Michael Fremer

I once pissed next to Dave Mason in the Cambridge Boathouse bathroom back in 1970 something. That has nothing to do with this review except that it’s a review of a Traffic album and Dave Mason was in Traffic but you wouldn’t know that from the cover of their first American album.

Considered a sprawling, self-indulgent mess when first released in 1967 (RCA LOP-1511 mono/LSO-1511 stereo), and a warning to other bands and to record executives footing the bills for unlimited studio time (even the extra dollar added to the list price couldn't have paid for the studio time), After Bathing At Baxter’s has worn remarkably well, and in retrospect is a powerful, smoldering document reflecting a chaotic, violent and dangerous time in America—the kind of time we’d be having now if people would fucking wake up and smell the fascism.

You can bet this blistering, groundbreaking jazz-rock fusion album from 1971 spun Jeff Beck’s head around big time, turning him from heavy metalist-rocker (his version of The Yardbirds’ “Shape of the Things to Come” on the Jeff Beck Group’s album Truth is arguably the first “heavy metal” rock arrangement) to the jazz-fusionist he became on Blow By Blow. Others followed too, of course.