In the final month of 1968, Dave Mason was summoned to a meeting with his band Traffic for a reason that haunts him to this day. According to Mason, the band’s biggest star, Steve Winwood, wasted no time in telling him four cold things: “I don’t like the way you write. I don’t like the way you sing. I don’t like the way you play. And we don’t want you in the band any more.”
“I was in shock,” Mason recalls. “For me, that was the ultimate band.”
Small wonder he has never fully put them behind him. Though Mason went on to release a string of gold and platinum hits as a solo artist, including a note-perfect solo debut, Alone Together in 1970, he makes clear in a brutally frank new memoir that, for him, Traffic remains the one that got away. He even goes so far as to cast his entire career as a frontman – which has now lasted at least 20 times longer than his days with Traffic – as a default for his true love, which is getting lost in the dynamics of a classic band. “As someone once wrote years ago, ‘Differences combine to form beauty,’” Mason said of an ideal band’s interplay. “Unfortunately, they also combine to drive people apart.”
Mason’s tussles with Traffic, which continued fitfully for decades, are hardly the only dramatic bullet points in his book, which he titled after one of his biggest solo hits, Only You Know and I Know. In his 78 years, the singing/songwriting guitarist has been married four times (divorced three), gone bankrupt twice, suffered the loss of his son to drugs and been sued by several powerful record companies, including one that threatened to kill his career once and for all. Naturally, the book also chronicles his many historic accomplishments, including performing with Jimi Hendrix on the Electric Ladyland album, as well as with Eric Clapton in a nascent version of Derek and the Dominos; George Harrison on his best set, All Things Must Pass; the Rolling Stones on Beggars Banquet; Delaney & Bonnie on their historic 1969 tour; Cass Elliott on an unlikely joint album; and Michael Jackson, who sang backup for him on a solo work.
Coming from a rural background in Worcester, England, Mason’s talents as a guitarist emerged early. After moving to London at the tail end of his teens, he quickly gained attention on the emerging rock scene, where he forged connections with members of Traffic well before their formation. He became close friends and performed in bands with Jim Capaldi, who played drums and wrote lyrics. He also sang backup vocals on several hits by the Spencer Davis Group, each electrified by the improbably soulful voice of a teenage Winwood. In the spring of 1967, when Winwood decided to leave Spencer Davis to form a more adventurous group, he turned to some guys he had jammed with on the side – Capaldi, Mason and multi-instrumentalist Chris Wood. “It was obvious that the band we were forming was going to be a hit because of Steve Winwood,” Mason said. “Then, it was a question of ‘What the hell are we going to sound like?’”
To discover that, they ditched the distractions of the city to rent a dilapidated cottage in the countryside. Unknowingly, their move helped start a trend in bands going back to “the land” to record, presaging similar explorations by Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock and Fairport Convention in rural England. The pieces Mason wrote at the time were fanciful and more pop-oriented than the stuff the other members were writing. For Traffic’s debut album, Mr Fantasy, which appeared eight months after they began, Mason wrote and sang their biggest UK hit, a pop-psychedelic bauble titled Hole in My Shoe. It got to number two, beating the Winwood-Capaldi track Paper Sun at five. Despite their success, Mason made the shock decision to leave directly after their debut appeared. “I realized I needed more life experiences in order to write stuff that would become timeless,” he said.
The fact that the other band members reacted to his decision with a shrug should have indicated to him their less than favorable opinions of his work. However, some months later, while the remaining Traffic members were working on their second album, they realized they didn’t have enough new songs to complete the record. At the time, Mason had been writing up a storm. Perhaps just for expediency’s sake, then, Traffic invited him back to help complete their self-titled sophomore work. For the album, Mason sang and wrote half the songs, including his classic Feelin’ Alright? Given the improvement in Mason’s writing and the increasing confidence of the band, Mason felt nothing but excitement about his future with them. But just two months later he was fired, a move he now believes stemmed from jealousy over him scoring some of their best-known songs. “I didn’t steal any money from them, I didn’t run off with their girlfriends. I don’t know what else it could be,” he said.
Mason thinks the reasons they later gave to the press – that he was writing more pop-oriented songs than they wanted and that he wrote alone while they wrote together – were just excuses. He felt particularly burned by Capaldi’s coldness towards him since they had been close friends before. Interestingly, Mason’s book barely mentions Chris Wood. “I never really had a close relationship with him,” he said.
It’s clear from our interview, however, that he didn’t think much of Wood’s work. “Chris was an art student first,” Mason said. “As a musician? A little bit, maybe.”
Wood, who died of liver disease at 39, also had well-known drug problems. “At the Fillmore East, he collapsed face-down at the keyboards,” Mason said. “We were all experimenting of course but, sadly, Chris took it too far.”
Wounded as Mason may have been by his sacking, he had no trouble attracting attention from other first-rank rockers. Ginger Baker contacted him about trying to form a new power trio after the collapse of Cream, but their jams didn’t jell. Then, he got an invitation to work with Hendrix, who he’d met while working with Traffic. In fact, he once invited Hendrix to jam with the band at the cottage but he said the other members turned up their noses. “They didn’t want any interlopers,” he said.
