Feelin’ Alright… One Last Time
A soulful farewell to Dave Mason, Billy Gibbons’ legacy boot trail, and a brain-twisting round of Impossible Music Trivia
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April 23, 2026
Dave Mason: The Man Who Left—and Made the Leaving Matter
By David Gross, Punmaster MusicWire
Dave Mason has died at 79—and in a career built on motion, it somehow feels less like an ending than a quiet disappearance into the spaces he always favored.
He was never supposed to be the center of the story—and that’s precisely why he keeps showing up in all of them.
He’s one of those rare figures in rock history whose fingerprints are everywhere, yet whose silhouette never quite blocks the light. The kind of musician who could walk into a room full of giants, contribute something indelible, then quietly step out before the mythology calcified around him. Not a sideman. Not a frontman in the conventional sense. More like a catalyst—a human hinge between sounds, scenes, and sensibilities.
And if you trace enough of those hinges, you start to realize: Dave Mason didn’t just pass through the story of rock. He helped it pivot.
The Song That Refused to Sit Still
“Feelin’ Alright?” is one of those songs that long ago slipped the leash of authorship.
When Traffic first recorded it, the track had a sideways looseness—almost a shrug in musical form. Mason didn’t write a statement. He wrote an invitation.
Then Joe Cocker came along and turned that invitation into a full-throated testimony. After that, the song stopped belonging to anyone in particular. It became a ritual—interpreted, reinterpreted, reshaped.
That elasticity—that refusal to be definitive—was Mason’s signature move.
The Only Guy in Traffic Who Could Leave—and Return—Like Weather
The mythology of Traffic tends to orbit Steve Winwood, but Mason was the band’s necessary disruption.
He joined. He left. He came back. He left again.
Not out of volatility—but out of instinct.
Where Winwood leaned toward flow, Mason leaned toward form. He wrote songs that ended. In a band fascinated with expansion, that alone made him an outlier.
“Hole in My Shoe” didn’t just clash with Traffic’s aesthetic—it revealed its edges. Whimsical, sly, almost music-hall in its sensibility, it reminded everyone that psychedelia didn’t have to sprawl to make its mark.
And Mason understood something crucial: sometimes the most important role in a band is the one that refuses to fully belong.
The Records Where He Was the Secret Ingredient
To really hear Dave Mason, you have to listen for him in places where his name isn’t in bold type.
That luminous 12-string underpinning All Along the Watchtower—the quiet architecture beneath Jimi Hendrix’s storm—is Mason. Not the blaze, but the frame.
He turns up again inside the unrest and clatter of Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones, adding texture rather than spectacle—shehnai, percussion, tonal grit—the kinds of details that make the whole track feel like it’s vibrating from within.
He slips just as easily into the sunlit ease of Listen to What the Man Said with Paul McCartney, adapting to a completely different emotional temperature without losing himself.
And if you follow the thread a little further, you’ll find him in rooms where the credits read like a roll call: lending shape to the wide-open sprawl of All Things Must Pass with George Harrison, hovering at the earliest formation of Derek and the Dominos alongside Eric Clapton, and moving through the road-tested current of Delaney & Bonnie—that loose, living junction box of late-’60s musicians.
There are even a few side-door appearances—the kind you only catch if you’re looking—like a brief, almost conspiratorial pass through the orbit of Cass Elliot, where Mason’s presence feels less like a credit and more like a knowing glance exchanged across the room.
And much later, in a very different chapter, he joins Fleetwood Mac in 1993 at Mick Fleetwood’s invitation after the departure of Rick Vito, staying through 1995—a reminder that even decades on, he was still the guy you called when a band needed shape, history, and steadiness without ego.
He wasn’t a chameleon.
He was a translator.
Alone Together: A Solo Album That Refused the Spotlight
Alone Together might be one of the most misleading titles in rock.
Because it isn’t solitary at all.
It’s communal in the way only early-’70s California records could be—porous, sunlit, collaborative without feeling crowded. Mason didn’t step forward to dominate. He stepped just far enough into the frame to let the music breathe.
It plays less like a declaration than a gathering.
And that, in its own quiet way, was radical.
The Discipline of Restraint
Mason’s real signature isn’t a lick or a tone—it’s restraint.
