Do dinosaurs rock? Just listen, says Hall of Fame guitarist coming to Lexington

In a career that has included co-founding a band that landed him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, adding guitar to some of the most fabled rock albums of any era and amassing hit songs that are being covered decades after they were cut, Dave Mason has become quite the storied journeyman of contemporary music.

So why has Mason reflected on his place in the 21st century rock music pantheon by calling his current summer concert trek The Endangered Species Tour?

When asked to elaborate, the veteran guitarist and song stylist offered a concise though somewhat bittersweet reply.

“Nobody’s left from my era.”

At age 77, Mason has seen many of his storied collaborators through the decades depart. It’s a hearty list. Topping it are Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood, his co-founders in Traffic, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.

There’s also Jimi Hendrix, who died just two years after his vanguard 1968 reinvention of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” with Mason on acoustic guitar was released. Other Mason contemporaries also gone include “Mama” Cass Elliot, David Crosby, George Harrison and Phoebe Snow.

That doesn’t mean, though, the spirit and soul that fortified songs they fashioned together have vanished. Mason’s Endangered Species concerts maintain focus on such Traffic favorites as “Feelin’ Alright,” a 1968 Mason original that has been covered by dozens of artists through the decades, from Three Dog Night in 1969 to Elle King in 2022.

His current shows also feature music from a solo career launched in the 1970s. Its repertoire runs from music featured on his first album away from Traffic, the acclaimed “Alone Together,” to radio hits earned later in the decade (“We Just Disagree.”. There is even a nod in his concerts to the Hendrix sessions with “All Along the Watchtower.”

It’s a program that covers a remarkable career. But Mason says his successes have simply been the results of mastering a craft.

“I just do what I do, no matter what the era or the time or the place or whatever the flavor of the month is. I just stick to what is that I do. Song wise, I try to stick to things that are somewhat timeless in their themes. Basically, that’s it. There’s no deep mystical reasons behind it just to keep things going.

“Everybody talks and thinks about the art of what I’m doing. I’m like, ‘Art?’ What I do is over 90% a craft. Occasionally, you get a flash of inspiration for a song. But the rest of it is basically a craft.”

Take for instance, “Only You Know and I Know,” the tune that kicked off “Alone Together” 53 years ago and has remained the opening song for many of Mason’s recent performances. One of Mason’s more popular works, it became a hit for Delaney & Bonnie and Friends in 1971.

“It’s just a fun, uptempo song,” Mason said almost dismissively. “I don’t know what else you would read into it. There’s no deep meaning to it. Basically, I wrote it because I needed and uptempo song for ‘Alone Together’ and that’s what came out.

“‘Alone Together’ was a statement of my work at that age, at that time. That’s the thing. Had the songs worked out any differently, they would have been on the next Traffic album. Some of them, anyway. Basically, that’s it. It’s what I was doing at 22. I got an opportunity to make a solo album and that’s what I did. I had no idea what would happen with it. The rest just unfolded from there.”

Viewing himself foremost as a guitarist (“I sing and write, but I’m really a guitar player. I loved Hank Marvin. I was a big Shadows fan”), Mason is thrilled to still be playing the music of a past generation to audiences young and, well, not so young.

But new music? That’s a bit trickier. He still records in his home studio on occasion. One such session produced a new version of the Traffic staple “Dear Mr. Fantasy” with new generation guitar hero Joe Bonamassa. But Mason feels the ritual of making a new album to define an artist’s career status has become a futile gesture. The internet, he said, has made such a practice financially pointless.

“Nobody buys any music anymore. Recording is a waste of time. It’s a waste of money. Intellectual property has basically been destroyed by the internet. The huge part of the impetus and also what becomes valuable in terms of what it is you do, meaning copyrights, have just been decimated. There’s no real radio anymore. There’s nobody home. Classic rock stations just play the same stuff you’ve got at home anyway. There’s nothing new. There are no DJs. There are no great days of FM, you know? There is no, ‘Hey, let’s check out the new Dave Mason record’ or whatever. Those days are gone. A huge part of the revenue for artists has disappeared, especially for writers – both writers who write music and those who write books and stories. That’s a big change.”

So what does that leave for a major artistic force of the 1960s and ’70s — an endangered species, by his own estimation — in 2023? Performing. That’s something Mason never tires of.

“What we’re left with is playing live. I’ve been doing that since I was 16. I love playing live. We have a great band. We’re good at it. And as long as I can keep doing it, I’ll keep doing it. Thank God they haven’t digitized playing live yet.”

Dave Mason

When: June 16, 8 p.m. June 16

Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short

Tickets: $39.50-$59.50 at ticketmaster.com