Winwood's life after Traffic

By Mike Zwerin
Published: Wednesday, February 25, 2004

New York Times

Three decades after it disbanded, Steve Winwood's band Traffic will be officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on March 15. "I'm honored that Traffic is being inducted," Winwood said, "and very grateful to the powers that be for putting them in this prestigious institution."

Winwood, 55, was in Paris earlier this month to promote the second coming of his most recent solo album, "About Time." His solo career has been thriving. Because he now records for his own label, Wincraft, he was able to release it twice within a year (adding a bonus CD) without considering it a reissue. There was no particular justification for this other than that with one thing or another he did not think it had gotten the attention it deserved the first time around.

Owning and operating his own record label might be one explanation for why he refers to his legendary band in the third person. Modesty might be another.

The night before, in Antwerp, Belgium, Winwood had finished a European tour with the Funk Brothers, survivors of the unsung studio band that constructed and backed up Motown's 1950s and 1960s R&B hits. The current edition of the Funk Brothers includes, as Winwood put it, "guys on stage in wheelchairs," but, he was quick to add, "It was so much fun to sing songs like 'Shotgun' and 'What's Going On?' with them."

Winwood entered his teens playing both guitar and piano in his brother Muff's jazz band in Birmingham, England, and he took part in the English blues revival led by Alexis Korner and John Mayall that also produced Mick Jagger, Jack Bruce, Paul Jones and Charlie Watts, among others. Like Stevie Wonder, he also was a prodigy first known as "Stevie." He surfaced in London at 16 with the Spencer Davis Group and his insistent organ riffs were central to his voice on such mid-'60s chart-busters as "Gimme Some Lovin"' and "I'm a Man."

Although he has sold more records than you can count and has been nominated for too many Grammys to cite (and has won his share), Winwood comes across as a musician more than a pop star. His haircut does not look as if it were unduly important to him, for one thing. For another, he does not find it necessary to change his clothes to go on stage to play music.

He played on Jimi Hendrix's recording of "Voodoo Chile" ("there were no chord sheets, no nothing; he just started playing"), he has learned how to construct bass lines between his left hand and the pedals of a Hammond B-3 organ - not easy to do - and he is particularly proud to have played Afro-Cuban music with Tito Puente and Arturo Sandoval.

Winwood was 18 when he formed Traffic in 1967. His plaintive, high tenor voice attracted immediate attention. It was a trademark sound that took only a few measures to identify and once heard was hard to forget. Such songs as "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys," "Colored Rain," "40,000 Headmen" and "(That Good Old Fashioned) Medicated Goo" ("a song about the '60s"), most of them written in collaboration with the drummer Jim Capaldi, were smart and wear well.

The arrangements included Cuban, Brazilian and Jamaican elements and long jams with modal saxophone improvisations before that sort of thing was generally done. The masterpiece "Dear Mr. Fantasy" ("play us a tune/Something to make us all happy/Do anything, take us out of this gloom/Sing a song, play guitar/Make it snappy") accompanied a recent National Football League TV commercial.

Traffic was an on-and-off-again band that broke up for good in 1974. Sidemen came and went. At one point, Winwood took leave to join Eric Clapton in Blind Faith ("Can't Find My Way Home"), considered the first super group, with Rick Grech and Ginger Baker. By the time he passed through Baker's Air Force, the B-3 had become his franchise instrument. He learned how to rebuild one out of necessity because the organs have moving parts and tubes that get knocked around on the road and B-3s have not been manufactured for years.

Winwood, who has B-3s and their bulky but essential Leslie speakers on both sides of the Atlantic, knows his history: "The Hammond organ is a very American instrument. It was invented by a clockmaker named Lawrence Hammond in the '20s. He wanted to build an instrument to replace expensive pipe organs in churches. It had a sound of its own and it could be moved around and it was picked up by black churches and then by jazz musicians like Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff in the '50s."

Good players like Joey deFrancesco, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Larry Goldings notwithstanding, the B-3 has mostly been replaced by digital keyboards and synthesizers. People are often heard to say how wonderful it was in the old days when a group as good as Traffic could be popular and some complain that there is no good music any more.

Asked if he agreed with them, Winwood replied: "The problem is that there's just a lot more music in general than there used to be, so of course there's more rubbish. You have to search harder to find the good stuff. I hear good new music."

"Technology is changing music drastically today," he added, "and I think we have to give it time to see how it's going to work itself out."