Steve Winwood: From Mr. Fantasy to Mr. Entertainment

At the time, however, the record bombed. Nineteen seventy-seven – the year the Sex Pistols fired the shot heard round the world – was not the best time for a Sixties luminary to release such a refined album. Consequently, Winwood’s memories of punk are harsh.

“It was against everything that I had been or was to that point,” he says bluntly. “It was against music, too. It was antiestablishment. They were really just advanced hippies. I’d been through that antiestablishment thing in the late Sixties, and during the Seventies I suddenly realized the value of being establishment.”

Though Winwood virtually disowns the record today – “I only did it because the record company wanted some product from me” – the failure of Steve Winwood provoked a crisis for him. His tenure with Traffic had ground him down, but his years off the road had made him something of a forgotten man. His experimental records had never reached much of an audience, and his solo album entered a musical and social culture that seemed to have no place for him or his increasingly conservative values. As a result, he seriously considered giving up his career as a recording artist.

“I think because of the experiences I was having through the early Seventies, I was almost preparing myself unknowingly for that, to go into some other area,” he says. “I wasn’t desperate, I don’t think, but I was definitely ready to do whatever was necessary.”

Winwood decided to give recording one last try. To do so, paradoxically, he burrowed deeper into himself, holing up in the sixteen-track studio in his home in Gloucestershire. Over the next three years, he wrote, played and produced all of the music for Arc of a Diver. “I knew ‘Okay, I’ve got one shot left, and I’ve got to make it count,'” he says. “At the point of Arc of a Diver, I wanted to give it everything, and if that wasn’t successful, that would be it. But I had to make sure I was giving everything. And I certainly did — there was nobody else on the record!”

Arc of a Diver‘s first single, “While You See a Chance,” soared into the Top Ten in early 1981. The album’s slick electronic sheen, however, suggested a commercial intent that many of the singer’s longtime fans had a hard time dealing with. It didn’t help that “While You See a Chance” was written with Will Jennings, a professional lyricist from Los Angeles. Though Winwood had rarely written his own lyrics, he’d always worked with friends and musicians like Jim Capaldi and Jimmy Miller, who co-wrote “I’m a Man” and produced the Spencer Davis albums, the first two Traffic albums and Blind Faith.

Winwood, however, says that he values Jennings’s workaday approach to songwriting – “I learned about discipline from Will,” he says – and their collaboration continues to this day. Together they wrote all the songs on Talking Back to the Night and the vast majority on Back in the High Life and Roll with It. Winwood also cites Jennings’s uncanny ability to express Winwood’s emotions, using “While You See a Chance” – which captures Winwood’s optimism as he was attempting to get his career back on track – as an example. “We didn’t talk about what the song was about,” Winwood says. “He just came up with this lyric, and it was right for me, right for him and right for the song.”

Winwood’s exhilaration with Arc of a Diver‘s success was short-lived. He’d always disliked touring, so he didn’t go on the road, and videos had not yet come along to provide artists with another means of staying in the public eye. So Talking Back to the Night – another one-man show – failed to find a substantial audience when it was released, in 1982. By that point Winwood was thirty-four and wondering what the future held for him.

Enter Mr. Entertainment.

I made a conscious effort three years ago to start working with musicians and producers and engineers,” Steve Winwood says. “I got a manager. I obviously did those things consciously. I have to say that those people are directly or indirectly responsible for my success now. There’s no denying it.”

Manager Ron Weisner describes his relationship with Winwood as a “nurturing situation.” Weisner, who has worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna and Rick Springfield, among other artists, met Winwood about three years ago. Winwood was looking for a manager. The only person to play that role for him in the past had been Chris Blackwell, who also happened to own Winwood’s label, Island Records, and the company that published Winwood’s music. “It’s a real conflict of interest going on there,” Winwood says. “I needed to get out of that situation.”

“I’ve always been a fan of Steve’s,” Weisner says. But when Weisner first started working with Winwood, his friends in the business weren’t impressed. “Everybody said to me, ‘What, are you fuckin’ crazy? I mean, why? This guy is washed up, he hasn’t had hits, he’s old news. Forget it.’ ”

Winwood had already begun working on Back in the High Life, and Weisner was determined that the record not be another homemade job. The first step was suggesting that Winwood record in London. “As soon as he agreed to that,” Weisner says, “I said, ‘Well, forget London. Maybe you should go to New York.’ “