A Morning Walk With Steve Winwood

A Morning Walk With Steve Winwood

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Or Why There'll Always Be An England

Jeff Nesin

Winston Churchill would be proud. Steve Winwood apologizes for being delayed, motions us both into equally uncomfortable chairs (leaving the plush one graciously vacant), and gives me his full attention. Polite, thoughtful, clearheaded and forthright, he seems to embody qualities of Englishness that are far older and more honorable than the “Falkland Spirit.”

My expectations overturned, I am temporarily starstruck by the unique combination of modest demeanor and massive music history before me. I remember the handsome British teenager with the miraculously Ray Charles-ish voice who wrote, sang and played most ofthe leads on the mid-’60s hits ofthe Spencer Davis Group. I remember the paler and wilder founding father of Traffic, who made some of the most original music of the late ’60s! I remember the guitar hero (and the voice, always the voice) who rumbled nose to nose with Eric Clapton in Blind Faith, the first cruiserweight “super group” to test the international waters. I remember him as the energetic focus of Traffic’s reemergence (John Barleycorn Must Die} whose energy seemed to dissipate as the sales figures began to swell (Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys, Shoot Out At The Fantasy Factory). And finally, I remember the secluded country squire as one-man-band who unleashed “While You See A Chance,” the most inescapable hit of 1981, on an unsuspecting world. I remember it all and so does he. Very clearly. After 18 years as a rock ’n’ roll star, Steve Winwood is somehow robust and sensible.

Steve (He’s bigger than I thought he’d be—definitely not a Stevie.) is in this country only briefly, in support of Talking Back To The Night, a late summer gem that has given me a lot of pleasure. No, he’s not going to tour. He’s put in quite enough road time now, thank you. So, naturally enough, I ask about the idyllic life that he earned the hard way..

“I was talking to Pete Townshend and he started by saying, ‘What a lucky thing you are—just walking the dogs and making records. I wish I was dping that.’ I said, ‘Gome on, cut the crap, Pete. It’s not all like that,’ which, of course, he knows. He was just winding me up a bit. Everyone who works at home will tell you .there are problems there. You’re working in the same place all the time. When you’re finished working, you’re still ip the same place—you’ve got no separation. And you’re not away at the office when somebody wants to distract you.

“In a normal day I do like to get out and take a certain amount of fresh air and exercise. I walk with my dogs—occasionally I go up into the mountains. I’ve got a pointer,and a lurcher. (A what?) A lurcher. It’s an old breed, a cross between a greyhound and«a collie. It’s a gypsy’s dog, a poacher’s dog.

“There’s a lot of land nearby and I have good relations with the neighboring farmers. That’s one thing I did throughout the ’70s. I got to know people who knew nothing about the rock ’n’ roll business. That was very valuable to me. It helped me no end to know people who’d never heard of Steve Win wood or TrafficI think I tried to home in'on that.”

When he’s not pointing and lurching about Gloucestershire he spends endless hours in his own studio playing and recording every note on his last two albums so I ask him about his solitary obsessions. “It’s like still photography. Everything can change in the darkroom and the same thing applies to recording. My piano technique and my guitar technique are, I think, rather limited, but what isn t so limited is my ability to make them sound good. That’s what’s got me so intrigued with recording.

It helped me no end to know people who'd never heard of Steve Winwood or Traffic.

“The medium itself is an art. You can do so many things that you can’t rea//y do. On ‘There’s A River’ on Talking Back To The Night I play a string bass. Now, there’s no way that I could look someone in the eye and say that I can play string bass, but I knew that I could cut a very convincing track and I could act out the part of a string bass player. I’ve watched them enough so that I know the kinds of things they do, the moves they make, where the fingers go on the fretboard and I could emulate it. So I rented this old string bass, rolled the machines and managed to catch it. It sounds like somebody who really knows his stuff and there’s no way I know string bass.

“The thing about recording is that you can’t produce anything you can’t do. You can’t take a bad sax and make it into a good sound by twiddling knobs. You’ve got to do it, but you’ve only got to do it once—and not all at once. You can do it in bits and then piece them all together. It takes a kind of confidence, which is why I record at home. The confidence is easy when there’s no one else there.”

Either I’m not as convinced by studio techniques as Winwood is or simply concerned that he can’t keep avoiding solo sterility indefinitely. How, I wonder, can he be responsible for a million details and still hope to get the vocals full of feeling? “First takes. That’s not to say I do everything on first take, but that’s the only way to get it. A certain amount of that relies on the flexibility of your equipment. What often happens is that the first take has the right spirit, the right quality, the right energy but it’s not right. There’s a couple of mistakes —notes hit badly maybe, or wrong lyrics. Normally, a producer would say, “Right, we’re very close. One more and we’ll get it.” Which is fine if you keep the first take, too. But if you’re running out of tracks, what do you do? I’ve only got 16 tracks so the problem has arisen. I try to record the most important things early when there’s more room.

