Traffic - On The Road

Phone charger reacquired, here we go.

First let's take a moment to appreciate the sheer giddy joy i feel when looking at the cover of Traffic's live album On The Road. It's beautiful. Next, let's appreciate that it has 4 tracks. Yep that's it, four extended live jams  that critics weren't thrilled about the first time around in shorter studio form.

Some history on Traffic is probably in order. Steve Winwood formed Traffic as a psych Rock band, jammed with Hendrix a lot, then randomly quit to form Blind Faith with Eric Clapton. When that was over, he went back to his friends and they had a second go at Traffic, now expanding into Jazz Rock territory. That's why critics don't like this album. Critics hate it when you do whatever you feel like without their permission. Oh, sure, the playing is great, but who has an attention span longer than 3 minutes? Not us, Traffic sucks now.

Bugger that, this is fantastic. I simply can't understand the mentality that listening to people actually MAKE music is a bad thing. This is great. It reminds me of Santana, just not quite so flashy. Oh, yeah, critics hated Santana too. That was a big theme in the 60s and early 70s, you're not allowed to like great bands succeeding on their own merits, stealing that hard earned revenue from our benevolent corporate pop overlords. Remember, this is Island Records (originally from Jamaica, but relocated to the UK) merely paying Capitol to manufacture it in the US so they didn't have to export it. Now it's all a nasty bowl of porridge under UMG, but back then they were ligitimately competing.

Oh yeah, great stuff. Not gonna lie, i'd rather listen to Winwood than Clapton most any day of the week.