As splendid an album as is Traffic’s eponymous sophomore work, it’s also a clear depiction of why guitarist and songwriter Dave Mason could not sustain membership in the British band for too long at a time. The musicians with whom he founded the group–Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood– were much more inclined toward spontaneity than the man who came and went from their company multiple times after the first Traffic album, Dear Mr. Fantasy, was released in 1967.
But it didn’t take over a half-century to discern exactly how far out of sync with his compatriots was the erstwhile guitarist/songwriter. Still, to the extent Dave’s natural predilection for structure conflicted with the more open-ended attitude of his three bandmates, his economical approach influenced the writing and recording of Traffic, as no doubt did the production of Jimmy Miller (Rolling Stones, Blind Faith).
For instance, camaraderie abounds in the multiple rollicking instrumental breaks concluding “Pearly Queen.” An implicitly dramatic narrative in the lyrics gives way to the hallucinatory mood of “40,000 Headmen,” an atmosphere that grows with each successive verse, but eventually exudes an infectious air by the end.
Yet neither of those tunes are as naturally concise and structured as Mason’s “You Can All Join In.” Its gaiety elevated even further by Winwood’s twirling, blues-oriented guitar and Wood’s happy honking on sax, the former’s skill at various guitars and keyboards, for which he became duly famous with 1980’s Arc Of A Diver, stood him and the band in good stead throughout these recordings (to which Dave Mason made only minimal instrumental contributions).
Joe Cocker rendered his cover of “Feelin’ Alright” in a markedly more agonized state than the superficially casual air with which Dave sings it here. But the slightly forced nature of the latter’s vocal dampens its intrinsically catchy quality, so it ultimately comes off as foreboding as the jaunty cautionary tale that is “Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring.”
The acoustic guitar strumming deep inside this arrangement foreshadows the Mason-less Traffic on 1970’s John Barleycorn Must Die. “Vagabond Virgin,” contains as much of a sing-song mood in Wood’s flute as in the chipper rhythm at the heart of the song; carefully circumscribed in the forty-some minute duration of playing time, the inherent duality of the group nevertheless doesn’t sound strained or tenuous, but rather an exercise in a collective force of will.
Meanwhile, the forlorn piano notes, ominous organ, and a far-off soprano sax introduce “No Time to Live” as a piece of deep introspection. This track helps conclude Traffic on a markedly muted note, albeit one that nonetheless functions as emphatic punctuation. Still, the last of the ten cuts, “Means to an End” a kissoff to Dave from his peers?–isn’t quite so far removed from its singalong beginning as it might seem.
It’s actually of a piece with Mason’s quietly reflective “Don’t Be Sad,” another pithy original of his, indicative of at least some affinity with the others, not to mention the progress in the coalescence of the Traffic style: group vocal harmonies and sprightly harmonica from the author buoy its inherently optimistic tone.
“Cryin’ to Be Heard,” however, is something else again. More than a little akin to “Withering Tree” (a bonus inclusion on the 2001 expanded CD of Traffic), the track finds Winwood imbuing the stark imagery of the words with the stout soul of his ageless voice. Twinkling notes of harpsichord, group chanting and surging organ crescendos effectively mitigate the wan yearning at the composition’s core as well.
The latter number also populates the first side of the Island Records package of odds and ends, Last Exit, released in 1969 after the initial fracture of Traffic. In its placement as the opener of seven tracks–two of which are extended live takes of the Winwood/Capaldi/Wood trio alone at Fillmore West–it precedes the decidedly upbeat “Medicated Goo” and “Shanghai Noodle Factory,” both of which were rightfully released as singles, a format that lent itself to condensing the psychedelic overtones often so diffuse on this foursome’s aforementioned debut.
In fact, the two tunes crystallized those elements in a whimsical fashion even more distinctive than Dave Mason’s writings of the period (see “Hole In My Shoe”). It is thus only fitting that, in the cover portrait for Traffic, the latter is a bemused expression next to Wood’s comic gesticulations, further contradicted by the stoicism on the faces of Winwood and Capaldi.
In the hindsight of five decades plus, this photo captures a group dynamic rife with creative conflicts that the foursome managed to transcend on this fifty-five-year-old album. Traffic thus accurately reflected the album title, itself taken from the band whose name was chosen to connote a constant flow of motion its history ultimately bore out.
Having left the band after recording the album on which he is pictured dead center in the cover photo, Dave Mason rejoined just long enough to contribute to this second LP of the ensemble’s, then left yet again only to come back ever so briefly three years later; documentation of that fleeting alliance appears in the form of the live album Welcome To The Canteen.
Released just weeks prior to The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, the band’s best-known record, it featured personnel that, apart from Mason, was identical to that of the first Traffic album of 1971 (one that originally appeared without the group’s name, only its symbol, on the black and white cover). And its cryptic title tune notwithstanding, this fifth studio album by the band is a seamless piece that solidified, at least temporarily, the precarious chemistry that permeates its 1968 predecessor.
It’s the sort of simpatico that would endure, to a greater or lesser extent, in a variety of permutations, for almost another quarter century of Traffic.
