Only Dave Mason could quit more bands than he actually joined, but he made memorable marks with many.
He co-founded 1960s British band Traffic, left, rejoined, left again. He also passed through Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, as did George Harrison and Eric Clapton, also Derek & the Dominos and Fleetwood Mac.
Dave Mason at the Union College Memorial Chapel, 1972. Check the guy in the hat, at left
Between others’ bands, he made his own albums including the landmark “Alone Together” (1970), a tuneful, rocking favorite of mine. The album co-starred top talents of that vivid time including keyboardists Leon Russell, Larry Knechtel and John Simon; guitarist Don Preston; bassists Chris Etheridge and Carl Radle; drummers John Barbata, Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner; and singers Bonnie Bramlett, Rita Coolidge and Claudia Lennear. But Mason’s own songs and forceful guitar really make the album. Some listeners even checked the credits expecting to find Jimi Hendrix listed as the guitar soloist. No, it’s Mason.
Mason also played recording sessions with star-level rockers. The first sound we hear in Hendrix’s epic cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is Mason’s surging 12-string. He played an Indian reed instrument on the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” and recorded with both George Harrison and Paul McCartney among others.
As litigious as he was prolific, he sued record label after record label, made hits and misses, stole his own master recordings from studios and gloried in his resiliency, as the New York Times reported in the obituary marking his death Sunday near Lake Tahoe.
The Times borrowed a Mason quote from Goldmine: “I’ve been through four earthquakes, three marriages, two bankruptcies, one major hurricane and I’ve survived the music business,” he said. “That’s a pretty good record.”
Here, let’s also remember Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
The positive side of Mason’s decades-deep music-making resides in his sound and his songs, notably “Feelin’ Alright?,” “Only You Know and I Know,” “World in Changes,” “Sad and Deep as You.”
Like most of the musicians whose deaths we’ve mourned recently, Mason passed through here many times. He played the Union College Memorial Chapel in Schenectady in 1972 (Jimmy and Vella opened), Albany’s Palace Theatre in 1973 (opening for the second line-up of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band); and most recently at The Egg in Albany, shortly before health issues forced his retirement from touring.
Dave Mason at Albany’s Palace Theatre, 1973
Pardon the fuzzy, badly-exposed “quality” of my photos of those early-70s shows here: slow film, slow lenses, and I was just learning to shoot concerts – before I started watching Marty Benjamin to learn how.
When Dave Mason’s World in Changes Tour brought him to The Egg in February 2022, he played Traffic tunes, solo-career songs and closed with “All Along the Watchtower.”
That’s a pretty good record.
Hoke's Jukebox 