited, with a stereo mix that bounces between channels, cascading effects (Winwood's voice on the chorus is almost spectral), and nonsense vocalizing on the fadeout. Unlike much of British psychedelic music, though, the instrumental backbone isn't woozy pop with circus-like interludes. A solid blues piano, a jazzy sax, a tight rhythm section: for all the brilliant sophistication that set them apart, Traffic could have passed as the backing band for some soul singer. In fact, they essentially were one, since what other word could possibly describe Steve Winwood, if not soul?

His gifts as a vocalist triumph on "No Face No Name No Number", which, despite forgoing the rhythm section, reveals a dense arrangement of acoustic guitar, Mellotron, harpsichord, organ and flute. Over this impossibly delicate carpet of sound, Winwood's voice soars with an intensity worthy of Percy Sledge. And yet this isn't black music sung by some seasoned Alabama professional — it's a baroque pop ballad conceived by a teenager from Birmingham not yet twenty years old. Winwood's age deserves to be pointed out again and again, because however many precocious geniuses come to mind, none of them, at just nineteen, had already made rock history with two different bands.

In any case, it's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" that was destined for the history books, becoming a jam-band standard and covered by, among others, Grateful Dead, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Jimi Hendrix and Gov't Mule. The track is a powerful electric blues, but seen through the most heterodox lens imaginable in 1967, complete with those girlish backing vocals acting as a bridge between the first and second verse. There's no real chorus, since the structure is torn apart by Winwood's harsh, relentless solos (finally showing his full worth as a guitarist), by the ups and downs of the stormy rhythm section (utterly removed from blues' typically languid pace), and by Mason's harmonica chugging along like an old coal train. Despite being essentially a small jam, nothing is left to chance, starting with the numerous treatments applied to Winwood's voice, now metallic, now natural, now distant, now upfront.

The Beatles took a cue from it the following year for "Hey Jude", which is, in effect, a pop rendering of the Traffic track, once its guitar rough edges have been smoothed away. Among those who cover "Dear Mr. Fantasy", it has by now become a tradition to let the ending flow into "Hey Jude", as if it were one single, natural stream.

Meanwhile Mason was moving in territory all his own, made up of lysergic fragments like "Utterly Simple" or "House For Everyone", which sound like a preview of the Pretty Things of the legendary "S.F.Sorrow". They're extraordinary little nursery rhymes, hard to forget once heard, but they prove beyond doubt just how out of place the poor guy was within the band. Hence the bitter decision to leave, right when there was an album to promote.

Traffic (1968)

A rave review from Rolling Stone and growing interest from the American market, however, prompt him to reconsider. He thus falls back into line to record the second album, on which he even co-writes half the songs.

Traffic is a much-celebrated record, considered by some even superior to the debut. Not by this writer, who, while holding Mason in high esteem, prefers Winwood's visionary power, here slightly muted. The leader still manages to slip in "Pearly Queen" (another blues jam in which the rhythmic patterns of his guitar echo Steve Cropper's work on Stax records) and, above all, "40,000 Headmen". Despite being a fairly short track, the unpredictable flourishes of Wood's flute and the folk/jazz hybrid arrangement effectively make it the band's first significant step toward what would soon come to be called progressive rock.

Mason, for his part, had by now come to believe that the season of flowers was over, and shifted toward territory closer to radio-friendly pop rock. The track that makes the album take flight is his "Feelin' Alright", and with good reason: standing at the crossroads of white folk and soul, it boasts one of the catchiest choruses of the era. The sheer perfection of that melody proved infectious, and over the following five years it would rack up a dozen notable covers: Joe Cocker, Three Dog Night, David Ruffin, 5th Dimension, Gladys Knight, Jackson 5, Isaac Hayes, Undisputed Truth, Grand Funk Railroad, and more besides.

The album reaches number 9 in the UK and number 17 in the US, and Traffic seem to have finally taken off for good, but the machine breaks down once more. Mason leaves, and the others head off on tour in America as a trio.

Around that time, more or less, they joined forces with Jimi Hendrix, a self-declared admirer of theirs, and took part in the recording of "Electric Ladyland". Wood plays flute on "1983", Winwood plays organ on "Voodoo Chile". It would later emerge that Mason himself had also taken part in those sessions, though uncredited at the time: his is the 12-string guitar on "All Along The Watchtower".

In December came the first release without Mason, a single pairing "Medicated Goo" on the A-side with "Shanghai Noodle Factory" on the flip. It's hard to listen to the former without breaking into a smile, since it's plainly a kind of spiteful response from Winwood to "Feelin' Alright". It closely mirrors its structure and choral quality, as if the young, domineering musician wanted to remind everyone that he too could write an infectious song. Far more distinctly his own, "Shanghai Noodle Factory" is another powerful folk blues, with swirling flute flourishes and a wall of electric organ. Overall, it's one of the finest British singles of the Sixties, but it never got the media push it deserved and passed unnoticed.

