TRAFFIC WERE a strange item that hovered around my youth. As a youngster heading toward my teens that voice somehow transmuted from ‘Gimme Some Loving’ to ‘Hole In My Shoe’. They were on my map.
I saw Traffic at the Albert Hall in 1971. They looked like they’d smoked too much strong black hash. Winwood’s hair hung in lank curtains over his palid, inscrutable face. It was conceivably the least dynamic rock’n'roll show I’ve ever seen.
A homeless spell whilst at art school found me staying at a fellow student Edward’s family home in Putney. Traffic On The Road was one of a handful of albums he had. We would snort cheap sulphate and smoke cheap Moroccan hash, and nod-our-heads/fidget-and-babble to it, whichever was winning. Then Traffic disappeared, to be replaced by a blow-dried horror singing “take me to a higher ground”. No thanks.
AND NOW, fuelled by the discovery that Free were fantastic, I raid iTunes for my past, and up comes Traffic On The Road, and it is frankly pretty ghastly. I revisit in part because this version of the band had the Muscle Shoals chaps – Roger Hawkins, David Hood and Barry Beckett – adorning it. Well the Alabama trio are perfectly fine, though what they made of the experience is beyond me. But the rest of the band…
Part of the problem is that they weren’t really a band at all. Chris Wood was a feeble tenor player. His flute has its moments as we know from Electric Ladyland. But a single reed/woodwind player is a waste of space in a rock band. Reebop Kwakabu bangs and rattles things without disturbing the groove one way or another. Jim Capaldi, meanwhile, does nothing whatsoever. OK, maybe not nothing, but waving a tambourine around and singing badly on ‘Light Up Or Leave Me Alone’ (an otherwise bracing tune) strikes me as money for old rope.
And it’s there that, weirdly, Traffic pointed to the future, for is not Capaldi the proto-Bez, the hippie Chas Smash, looning around on the stage with no apparent function? Is it not indisputable that Chris Wood patented the sort of flaccid, tuneless saxophone that was to later grace albums by Sade and Spandau Ballet?
One Response to Hideous reminders of our grim, distant pasts #1: Traffic On The Road
I have two wildly contrasting memories of Traffic, and this post – together with the Island exhibition in Poland Street that I visited last week – has brought them back to me.
The first time I saw them was in 1970 and they were a trio, just Winwood, Capaldi and Wood, and I was well impressed, even though it seemed to me that Winwood did 90% of the work, singing, playing his Hammond when he wasn’t playing guitar and doing the bass with his feet on the organ pedals. If I remember rightly, for a few songs he sat on his organ stool playing his guitar in his lap, and still played bass on the pedals – stunning co-ordination. This would have been around the time of the John Barleycorn album, which I liked a lot, as I did the two previous Traffic albums.
Second time around wasn’t so good. This was a late show at the New York Academy of Music in, I think, 1975 (maybe ’76) and featured Winwood, Capaldi, Repob and Wood who was clearly unfit to perform. He wandered on and off from time to time and made an excruciating din with his saxophone or flute, all the while struggling unsuccessfully to control his tone and volume through a small box attached to his belt. Eventually he was escorted from the stage. Meanwhile Winwood droned on, jamming interminably on his keyboard while Capaldi and Repob offered percussive backing. Many walked out.
There is a footnote to this. The following week I slammed them in MM, my review suggesting that this once great band should call it a day now before things got even worse. The review was duly published. About a month later, by chance, I bumped into Chris Blackwell in a restaurant on 57th Street. He was not amused. He castigated me for saying what I’d said about his precious Traffic but I stood my ground. He wasn’t there, of course, so how did he know how bad (or good) they were? I suppose you can’t blame him for supporting his act, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth.