Enjoy the high life with Steve Winwood at The Pearl

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During the peak of his MTV stardom in the 1980s, Steve Winwood says he remembers “people coming up and asking why I was playing a cover of a Blues Brothers song.”

That would be “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which Winwood sang with the Spencer Davis Group in 1967. “I had to point out that was my song. I have a different sort of a situation,” he says.

Indeed. If not for Winwood’s smoky voice as a unifying factor, it’s hard to keep track of the guy who sang “I’m a Man” when he just 18, went on to be a member of Traffic and Blind Faith and then had a run of hit ’80s solo albums such as “Back in the High Life.”

It can now be a challenge to pull all these career aspects into a unified set for shows such as the one today at The Palms, which kicks off a West Coast tour.

“I try and not leave any period out,” the 64-year-old says. That’s why he has so far resisted the concert-industry gimmick of performing one hit album start to finish.

“I have these different points of reference. Some of the people that identify with different points in my career often don’t even know there’s another point of my career where someone else comes in,” he says.

But Winwood says the songs all smooth out when played by the same band with fresh arrangements.

“I generally play the songs with the instrumentation we have now,” he says. “We don’t use much in the way of synthesizers now. But we feel we still do the song justice.

“I do sometimes get a certain amount of flak for the so-called pop section of my career,” he volunteers. “But I’m always quite insistent on that – that it’s very much the production style” that might date hits such as “Higher Love” and “Roll With It.”

“Although they have a very specific ’80s sound, it’s the production,” he says. The musical elements – rock, folk, Afro-Caribbean rhythms are “the same thing I was doing with Traffic.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.