In an era of excess, he practiced precision.
He played just enough to define the space.
He left room where others would have filled it.
He trusted silence as much as sound.
You hear it everywhere—from his chord voicings to his phrasing to the way his songs arrive, make their point, and step aside.
He understood something most never quite grasp:
Presence isn’t about volume.
It’s about placement.
A Career Built on Open Doors
Dave Mason’s legacy isn’t tied to one band, one sound, or even one era.
It’s tied to permeability.
He moved through rock’s golden age like someone who understood that the walls were temporary. That songs evolve. That scenes overlap. That leaving isn’t rupture—it’s motion.
And maybe that’s why his work endures in such a peculiar way.
Not always front and center.
Not always attached to the loudest mythology.
But always there.
In the bones of songs that refuse to stay fixed. In sessions that needed one more voice to click into place. In the connective tissue between artists who didn’t realize they were part of the same conversation.
Dave Mason didn’t chase immortality.
He built a career out of reappearing exactly where the music needed another dimension.
And in rock and roll, that kind of presence doesn’t fade.
It just keeps turning up.
Billy Gibbons Steps Into Lucchese’s Legacy in New Campaign Celebrating Craft and the Modern West
Lucchese Bootmaker has launched a new campaign that leans into its 143-year legacy of craftsmanship, pairing the heritage Texas brand with Billy Gibbons in a collaboration rooted in authenticity and long-lived style. Lucchese Bootmaker frames the effort not as a reinvention, but as a reaffirmation—highlighting boots built to age, wear, and evolve alongside their owners.
Directed by Boo George and styled by Julian Fetterman, the campaign blends still-life imagery with lived-in motion, showcasing signature designs like the Devin and Rio boots alongside select apparel and accessories. Gibbons, a Texas native and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, appears not as a spokesperson but as a natural extension of the brand’s ethos—craft, independence, and a resistance to fleeting trends.
The campaign underscores Lucchese’s ongoing focus on timeless design and enduring quality, presenting its core styles as lasting staples rather than seasonal statements.
A blast from the past
THE PUNMASTER by David Gross
TODAY'S EASY-BAKE TRIVIA QUESTION
Rock ’n’ Roll Brainbuster:
What do the following hit recordings all have in common—aside from being some of their respective artists’ best-known tracks?
“Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)”
“Are You Ready?”
“Groovin’ Is Easy”
“Can’t Get It Out of My Head”
“Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”
“We’re an American Band”
The answer will appear in the next MusicWire...
The trivia question from the last MusicWire was:
What’s the connection with The Rolling Stones, America, The Byrds, Michael Martin Murphey, George Harrison, Cliff Nobles, The Doors
Answer: They all had songs about Horses
Thanks to this week’s winners….Mike Campbell, Mitch Rothbardt
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THIS DAY IN MUSIC
You Can Quote Me On That…
“I’m a part of the I like ice cream watermelon soup generation.” ~ Allen Ginsberg
“Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk in order to provide articles for people who can’t read.” - Frank Zappa
“The older you get, the better you were!” - Leslie West
“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.” - Bo Diddley
“I’m as country as a dozen eggs.” - Elvin Bishop
“Elvis may be the King of Rock and Roll, but I am the Queen.” - Little Richard
“If you think you are too old to rock ‘n roll, then you are.” - Lemmy Kilmister
"If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry’.” - John Lennon
“The old-timers schooled me good. They brainwashed me to respect music, whether we were playing rockabilly or blues or rock and roll.” - Dr. John
“It’s much too late to do anything about rock & roll now ...” - Jerry Garcia
“Hippies? Why, I’m the original.” - Jerry Lee Lewis
"David Gross (Punmaster MusicWire) is the Arianna Huffington of music news!" - Barry "The Fish" Melton
"Rock and roll is here to stay.” - Neil Young
“The reason kids like rock ‘n roll is their parents don’t.” - Mitch Miller
“Rock ’n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It’s the rhythm that gets to the kids – they’re starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners.” - Alan Freed
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” - Albert Einstein
“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.” - Hunter S. Thompson
"Mike Love, not war." - Scott Mathews
"I have outlived my dick" - Willie Nelson (2008)
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