Dave Mason obituary

The singer, songwriter and guitarist Dave Mason, who has died aged 79, was the superstar who never was. He first found fame as a founder member of Traffic, and wrote some of the most popular songs from their early repertoire, but could never quite see eye-to-eye with the band’s precocious genius Steve Winwood. Mason’s self-evident talents, which included copious skills on acoustic and electric guitars and a grainy, soulful singing voice, then allowed him to form creative relationships with some of the biggest names of late-1960s and 70s rock, including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Delaney & Bonnie, George Harrison, Cass Elliot and Crosby Stills and Nash – though never on a long-lasting basis. In 1975 he featured on the US chart-topping single Listen to What the Man Said by Paul McCartney’s Wings, and in the mid-90s he was temporarily a member of Fleetwood Mac, featuring on their album Time (1995), for which he co-wrote a couple of tracks. He also released 16 solo albums, the last of them A Shade of Blues (2023), and notched up seven successive Top 50 entries on the US album charts between 1970 and 1977. His first solo disc, the widely admired Alone Together (1970), reached No 22 in the US, while Let It Flow (1977) sold a million copies, even though it only reached 37 on the US chart. It also generated Mason’s biggest hit single, We Just Disagree (written by Jim Krueger), which climbed to 12 in the US. On Mason’s death Winwood was fulsome in his praise of his former band member’s talents. But relations between the two were not always so beatific. Mason recalled how Winwood had terminated his tenure in Traffic by telling him: “I don’t like the way you write, I don’t like the way you sing. I don’t like the way you play. And we don’t want you in the band any more.” It seemed also that Winwood disliked Mason’s habit of writing on his own, rather than collaboratively with bandmates. Traffic formed in 1967, after Winwood had left the Spencer Davis …