Last Exit (1969)

By the start of 1969, Traffic no longer existed, with Winwood planning to form a new band together with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. The record label, however, was unwilling to give up the American market success won with the previous album, and so released Last Exit, half recorded live in 1968 and half made up of leftovers from the first two albums or tracks already released as singles.

Here find a place “Just For You” (a potent psychedelic r&b number released by Mason under his own name in February 1968, during the first hiatus from Traffic), “Shanghai Noodle Factory” and “Medicated Goo”. Decidedly less compelling, side two is taken up by two murky live jams, which aren't even based on the band's own compositions. The US confirms its fondness for Traffic, and the album reaches number 19 with no promotion whatsoever. In the UK, by contrast, the public seems to have forgotten them in a hurry.

John Barleycorn Must Die (1970)

Blind Faith was born and died in the space of a breath, after releasing one of the most talked-about albums of 1969, which shot straight to number 1 in the UK and US. In February 1970 Winwood decides to pick up a thread that had perhaps been cut off too abruptly. Wood and Capaldi are with him, Mason obviously isn't. With no outsider to challenge him, the leader runs free and makes an album in his own image, producing it himself for the first time.

Winwood has by now reached full maturity, with the ambition to match, and the album that results all but closes the book on Sixties music, just as the deaths of the Hendrix-Morrison-Joplin triad would do at a media level within the year. Once again Traffic manage to capture a perfect snapshot of the landscape around them, immortalising the radical shift in taste sweeping through the British rock intelligentsia in those months.

John Barleycorn Must Die is as progressive as the albums that had crystallised the genre the year before (King Crimson, Moody Blues, Caravan, Nice), it's as folk as the bands rediscovering Celtic tradition (Pentangle, Fairport Convention), it's as jazz as some of the period's underground classics (Colosseum, Soft Machine), and it's soul because Winwood wouldn't give up that component for any epoch-defining upheaval in the world. The sheer range of material the artist commands to build the most complex of his architectures is, in short, vast, running from an 18th-century traditional ballad to his African-American contemporaries, crossing centuries, oceans and races along the way.

The opening instrumental is called “Glad”. An unforgettable piano riff, the Hammond's counterpoint, Wood's horn work both as rhythm and as soloist. A jazz-rock masterpiece of absolute elegance and cleanliness, perfectly catchy despite essentially being one long virtuosic digression. “Freedom Rider” continues in that vein, but channels those suggestions into a structure with verse, chorus and an epic crescendo finale.

When Winwood's voice makes its entrance on “Empty Pages”, with the electric piano painting relaxed brushstrokes, you can already hear the soft rock that would make the fortune of so many American bands for the rest of the Seventies. The burst of Hammond and the theatrical flavour of the chorus then bring it all back to the progressive land of Albion.

Played entirely by Winwood, with Wood absent and Capaldi on second vocals, “Stranger To Himself” is a rare example of British country rock, and unmistakably so, since despite everything it retains a pastoral, vaguely Celtic feel.

Next comes the traditional “John Barleycorn”, which by now one is almost embarrassed to file under that label. With this recording Traffic reach one of the high points of folk music of any era or place, effectively making the song their own. The gentle arpeggiated guitar, which occasionally follows the emotional flow of the voices and grows sharper. The tambourine played on tiptoe. Once again Capaldi's second voice, with its low tone and ancient colour, the perfect counterpart to Winwood's bright, lively one, in an unrepeatable unison that plays on contrast. Wood's flute, carrying the senses straight back to the England of centuries past. After a rendition like this, you'd have to be either reckless or exceptionally brave to attempt a new version of this ballad.

The American rock audience is captivated, and the album reaches number 5 on Billboard without a single notable hit single. Interest flares up briefly in the UK too, peaking at number 11, but it's the last time. From here on, the band will remain the exclusive concern of the new continent.

The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys (1971)

In September 1971 the live album Welcome To The Canteen is released, featuring a considerably expanded lineup: the core trio has been joined by Ric Grech (Family's bassist, already alongside Winwood in Blind Faith), Ghanaian percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah, drummer Jim Gordon (ex-Derek and the Dominos and co-writer of “Layla”) and a returning Dave Mason as a guest. It's by far the most energetic live recording Traffic ever made, thanks in particular to the torrential versions of “Dear Mr. Fantasy” (eleven minutes) and “Gimme Some Lovin'” (the big Spencer Davis Group hit, nine minutes). The rhythmic groove is so dynamic and compelling that you barely notice the flaws in the vocal track mixing.

Just a couple of months later comes the new album, which keeps the same lineup as above, minus Mason. Surprisingly, it's Gordon and Grech who write the lead single, “Rock 'N' Roll Stew”, though they leave the singing to Capaldi. It's a flawless track, in which everything helps cement Traffic's central role in the development of FM radio sound (Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Ozark Mountain Daredevils and so on would owe them a heartfelt thanks). The vocals, now thoroughly West Coast, the guitar hard-edged yet kept at a low volume, the smooth carpet of percussion, the Rhodes: every ingredient is already there.

Winwood for his part contributes some of his most inspired songs. “Many A Mile To Freedom” is a spell halfway between pop music and jazz fusion, where calm and fluidity now reign supreme over the sound. The melody flows as if in a trance over the carpet of keyboards and the hypnotic rhythm section; Winwood's part is a kind of perpetual motion that could fade out after three minutes or run for a quarter of an hour and nothing would change. With “Rainmaker” he returns instead to folk, conjuring a chorus worthy of a pagan rite and blending it perfectly with the band's new sound.

Then there's the title track, a twelve-minute fresco in which his voice, rarely so clean, guides a rise and fall of instrumental mastery marked by elegance. The piano part is perhaps the best of his career and vaguely recalls the style of the great jazz musician Horace Silver, just as the particularly inspired organ solo is filtered to such a degree that on its entrance it's mistaken for a wind instrument.

Reaching number 7 on the American charts just a few weeks after release confirms the band's rude health in terms of popularity.

The end of a journey

The following albums, Shoot Out At The Fantasy Factory (1973, number 6) and When The Eagle Flies (1974, number 9), also perform very well commercially. Yet the band breaks up during the tour in support of the latter, after discovering they were unable to keep up with the rockstar lifestyle. Wood is by now swamped by drugs, while Winwood, rather frail at the time, is quite simply struggling physically to withstand the crushing pressure of yet another tour. He thus decides to drop everything all of a sudden, without saying a word to any of the other members, leaving them completely in the dark. Understanding the situation, Wood and Capaldi opt for a peaceful dissolution of the historic group.

While Shoot Out… rather wearily retreads the album that preceded it (and it may be a coincidence, but one of the tracks is titled "Uninspired"), When The Eagle Flies restores Traffic to the level they deserve, and makes their demise all the more regrettable.

Co-written with Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band, a close friend of Winwood's, "Dream Gerrard" is the standout masterpiece. Eleven minutes of dancing keyboards, with Steve more theatrical than ever. The effort he puts in to keep from being outpaced by the times is titanic, but more importantly, it pays off. While the acoustic piano shows off a jazzy nimbleness that's by now the band's trademark, the use of the Mellotron, set to an orchestral tone with a cosmic flavour, is something new for Traffic. Further back in the mix than the Mellotron, a synthesizer can be heard indulging in occasional distorted sounds, while sax and organ repeat a minimalist pattern. In the finale, new bassist Rosko Gee pulls off a masterful solo out of nowhere, with unusually high-pitched notes. The only fault one could find with a track like this is that it's too short.

Although not the entire tracklist holds up to this standard, the album boasts other prestigious moments. "Graveyard People" contains much of what would come to define Alan Parsons Project, while "Walking In The Wind" is an infectious funky midtempo, where the most varied keyboard sounds end up wandering through uncharted spaces.

In any case, even though it arrived at the end of the adventure, this new space pop vein of Winwood's wasn't a flash in the pan: two years later, in fact, he can be found playing on "Go", the landmark album by Japanese keyboardist and percussionist Stomu Yamashta, alongside Michael Shrieve and Klaus Schulze.

After that, starting in 1977, he throws himself headlong into a highly successful solo career, never failing to deliver quality singles, even though they're often undermined by questionable arrangements.

Chris Wood's fate is decidedly less happy: he would be struck down by pneumonia in 1983, not even forty years old, after having long suffered from depression.

In 1994 Far From Home is released, recorded by Winwood and Capaldi on their own. It's not a bad album at all, but it's very hard to consider the somewhat sterile pop-rock of "Some Kinda Woman" and "Here Comes A Man" as an effective part of Traffic's repertoire, despite the name on the cover trying to convince us otherwise. It's music that has nothing to do with the warmth of days gone by. Once the tour in support of the album wraps up, complete with a triumphant performance at the 1994 Woodstock festival, the name is put to rest for good.

Capaldi's death in 2005, from stomach cancer, effectively puts an end to any possibility of a reunion. As Winwood has publicly stated: "Traffic without my longtime partner cannot exist".

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