MR. FANTASY

The second half of the sixties provided a launch pad for a number of bands on the British Isles who were "doing their own thing" with blues, psychedelia and jazz influences. Small Faces, Spooky Tooth, Trinity, Family - or even Traffic. These bands (and many others, of course) may not have become pop culture icons, but their music still has the inimitable touch of a time when genre development was counted not in years, but rather in months or often weeks.

In the band Traffic, an interesting four musicians came together in mid-1967 after a jam. Guitarist and player of various other (mainly Indian) stringed instruments Dave Mason, woodwind player Steve Wood, drummer Jim Capaldi and (at that point the figure with clearly the highest musical "credit") Steve Winwood, a keyboardist (but actually more of a multi-instrumentalist) who had left the popular Spencer Davis Group shortly before. It soon became apparent that the Winwood/Wood/Capaldi trio were more musically drawn together, while Mason was profiling himself as a guitar solitaire, both humanly and as a writer. The disagreements came to light mainly during the recording of their debut album Mr. Fantasy, where Mason had to record several bass parts against his will.

Specifically, these tracks were Mr. Fantasy and Dealer - and although Mason may not think so to this day, they both turned out great. Full-blooded guitar blues rock with subtle psychedelic curtains has juice and certainly doesn't get boring. The psychedelia literally oozes from the opening Heaven Is in Your Mind, which gets me with its combination of two contrasting melodic motifs and playful piano. I'm so much impressed by the densely backed melody of Coloured Rain, in which Wood's saxophone rages like a black hand. Then we have two slower pieces - the graduating into a heavier form of Hope I Never Find Me There and the utterly soulful splendour of No Face, No Name, No Number. A little "aside" from the rest of the material on the record is the cheerful looking piano piece Berkshire Poppies, and Mason's oriental psychedelia Utterly Simple. And then there's the closing r'n'b jam Giving to You, which builds all that melodic charge into a chaotic vocal collage.

Traffic's psychedelic melody is not hard to succumb to. Imaginative arrangements, distinctive vocals and melodic sovereignty in pretty much all the tracks puts this debut pretty damn high in my eyes - even within the year 1967, which perhaps favoured recordings of this kind the most of all years. After a little hesitation I give Mr. Fantasy full marks for that geyser of creativity.