![]() ![]() Yet it also extracted from Traffic’s three principals a heavy price, and it could be said that not one of them was ever the same again.Īs the 70s opened, the sound of folk rock had been blown across the Atlantic in the gusts made by The Band’s first two albums, the Byrds’ Gram Parsons-enhanced Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, and Bob Dylan’s rustic-hued one-two of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. From this launching point, they proceeded to conjure three more studio albums that marked them out as prodigious explorers and rare virtuosos. What became the John Barleycorn Must Die album was the first, giant step along that path. That’s to say, one capable of harnessing a dizzying array of musical styles – folk, blues, rock, jazz, classical, world – and then make them over into a fresh, original form that ebbed, flowed and soared. With the extravagant Capaldi cheerleading and fragile, mystical Wood bringing with him a traditional English folk tune called John Barleycorn that he’d heard on Frost And Fire, a 1965 album by Hull folkies The Watersons, the stage was set for Traffic to at last become the band Winwood had wanted all along. About that Winwood made just one stipulation, which was that he would now be the undisputed leader of the band. ![]() Stevens left too, Island owner Chris Blackwell subsequently taking personal charge of the sessions, which soon enough evolved into a fully fledged Traffic reunion. ![]() Mason he didn’t bother with, having instigated the guitarist’s dismissal from the ranks not long after they had completed the second Traffic album. It was left to the more voluble band members, Capaldi and Mason, to verbalise everything.”įinally, Winwood summoned Capaldi and Wood to join him once more at The Cottage. “He doesn’t communicate brilliantly and wouldn’t talk to anyone for days on end. “Winwood was amazing, but a very quiet, shy kind of guy,” says Phill Brown, engineer on the Traffic album sessions. Both flexed Winwood’s musical muscles, but he was nevertheless still dissatisfied, missing the push and pull he got from being surrounded by musicians who were sympathetic to his whims and also able to help translate for him. Working alone with Stevens in the homey living room of The Cottage, rugs thrown down on the floor before a roaring fireplace, Winwood managed to concoct a couple of tracks: a stately jam, Every Mother’s Son, and a punchier blues, Stranger To Himself. ![]()
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