The first working trip
abroad that I ever went on after joining Melody Maker, in September 1970,
was to Holland with Traffic, Free and the Jess Roden Band, all groups signed to
Island Records, who were touring together. For some reason or other the manager
of another Island band, Quintessance, joined us on the trip, just for the ride
I think. His name was Stan Barr, an American rumoured to be a Vietnam War
veteran, but he didn't get to sit with the rest of the party on the plane, and
when we were airborne he came lurching down the central aisle to talk with us.
He stayed there for some time, looking as if he intended to remain standing for
the entire flight. Soon he was approached by a stewardess.
“Would
you mind going back to your seat sir," she asked politely. "It's
dangerous to stand in the aisle."
"Dangerous
lady?" scoffed the American. "When you've flown over Vietnam in a
plane with no seats that wasn't safe enough to take off in the first place,
with a pilot who's drinking Jack Daniels straight from the bottle, when there's
napalm going off all around you, when there's a hole in the side of the plane
where the door should be and there’s bullets flying in all directions, when the
tops of the trees are brushing up against the bottom of the plane and the din's
so loud you can't talk to anyone or hear anyone... that's dangerous lady.
That's dangerous. This is a piece of cake."
"That's
all very well sir, but you must sit down."
I liked Traffic, Steve
Winwood’s post Spencer Davis group, and Free a lot and I saw them do three
shows together on this trip, in The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam,
and in one of those cities can dimly recall getting up on stage in a hotel bar,
alongside various members of Traffic and Free, and playing someone’s Telecaster
on a 12-bar blues workout. Paul Rodgers was on vocals. Rodgers could be a
bit of a handful but his band had a lovely springy feel, all tension and
elasticity, and I'll do a post on them in due course.
In
those days Traffic was a trio with Winwood doing almost all the work, lead
vocals, organ and guitar, and I loved their song ‘No Face No Name No Number’
which became a sort of soundtrack to a short-lived romance of mine with a girl
called Janet who went off to become an au pair in the South of France.
Then
Traffic increased the size of the band with some crack US session guys, but I
felt its character had been diluted. In the end they deteriorated alarmingly
and I was unfortunate enough to watch them at their lowest, at the Palladium in
New York, during 1975. By this time they were playing as a quartet, with
Winwood on keyboards and guitar, Jim Capaldi on drums, Rebop on assorted
additional percussion and Chris Wood on flute. Wood, evidently not in the best
of health, spoilt the show, ambling on unexpectedly and seemingly incapable of
figuring out how to operate the electronic pad stuck to his belt which
controlled the amplification of his instrument. After a few blasts of piercing
feedback which he was unable to control, he was led off by a roadie. The show
itself was short, less than an hour and seemed to comprise an endless jam. The
audience barely applauded and some walked out before the end.
The
next day I felt compelled to take Traffic to task. ‘Pack up now,’ I wrote, or
something to that effect. It wasn’t fair on the audience to charge money if the
group was incapable of performing a professional show. Traffic had been
wonderful in their time but this time had clearly passed. The review was
printed in MM and I thought no more about it.
A
week or two later I was having lunch with Pete Rudge in the Russian Tea Room on
57th Street when Chris Blackwell, boss of Traffic’s label Island,
passed by our table. He’d long been associated with Steve Winwood, managing him
as well and running his label and publishing, but I’d never met him.
Blackwell stopped to talk
to Rudge and Peter introduced me. It was a bad mistake. Blackwell, who’d
evidently read my recent review of Traffic in MM, fumed and raged. ‘What
right did I have criticising a musician of Winwood’s calibre,’ he ranted.
My
response was to ask him whether he’d been present at the concert I reviewed. He
had not. I told him the concert had been lousy and since he wasn’t there, how
could he say otherwise?
We
argued long and hard, and in the end Blackwell stormed off, threatening to pull
Island’s advertising from Melody Maker until I apologised.
I never did apologise, Island never pulled their advertising and I never
saw or spoke to Chris Blackwell again.
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