If ever there were a rock and roll prodigy, it would have to be Steve Winwood. His first single with the Spencer Davis Group, “Dimples,” was released just ten days after the singer’s 16th birthday. While “Dimples” (actually a John Lee Hooker cover) wasn’t a massive hit, there would be plenty of those in Winwood’s future…and he wrote and sang one of them when he was only 18 years old.
Released as a single in 1967 (and included on the album of the same name), “I’m a Man” was a major triumph for the Spencer Davis Group, peaking at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100. But the organ-driven, soul-infused rocker was more than just commercially successful. As Winwood explained in a 2003 interview with the Dutch music series Top 2000 agogo, “I’m a Man” also helped to pave the way for the music he would make with Traffic.
“We were kind of experimenting with what is now called world music — it didn’t exist then — but Afro-Caribbean music which we’d been listening to,” he explained.
“‘I’m A Man’ was actually significant because it was the last Spencer Davis Group song before Traffic,” Winwood continued. “So it was a significant transition because we were using these Afro-Caribbean elements in that music and then we went on in Traffic to combine that with many more elements like folk music and jazz and rock to try and combine all these elements.”
The lyrics, meanwhile, certainly seem to reflect the life of an 18-year-old musician in the ’60s:
Well, my pad is very messy
And there’s whiskers on my chin
And I’m all hung up on music
And I always play to win
I ain’t got no time for lovin’
‘Cause my time is all used up
Just to sit around creatin’
All that groovy kind of stuff
In a 2018 interview with Uncut, Winwood reflected on the diversity of his early musical influences.
“I started off playing ’30s and ’40s dance music with my dad and my brother,” he said. “Then I started to discover skiffle, bebop and R&B. It was an odd mix — I was subconsciously trying to see how skiffle would work with Horace Silver, trying to put it all together.
Related: 1965 Classic Rock Hit, Written by an 18-Year-Old, Was Rejected by Record Label Before Topping the Charts
“My brother [Muff Winwood, producer and musician] and I didn’t have a record player, but what we did have was an uncle who would make all this hi-fi kit, so we’d have his cast-offs,” Winwood recalled. “We had a quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape machine in 1962, so we used to record off the radio — things like Willis Conover’s Voice Of America Jazz Hour, broadcasting in Germany to the American forces.”
Even decades later, Winwood said he still felt a “connection” to the music he made as a teenager with the Spencer Davis Group.
“I do feel a connection to those songs,” he said. “We’re not just going through the motions. ‘I’m A Man’ has also got the jazz organ trio thing going on, somewhere in there, with the Caribbean sound. It’s nice to add all those different flavors.”
Clearly, the rest of the world still feels a connection to Winwood’s first major hits, too. At the time of this writing, “I’m a Man” has been streamed 37,360,534 times on Spotify alone.
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