TRAFFIC – Evening Blue

Rolling Stone named it one of the best songs on Traffic’s 1973 album, and the live record from that spring’s tour left it off.

When Rolling Stone reviewed Traffic’s Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory in 1973, it found most of the record too even in temper, song after song cut to the same shape, and named only two tracks as its high points. One was the closer, “(Sometimes I Feel So) Uninspired.” The other was “Evening Blue,” a slow, organ-led ballad about being alone as the day goes down, sung by Steve Winwood. That October, Island released On the Road, the double live album taped on the band’s spring tour of Germany. “Uninspired” made the cut. “Evening Blue” did not, and the tour’s filmed record of the song comes from a television studio in Bremen.

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The song came out of a band in the middle of changing shape. Jim Capaldi, Traffic’s founding drummer and its lyricist, had made a solo album in 1972 with musicians from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and two of them came into Traffic: bassist David Hood and drummer Roger Hawkins, who joined Ghanaian percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah in the rhythm section. On Shoot Out, Hawkins played the drums and Capaldi moved over to percussion, a striking handover in a group he had helped start behind the kit. The band recorded the album at Strawberry Hill Studios in Jamaica in 1972 with Winwood producing. Every song on it but Chris Wood’s instrumental “Tragic Magic” carries the Winwood–Capaldi credit, “Evening Blue” included.

Record buyers took to the album faster than critics did. Island released it in February 1973, and Billboard’s album chart ranked it No.6, one place higher than The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys had peaked. The reviews ran cooler. Rolling Stone’s was mixed, and later assessments were harsher, with AllMusic judging the writing and the playing uniformly weak. “Evening Blue” sat apart from the rest of the record in one plain way. Next to the thirteen-minute “Roll Right Stones,” it was the shortest song Winwood and Capaldi wrote for the album, five quiet minutes on a record built for stretching.

Three men from Muscle Shoals on German television

For the spring tour, Island founder Chris Blackwell brought in a third Muscle Shoals player, keyboardist Barry Beckett, and Traffic became a seven-piece. The tour opened at Birmingham’s Town Hall on March 20, 1973, with a re-formed Spooky Tooth supporting on most dates. It moved through Amsterdam, Rome and Vienna before reaching seven German cities, from Munich’s Circus Krone on April 3 to Hamburg’s Musikhalle on April 10. In the middle of that run the band stopped in Bremen for Musikladen, Radio Bremen’s music show, which had replaced Beat-Club on German screens only in December 1972. The official Traffic channel titles the upload “Live in West Germany, 1973.”

A concert hall and a television studio asked different things of that band. On stage, the Muscle Shoals players gave Winwood a floor he could jam over for as long as a crowd would stay with him. On the Road shows how far that went: the European double album opens on a “Glad” and “Freedom Rider” medley that runs past twenty minutes. A television slot favors a song that can be heard whole, and “Evening Blue” was exactly that. The Bremen clip catches the seven-piece Traffic doing something its own live album never set down.

That lineup did not outlast the spring. After the German dates, Winwood let the Muscle Shoals players go and brought in Rosko Gee on bass. Traffic made one more studio album, When the Eagle Flies, in 1974, and then broke up. Chris Wood died on July 12, 1983, and Capaldi on January 28, 2005; Beckett died in 2009. On the Road remembers the 1973 band by how far it could stretch a groove. The Musikladen film keeps the other side of it, the five minutes Rolling Stone heard as the best of Shoot Out. Without it, the record of that band would be missing the song its own reviewers rated highest.