Traffic / Muddy Waters

Didn’t make a ROCKTOBER post yesterday 🙁 I guess the only thing that really can stop the rock are beers and a slight hangover, heh! I’ve got three songs for you today to make up for it, though…

I remember first hearing about Traffic through Meaghan when she mentioned once how her mom was borrowing her Traffic cds. I hadn’t heard of them before, and when I asked about them she sent me an mp3 of the song “Tragic Magic”. It had a sort of mystical quality to it in that it was a low-quality mp3 version of it (possibly recorded from vinyl, maybe?). I accidentally erased it off the computer once ages later and took forever trying to track it back down until I found out the album it was from. What makes it even nicer is it’s almost a full 8 minutes 40 seconds of non-stop instrumental rocking. Traffic’s other stuff is good (my guess is that their most popular song overall would probably be “Feelin’ Alright”), and maybe I’m just biased because this was the first song of theirs that I ever heard, but this cut of “Tragic Magic” is my most favorite song of their whole repertoire.

That being said, their version of “Rock ‘n Roll Stew” is good music too and it’s got a very distinctive intro. I remember listening to WRNR radio one day where their station identification had the beginning strains of the song play in the background, and it’s distinctive enough that you immediately know the band and the song all at once. The lyrics in the song are a bit muddied, but at least they’re not as bad as a few other bands I know of (*cough*Creedence Clearwater Revival*cough*)!

“ROCK ‘N ROLL STEW” [ buy Feelin’ Alright: The Very Best of Traffic ]
“TRAGIC MAGIC” [ buy On The Road ]

Last up for today is a bluesy song by Muddy Waters – found this one via my local public library’s blues cd collection. It’s got that familiar (maybe even requisite) “bah-dum-bah-ba-dum” blues repetition in there, and is good sitting back and relaxing music. Makes me think of smoky dives that look like, well, like the cover art of the album! Muddy Waters takes this one nice and slow…

“ROCK ME”, Muddy Waters [ buy Chess Blues Classics: 1947 – 1956 ]

Honey, Where You Been So Long is an oft-overlooked musicblog specializing in old-timey blues – it’s worth checking out if that’s your type of music!