Notes

---

Singer, guitarist, and drummer Gordon Jackson released a rare album for the Marmalade label in 1969, Thinking Back, that bore much similarity to records of the era by Traffic and (more distantly) Family. The resemblance wasn't casual, as several members of Traffic and Family helped out on the record, alongside other notables like Julie Driscoll and Luther Grosvenor of Spooky Tooth; Traffic's Dave Mason, in fact, was the producer. Thinking Back had the same sort of loose mixture of psychedelic rock with jazz, folk, and bits of soul and world music that characterized some of Traffic's work. The material wasn't as strong or focused as Traffic's or Family's, but it had a nice introspective groove with haunting, minor-keyed melodies.

Prior to the album, Jackson had been intimately connected with musicians in bands that evolved into Traffic, Family, and Spooky Tooth, although he never attained anything near the same recognition as those groups in his brief solo career. He'd been in the Hellions, the Birmingham group also including Mason, Grosvenor, and future Traffic percussionist Jim Capaldi, who made some flop singles for Piccadilly in the mid-1960s. After the Hellions broke up, Jackson played in Deep Feeling with Capaldi, Grosvenor, and future Family multi-instrumentalist Poli Palmer. Deep Feeling, unfortunately, never released anything, although an excellent early psychedelic track they recorded, "Pretty Colours," did eventually get released on Grosvenor's Floodgates Anthology. Jackson was an odd man out, though, when Mason and Capaldi helped form Traffic, and little was heard from him after the 1960s despite the promise of Thinking Back.


Gordon Jackson's only album sounds a little like a Traffic LP with a singer who isn't in the band. The similarity is really no surprise, since Traffic men Steve Winwood, Dave Mason, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood all played on the record, and Mason produced. Other notables with connections to the Traffic family tree or Marmalade label also appeared, including Luther Grosvenor; Rick Grech, Jim King, and Poli Palmer of Family; and Julie Driscoll. There's a languid, minor keyed jazz-folk-psychedelic vibe to the songs, which have a meditative, spontaneously pensive air, appealingly sung by Jackson. Touches of Indian and African music are added by occasional tabla and sitar. What keeps this from being as memorable as Traffic or some of the other better late-'60s British psychedelic acts is a certain meandering looseness to the songs that, while quite pleasant, lacks concision and focus. That was a quality also heard in the album from the same era by fellow Marmalade artist Gary Farr, Take Something With You, and while Thinking Back is better and more original than Farr's effort, the songs are more interesting mood pieces with a yearning, mystic tone than they are outstanding compositions. At times this is like hearing psychedelic sea shanties (as on "My Ship, My Star"), such is the lilt of the tunes, though hints of blues and more playful pop-psych whimsy are heard in cuts like "Me and My Dog." [The 2005 CD reissue on Sunbeam adds lengthy historical liner notes and five bonus tracks, including the non-LP B-side "A Day at the Cottage"; a haunting, sparse home demo of "My Ship, My Star"; single mixes of "Song for Freedom" and "Sing to Me Woman"; and a long version of "Me and My Dog."]

Poli Palmer - Keyboards, Vocals
Jim King - Saxophone
Chris Wood - Wind
Julie Driscoll - Vocals
Rick Grech - Bass
Luther Grosvenor - Vocals
Gordon Jackson - Guitar, Sitar, Main Performer, Vocals
Reg King - Vocals
Robbie Blunt - Sitar
Rocky Dzidzornu - Percussion
Patrick Gammon - Keyboards, Vocals
Remi Kabaka - Percussion
Jim Capaldi - Vocals
Dave Mason - Bass
Steve Winwood - Bass, Keyboards
The Blossom Toes
Meic Stevens