Dave Mason Tarrytown Music Hall

Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer and founding member of the English group Traffic in the late 60s, Dave Mason will perform at The Tarrytown Music Hall on Friday, February 26. Leon Russell is also on the twin bill.

You’re best known for your solo album Alone Together but you wrote some signature songs for Traffic. How did you get started as a songwriter?

I always thought of myself as a guitar player but in London if you wanted to get booked in a club you had to have hit songs. So I wrote “Hole In My Shoe” for Traffic. That was my first song – in 1967. Even then it really started with the instrumentation. I was playing sitar and wanted to work it into a song for the band so I had to write the lyrics. It went to number 2 in the UK charts and was the band’s best selling single.

But to me your signature song with Traffic was “Feelin’ All Right”.

A really simple song.

But it captured something universal.

I purposely set out, I don’t try to write timeless themes. I was just trying to write a simple song. It was just two chords and a simple lyric. Lyrically it’s about, you know, not feeling too good myself. But it struck a chord. Then Joe Cocker and then fifty more artists covered it and then every garage band in the world. It never stops getting played and going into commercials and movies.

Then “Only You Know and I Know” became a signature song for Delaney and Bonnie.

I moved to Los Angeles and started playing guitar for Delaney and Bonnie just because I knew them and Eric Clapton toured with us too. That was just a song I had written that wound up on Alone Together in 1970 that they picked up to play on our tour in 1969.

Your name pops up in so many collaborations in those years.

Yeah, Hendrix, Clapton, The Stones. That was just the world I was living in at the time. In the states the music scene is spread out. You have the New York scene, L.A.. San Francisco, Nashville. In the UK everybody was in London and there were a finite number of studios. Eddie Kramer was the producer who did Traffic and the Stones and Hendrix and it was all the same studio, Olympic. You just crossed paths with people. You were a fan of theirs and they were a fan of Traffic. People just dropped by everybody’s sessions and checked in to see what they were doing. And then you’re playing on their album.

You played 12-string guitar on Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower”.

That was the collaboration that really stands out from all of them. The first time I ever saw him was in a small club before anybody knew who he was. And when I saw him play guitar I thought, “Ooh, I better find a new instrument because I can’t play like that.” But then he asked me to stand in with him. He was so innovative. Especially in the studio. There were a lot of great guitar players then and since but there aren’t anymore Hendrixes. I was going to step in for Noel Redding on bass for the Experience but they broke up.

Who was your first influence? 

I just wanted to play guitar so I was a fan of The Ventures. And my first concert was probably The Shadows with Cliff Richard. They were huge all over the world except the States. But mostly we were just listening to American music. Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Bo Didley. It was the 60s, just 16-17 years after WWII. There were still bombed out parts of London when I was growing up. There just wasn’t anything happening, so we just copied American music and put our twist on it.  

And then you went solo with “Alone Together” a seminal album of the period.

Yeah, well it’s not like I said I want to go alone. I had already written those songs when I was with Traffic and they would have been on their next album if they had stayed together. It worked out.

What are your plans for Tarrytown?

I’ll play some old Traffic stuff and then some songs from my solo career. And Leon Russell, who played with me on Alone Together, will do a set and I’ll be selling some CDs of my live Traffic Jam Tour. And maybe some surprises.

What are you most proud of in your career?

Most proud of what I’ve been able to do for the Vets. I started a charitable organization to help Vets start their own businesses. We helped start a very successful farm in Jacksonville, an office cleaning business in Jacksonville and we supply Vets with vans and trucks. Not to get all political but it’s shameful the way America treats their vets. There are over 50,000 homeless Vets and too many suicides.

I’ve always had a feeling for the Vets. I came along a year after the WWII and my half-brother was driving tanks in North Africa. Dad was in WWI. I’m very lucky I could play in guitar in a rock band and not in an oompah band wearing lederhosen.

A 2004 Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Dave Mason recorded his biggest solo hit, “We Just Disagree” in 1977 and had a second hit that year with “Let It Go, Let It Flow”. His solo album, “Alone Together” featured the hit songs, “Only You Know and I Know”, “Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave”, “World In Changes” and “Sad and Deep as You”. He also wrote the iconic Traffic songs “You Can All Join In” and “Vagabond Virgin”.

Music: Spring 2016

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