Traffic: John Barleycorn Must Die : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

At best, records are frozen instants of music. The ultimate musical experience is always live. It's a rare artist who does not reveal much of himself and his work by the way he attacks the task of playing it, and you have to be there to know what it means. Some few records manage to bridge the gap, simply by overpowering the barriers, storming the gates of electronic distance and repetition with sheer unified energy. The rest are ... words and music.

So we have before us two inexorably linked albums: John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic, a trio now, continuing their group saga, and Alone Together with Dave Mason, formerly one-quarter of Traffic, off on his own trip. They're both good albums, careful, well-played, occasionally brilliant, well-conceived, but neither of them breaks its vinyl bonds and soars.

Take Traffic. "Glad," the instrumental cut which opens the album, has some glorious piano work by Steve Winwood and some inventive, imaginative sax playing by Chris Wood. It's all so perfect, so exquisite and so dull. "Freedom Rider" is much more like it. Wood's flute and Winwood's piano are both extraordinary, and Jim Capaldi's drumming is fine, very sympathetic, but ... if this train is moving, why isn't the scenery changing?

The best cut on the album is probably the title tune, a traditional English ballad arranged by Winwood for acoustic guitar and flute. Wood's flute is again exceptional, delicate and ornate, and Steve sings the song just right, with an admirable sense of restraint and simplicity. Simple, but it works.

Winwood's two virtuoso cuts, "Stranger To Himself" and "Every Mother's Son," are equally satisfying. Jim Capaldi's lyrics are almost perfect, and Winwood's singing is just stunning, lean and clear. And he is a good virtuoso—the guitar on "Stranger" and the organ on "Every Mother's Son" are both powerful and moving. But that kind of control-board masturbation can take the music only so far. Steve Winwood may be the best at it that there is, but it still isn't a very rewarding art form.

Perhaps part of the problem is my high expectations of any Traffic album. This is a good album of rock and roll music, featuring the best rock and roll woodwind player anywhere and one of the best singers, and maybe the trio is still just getting together again, feeling each other out. Traffic, after all, was a light-year jump from Mr. Fantasy; maybe the next album will soar again.

In terms of expectations, Alone Together is much better. Mason's talent as a song writer remains undiminished, and his easy, fluid voice, long in Winwood's giant shadow, is used to maximum effect.

This is, of course, the marbled LP, a brilliant burst of color spinning on the turntable, the grooves barely discernable so the needle seems to be floating across the record. Maybe the next step could be a little cartoon around the edge of the record, like those flip-the-pages funnies, or a slow inward spiral so you could be literally hypnotized by the record.

The music is vintage Mason, veering here and there towards commercialism but never quite getting there, slick but not offensive. Falling in line with the rest of Great Britain, Mason chose old Delaney and Bonnie sidemen for the session, including Leon Russell, Jim Keltner, Carl Radle and Rita Coolidge, plus old Mother Don Preston. Russell, as always, is much in evidence, and his piano (if it is him—the album doesn't say and we have only internal evidence), particularly on "Sad and Deep As You," is masterful.

The high point of the album is clearly "Look at You Look at Me," a song Mason wrote with Trafficker Jim Capaldi, whose tight, urgent drumming on the cut moves the song along with discretion and skill. Mason's singing is simply superb. The other exceptional cuts are "Shouldn't Have Took More Than You Gave" (Mason is not, between you and me, a great song titlist), which features the best wah-wah guitar since Clapton's initial exposition on "Tales of Brave Ulysses"; and "World in Changes," with Mason's deceptively simple lyrics pulled along by some brilliant organ work.

High commercial potential on the album is represented by "Only You Know and I Know," which has a ricky-ticky rhythm reminiscent of "You Can All Join In." It's really a trivial song (like others on the album, particularly "Watin' On You" and "Just A Song"), but it will sound great on a tinny AM radio at 60 miles an hour.

But the Mason album, too, is more potential than realization. It too is, in a very real sense, flawless, but, as Paul McCartney is beginning to learn, great muisc is much better than flawless music.