Gordon Jackson

by Richie UnterbergerSinger, 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.