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It’s amazing to consider that Steve Winwood was not yet even 19 years old when he formed Traffic and they recorded Dear Mr. Fantasy in 1967. Of course, he had been playing professionally since his early teens, along with brother Muff Winwood in various bands and was the lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group when he was but fifteen, but Traffic’s sound was especially sophisticated coming from someone so young. (Before Winwood left the SDG they had two worldwide hits with “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “I’m a Man.” Talk about precocious!)

Some of the greatest groups of the 60s and 70s are woefully under-documented on film. I’m not aware of an Allman Brothers concert film, for instance and I’ve never seen more than a tiny handful of Frank Zappa and the original Mothers of Invention clips that capture what I always imagined their shows must’ve been like. There is only one sync-sound document of the Velvet Underground. Even David Bowie doesn’t have that much concert footage. Nor, when you get right down to it, considering the amount of gigging they did, do the Grateful Dead. Except for a few pop shows in the US, Britain (and The Beat Club in Germany), many groups would have fallen through the cracks of visual documentation altogether. Full concert films were expensive to mount back then and very rarely green-lighted. There were simply few places to exhibit them.

A group like Traffic, with their jazz/rock fusion sound and 12-minute epics like “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” would have been a difficult band to book on most TV variety shows of the day, so was nice to watch the concert documentary of Traffic Live at Santa Monica 1972 and see them in all their jammy, muso glory. It’s insanely great. If you like Traffic, these performances are stunning:

Legendary producer Jimmy Miller on producing Traffic’s classic ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ album (Mix Online)

Dig Winwood’s three guitar solos. Superb!