The genius that is Steve Winwood

Winwood was an 18 year old English kid that sounded like a middle aged black man from Georgia in Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. What a great voice

I've always liked that song. It just has a really good feel and sound to it for me

I like his overall body of work, but I've seen him live twice and he was pretty bad to mediocre both times. Well moreso the first time.

The first time was back in 1988 and he came out with a Janet Jackson like headset on, and was kind of trying to dance around on stage a bit. ...kind of pacing back and forth.

The second time was about 7-8 years ago when he opened for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. He wasn't "terrible" as an opener, but he only played about 30-35 minutes.

Thanks for sharing

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The second time was about 7-8 years ago when he opened for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. He wasn't "terrible" as an opener, but he only played about 30-35 minutes

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Saw Winwood (and Petty) on that same tour (NJ)

Same impressions. Short set. And the performance was so-so.

Petty's band was great OTOH.

I have always felt that even as talented as he is, he has always been underappreciated. He is a fantastic guitar player, keyboard player, singer and songwriter.
Just listen to John Barleycorn Must Die, Low Spark or Walkin In the Wind, and let those songs take you to a great place.

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He is a fantastic guitar player, keyboard player, singer and songwriter.

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Pretty sure he wrote all of the music and played every instrument for every song when recording his first solo album.

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Prince did that on AT LEAST his first 3 albums and also for 2 #1 hits later on in the mid 80s. He dropped the first of those albums at age 19. Hell, he only hired a band because he needed one to tour with.

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Agree and disagree. He was a virtuoso on both guitar and keys and a damned fine bass player in his own right. He was a decent drummer, but most of those pre-Revolution records had programmed drums. As far as the band, he like the idea of a band and really enjoyed working with those folks. Without question he was the ringmaster, conductor, chief cook and bottle washer of the outfit, though.


(ETA: Maca and Prince do get the biggest press out of their being big name multi-instrumentalists, but Winwood is right there with them in ability and probably the best singer of the three.)

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In the video for "I wanna be your lover" from his second album, he's clearly shown playing the drums, and everything else for that matter.

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He took a hybrid approach to drums and that was the thing he would most likely outsource if it came to that (thus his long working relationships with Bobby Z, John Blackwell and Michael Bland). Sometimes he would have all (real or electronic) drums on a track, either played by himself or his working drummer at the time. Other times, he would program the drums (usually himself). And yet other times, he would have both programmed sections and real drumming on a track. Of the main rock instruments, drumming was almost certainly his weakest discipline. That's true of most (but not all) multi-instrumentalists (Phil Collins being a notable exception).

Certainly nobody was going to pay Maca, Steve Winwood or Prince to "just" play drums and sing background vocals for them. In Maca's case, there would almost certainly be someone better already in the band for everything except singing and songwriting. Winwood or Prince could have played "just" keys for tons of bands and their singing/songwriting would have been nice "bonuses".

(ETA: Obviously, Prince was a one-of-a-kind guitar player, as well, but I digress.)

I worked at guitar center in Nashville and was lucky enough to meet him a couple times while he was looking around the drum department, he was really nice and just seemed like down to earth regular dude which is more than I can say for some of the “stars” I met there that didn’t have an ounce of his talent.