“But that balance must be kept. Sometimes I get hung up in little bits and I lose track of the original thought. And you’ve got to hang onto the way you first thought of a song, the way you imagined it in the first place. Because when you start changing it you’re really rewriting it. OK, that’s fine, but when do you stop rewriting it? At some point you must hang On to a vision of what you thought the song would be like. I was telling Pete Townshend that I’m never going to make a demo again. You’ve got to go for real—do it properly the first time. Take the song you’ve written and go and record it. Of course there’ve got to be compromises. The balance is between emotion and science.”

Moving from the general to the specific I begin to ask about Talking Back To The Night. Even though the lyrics were written by collaborator Will Jennings, the songs seem to be about Steve. “Yeah, they all relate to me. ‘Still In The Game’ certainly does. ‘While There’s A Candle Burning’ is probably the most autobiographical song on the album. What sparked it off was Will reading in the Rolling Stone Illustrated Steve winwood History Of Rock ’n’ Roll that I was a victim of drugs or some such thing. When he met my publisher he asked, “How is Steve... now?” Of course he was told, “He’s fine, always has been.” When Will and I actually got together it became a joke between us, but I looked into the possibility of a lawsuit. But whilst I was exploring the possibility of some kind of legal action, Arc Of A Diver went to #1 in the Rolling Stone charts. I thought this must surely be reward enough for me. Winning a lawsuit could give me no greater pleasure than that.

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“Drugs are something I feel very strongly about. The whole bloody album’s about that. Will was working on a lyric about a sax player that eventually became the title song. We were tossing it around and I said, My God, that’s like a lot of people I know. It’s a relic of old romantic notions: the artist must suffer in order to produce anything worthwhile...Rimbaud, Baudelaire... When you see this happening to people— which I have, people I love—and see their characters change, and realize there’s nothing you can do, your hands are tied...

“That’s not to say that some great artists haven’t suffered a lot and perhaps, as a result, they’ve done great work. OK, fair enough. But when you see the people suffering, their families suffering, and their work as well, and you’re totally helpless... well, it’s there in the songs. It gives basis to the songs. ‘Valerie’ is a nice little love song, but it’s written as a passionate complaint from the singer who’s seeing the girl destroying herself. She’s brilliant and he knows she’s not going to be much longer. When you see these problems you get angry and passionate about them and that’s the basis of those songs.”

Since I had carefully relistened to 18 years of my favorite Steve Winwood tracks before going to meet him, there was a lot of rock history I was anxious to cover in a very limited time, particularly the brief curious career of Blind Faith. Formed in 1969 by Winwood, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Ric Grech when Traffic and Cream had dissolved, it lasted less than a year. The one LP they recorded together however, still sounds wonderful. I tell Steve that I could listen to side 1 over and over and he agrees.

“It stands up extremely well. There wasn’t any problem making the album. The problems didn’t start until after the album. First, we were the guinea pigs of big concerts. Now you go to a big place like Madison Square Garden to hear a band and they’ve got the sound pretty much together. The equipment’s improved and the technology’s improved almost as a result of people watching Blindt Faith and saying, “That sounded terrible. We must get better equipment for these sites.”

“Secondly, there was the problem with the audience. Cream was hard to get away from because it was such a huge band, but Blind Faith was substantially different. So what do you do? Do you take a hard line and suffer six months of bad writeups until people come off the idea of Cream and accept the idea of Blind Faith? Or do you tease them with a bit of Cream? (JN: Like a 45 minute jam? SW: That’s a bit of Cream. JN: It certainly is!)

“So suddenly there’s this huge audience of a size you’ve never played to and the temptation when you’re playing on stage is to get a good reaction out of the audience. It’s like when you meet people you at least make an effort to put them at their ease. You tend to think: I know why you came here so here’s a bit of it. But at a certain point you say shit, we created this thing on the album and we’re not sticking to it. You get this duality. You come off stage and one part of you feels satisfied and another part feels cheated. How the hell do you come to terms with that?

“It’s easy to see now—just keep doing what you’re doing. Forget Cream. Say, sod off. This is the way we sound. This is what we play like. But you always want to give the people something. You want to design some material that will take them from Cream to Blind Faith. Ultimately the jump was too great.”

The door opens and an Island publicist looks in to remind Steve of his lunch reservation. With so many more things to find out and no more time at all I ask, as a parting shot, about his reading habits.

“I don’t read very much fiction. I like natural history and travel books. Right now I’m reading George Borrow’s Wild Wales. I go to Wales a lot. The Welsh have the bards, the great ancient poets, but of course the poetry only works in Welsh which is the most obscure language I know of. All that literature and it’s inaccessible. I know bits of Welsh, but not nearly enough.”

For those of you who haven’t taken a graduate seminar on noted English travel writers of the 19th century, George Borrow (1803-81) was one of the great eccentrics, a tireless walker and gifted linguist. Wild Wales, a recounting of his walks through Wales, was published 120 years ago. Winston Churchill would indeed be proud.