Steve Winwood: From Mr. Fantasy to Mr. Entertainment
” ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ ” is obviously the bane of my life in some ways, because I’ve got to do it all the time,” says Steve Winwood, relaxing in an outlandish Las Vegas hotel room. “But now you actually have a lot more people who have heard ‘Higher Love’ than ‘Gimme Some Lovin’.’ Or, often, people have heard ‘Gimme Some Lovin” and don’t know it’s me. That happens a lot. They say, ‘Why are you covering that Blues Brothers song?’
Characteristically, Winwood – as obliging a bloke as you’ll find – isn’t disturbed that people sometimes fail to associate him with the best-known song of his career, a song that has been a dance-floor burner since he co-wrote and sang it as a teenage prodigy with the Spencer Davis Group in 1966. Perversely, he almost seems to enjoy the lack of recognition.
Warming to his subject, Winwood – who is wearing khaki shorts, a Johnny Clegg and Savuka T-shirt, white sneakers and sweat socks – takes a pull from a bottle of Perrier and tells a story about Tom Lord Alge, who co-engineered Winwood’s 1986 smash Back in the High Life and co-produced his latest album, Roll with It. “We were working for quite some time, and something came up, and we talked about ‘I’m a Man,’ ” Winwood says, referring to the Spencer Davis Group’s other legendary hit, which he also co-wrote and sang. “And Tom said, ‘You don’t mean “I’m a man, yes I am….” ‘ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You wrote that?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ You know, he just really didn’t know.”
At this point Winwood, who has a day off in Las Vegas, where he’s performing at Caesars Amphitheater, can afford to take such slights in his stride. At forty, he is more successful than ever, on the strength of the massive sales of Back in the High Life and Roll with It. Not that he had been a slouch before.
After bursting on the scene with Spencer Davis, Winwood formed Traffic, one of the most adventurous bands of the Sixties and Seventies, in 1967. He separated from Traffic in 1969 to form Blind Faith, with Eric Clapton, bassist Rick Grech and Cream drummer Ginger Baker. In 1980 his solo career took off for the first time with the platinum Arc of a Diver, a virtuoso studio performance on which Winwood wrote all the music and played every instrument on every track.
Winwood’s youthfully innocent good looks, his disarming manner and his refusal to wear his stature on his sleeve can make for surprises. An offhand, let’s-get-settled question like. “When was the last time you were in Las Vegas?” elicits an equally casual answer: “Nineteen years ago, on the Blind Faith tour. I went to see Elvis on his comeback tour. He was amazing.”
Still, the Las Vegas setting, the impossible kitsch of his Caesars Palace hotel room (the parlor of the suite is a nightmare vision of yellow, brown and mustard tones, with a wild floral pattern on the walls), the mention of Elvis and even Winwood’s distance from his celebrated past create a certain uneasiness. The scene is haunted by a remark Winwood made three weeks before on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon in Chicago, during one of the first stops on his tour.
In a far more subdued suite at the Omni Ambassador East, Winwood explained how three years earlier, after the relative failure of his album Talking Back to the Night, he had “decided to embrace the fact of being an entertainer.” Straightforward as it may seem, the remark sounded strange coming from a man whose exquisite musicianship, outstanding voice and expansive musical vision had long set the standard of integrity.
“This is probably a recent thing that I’ve realized, about music being entertainment,” he said, his voice hoarse from the previous night’s show. “I had a choice to go a couple of ways. If I was to say, ‘Well, I’m a musician, I’m not an entertainer,’ then I have no business going onstage with lights and trying to look … I should be in the back doing the music, and somebody else should be out front.
“So you have the choice. You have to decide which way to go. I thought about it long and seriously, and I thought that if I sing songs to people, you can’t deny it, you’re an entertainer. It’s not just ‘I’m entertaining them’ but ‘I am actually an entertainer.’ ”
This decision obviously had enormous commercial benefits. Both Back in the High Life and Roll with It are fine records that have yielded hit after hit. Onstage, Winwood no longer finds an instrument to play on every song. Although he seems uncomfortable at times, he dons fashionable duds and tackles the frontman’s role with determination – and the crowds at his sold-out shows love it.
But it’s hard to escape the feeling that Winwood isn’t challenging himself, that his Eighties work isn’t charged with the passion he displayed early on. “Really, your question is about the value of art in the marketplace,” Winwood says in response to this observation. “That’s a tricky question. It’s got to be a balance, and it’s hard to get the balance right every time. I spent a lot of years doing stuff where people said, ‘That’s fantastic,’ but nobody bought it. That also is a bad situation, because what are you achieving? You do want to be heard – unless you’re trying to create some elitist thing.”
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