Old Enough to Forget

1986 was a great year for music, and the summer soundtrack was particularly good that year. There were two albums in my collection that were joined at the hip, Peter Gabriel's So , and Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life . As the summer cooled down Bon Jovi would drop Slippery When Wet , followed closely by Paul Simon's mesmerizing Graceland . Those are just the tip of the iceberg, and are stories for another day. Still, when I think of Winwood, I think of Gabriel, I don't know why - they're really nothing alike other than they were a couple of Englishmen who reached their commercial peak at the same time. I'm not going to go back and list off Steve Winwood's other accomplishments with bands like The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, or that lone Blind Faith album ... the guy had laurels he could have rested on. Heck, with all that he was still only 38 (which seemed ancient back then) when he dropped Back in the High Life . By comparison, Tom Petty was 36 and ...