For a while, there was talk of Mason replacing Noel Redding on bass in Hendrix’s band. Instead, he wound up playing acoustic guitar on Hendrix’s classic song Crosstown Traffic, along with adding some backup vocals and sitar on Electric Ladyland. In another break, Joe Cocker covered Mason’s song Feelin’ Alright (minus the question mark) on his hit debut album, adding a distinctly different piano and percussion arrangement that became definitive. After hearing Cocker’s take, Mason recalls thinking, “Shit, I should have done it that way!”
Mason went on to play with Delaney & Bonnie on their historic British tour that also featured Clapton and Harrison. In his book, Mason describes showing Harrison some moves on slide guitar on the tour that greatly affected his signature smooth style on All Things Must Pass. The Delaney & Bonnie tour, and subsequent live album, also introduced a new song Mason had written, Only You Know and I Know, which would become the lead track on his 1970 solo debut, released two months later. Mason’s debut also stood out with its design. The first 250,000 copies featured a randomized swirl of color in the vinyl, making each a unique piece of art.
His next album proved just as surprising, a collaboration with Cass Elliot, whom he had befriended in the Laurel Canyon scene. Though the album has its strengths, ultimately “it was just patched together”, Mason said, which helps account for the public’s indifferent reaction to it. Another factor was the friction at the time between him and his record company, the boutique label Blue Thumb. As their top-selling artist, Mason wanted to renegotiate what he considered an unfair contract, something they were loth to do. As tensions rose, Mason stole some tapes he had been working on, prompting them to retaliate by issuing an album of outtakes and demos under the title Headkeeper. The result so angered Mason, he gave press interviews telling fans not to buy it.
During that same fraught period, Mason began jamming with Clapton and the rhythm section of Delaney & Bonnie’s band for what would become Derek and the Dominos. Unfortunately, Clapton was deep into heroin at the time and so, said Mason, “a lot of time was spent sitting around doing nothing. After a while, I said, ‘I can’t do this, guys. I’ve got to go.’”
Shortly thereafter, Mason had another awkward encounter with Traffic. Improbably, they invited him back again, if only for a six-gig tour of England that yielded the exciting live album, Welcome to the Canteen. Asked why he thinks they brought him back given their fractious history, Mason surmises, “probably to fulfill some recording obligation”.
Luckily, his solo career got a new shot of energy from a fresh contract with Columbia Records, leading to a major hit in 1977 with the single We Just Disagree. Eventually, however, contract issues arose with the new label as well, leading to a near ruinous suit in which the company’s lawyer told him at one point: “We’re going to bury you.”
“Take your best shot,” Mason recalls answering back.
The cumulative result of these encounters gave the guitarist a reputation for being difficult. “As far as I was concerned, they were being difficult,” he retorted. “My artistic integrity is all I have. This is my work: ‘don’t fuck with it!’”
Like many classic rockers, Mason’s chart career ended with the 80s, but he has continued to be a reliably popular concert draw in all the decades since. Along the way, he also had a few more nasty swipes with Traffic. In the 90s, he and Capaldi reunited for a tour that included a show at New York’s Bottom Line. Winwood showed up in the audience that night, and though Capaldi had specifically warned Mason not to draw attention to him, towards the concert’s end the guitarist asked Winwood to come on stage to play with them. Winwood obliged, but he was clearly far from pleased about it. Asked if he was being deliberately provocative by inviting Winwood up, Mason said: “Of course! I didn’t care. It was my show, my stage and you’re stuck!”
Things went even further south in 2003 when Traffic were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. For the performance segment, Mason proposed a guitar duel between him and Winwood on Dear Mr Fantasy to underscore their role as one of music’s first jam bands. Instead, Winwood insisted on playing guitar alone, relegating Mason to bass, a position he turned down flat. “It was turning into the Steve Winwood show,” Mason said.
The bad blood even ran into the afterlife. In 2017, well after Capaldi’s death, Mason sensed enough of a thaw to propose a tour with Winwood under Traffic’s name. Winwood shot it down, saying that Capaldi had made him promise on his deathbed never to tour under the band’s banner again. “For somebody to elicit that promise on a deathbed, it’s just fucking bizarre,” Mason said of Capaldi’s request. “It’s machiavellian.”
Regardless, the guitarist found his own route back to his classic band just this year. He’s currently performing across the US on a Traffic Jam tour, which features reinvented versions of the band’s old material. He has not heard from Winwood on the move.
As vulnerable as Mason has made himself by airing all these frustrations in public, he wrote in his book that doing so had given him peace. “On one level, I could hate every one of them,” he said of the other Traffic members. But, “without that opportunity I never would have had the platform to do want I went on to do”.
“I’m not one to hold grudges,” he said, “but I’m also not one to forget.”
Only you know & I know by Dave Mason & Chris Epting (Omnibus Press, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
