Pearly Queen

It's hard to argue with this two-fer issued by the fine Beat Goes On label from Great Britain, as it pairs two of former Traffic guitarist Dave Mason's finest records on a single disc. Alone Together featured the hit "Only You Know and I Know," as well as "Shouldn't Have Took More Than You Gave," and "Look at You, Look at Me." Headkeeper contains "Pearly Queen," his solo version of "Headkeeper," "Feelin' Alright?," and "World in Changes." What these discs most reveal is just how deep Mason's roots went into R&B, soul, and into country as well. If anything, Mason would have been right at home on a Delaney & Bonnie record as his sensibilities were closely allied with theirs. Mason was always underrated and, in America at least, under-noticed. These records are as fine as anything Eric Clapton ever issued solo. The comparison is fair because they were both digging into the same territory at the time, only Mason's delivery and understated guitar playing come off as far more emotionally honest.

By January 1973, Eric Clapton's career was going great guns as the result of compilations like History of Eric Clapton; the only problem was that Clapton himself was nursing a heroin addiction and hadn't been heard from since his August 1971 appearance at the concert for Bangladesh…

The Last Great Traffic Jam is a live album and DVD from the English rock band Traffic. The album was recorded on the 1994 reunion tour supporting Far from Home…

Through relentless touring in the mid-1970s, Dave Mason built up a concert audience that didn't necessarily translate into a record-buying audience, and this double-live album, released at a time when double-live albums were all the rage (remember Frampton Comes Alive?), was intended to address that problem.

Terrific compilation of Mason's MCA years.
The third time around in constructing a Dave Mason compilation, Blue Thumb Records (which had been acquired by ABC Records, and which in turn would be swallowed by MCA Records) finally made a worthy selection of its cache of Dave Mason recordings from 1970-71.