Virgin 90946
Producers: Steve Winwood and Tom Lord Alge
Track listing: Roll With It / Holding On / The Morning Side / Put on Your Dancing Shoes / Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do? / Hearts on Fire / One More Morning / Shining Song
August 20, 1988
1 week
In his 27-year career, Steve Winwood had experienced success a number of times, from “Gimme Some Lovin’,” recorded when he was a teenager with Spencer Davis Group, to hit albums with Blind Faith and Traffic. Yet Winwood experienced his greatest success at the age of 40 with Roll With It.
In the summer of 1988, Winwood was primed for a hit. As the title of his previous album, Back in the High Life, suggested, the veteran R&B vocalist/keyboardist had launched a comeback in 1986. That album climbed to number three, included the Number One single “Higher Love,” and set the stage for Roll With It.
Says Winwood, “It was really the pinnacle of my solo career. I never expected at the age of 40 to be suddenly doing better than I had at any time before.” There were a number of factors that helped Winwood reach new heights with Roll With It. For one, it was his first album for his new label, Virgin, which signed him to a deal reportedly worth $13 million. “It certainly was a new step up for me. Also, I had just got married and I had a family, which was very important to me. It was a new phase in my life.”
In a few instances, Roll With It marked a return to Winwood’s roots. The title track, which featured the Memphis Horns’ Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on saxophone, was reminiscent of the R&B sounds Winwood played as a teenager as a member of the Spencer Davis Group. “It was exciting working with those musicians,” Winwood says. “I can’t say I knew it was going to be a hit — I made too many records to ever want to think that. But I did have a good feeling about Roll With It. I knew I liked it, but it didn’t necessarily feel like a commercial success.”
Winwood wrote seven of the album’s eight tracks with Will Jennings, with whom he had collaborated previously. The duo had penned “While You See a Chance,” a number seven hit from Winwood’s 1981 Arc of a Diver. (Jennings would later share writing credits with Winwood’s former Blind Faith mate Eric Clapton.) “Hearts on Fire,” the eighth track, was a collaboration between Winwood and his onetime Traffic mate Jim Capaldi.
Yet it was the title track that would put Roll With It on top. The single hit Number One on the Hot 100 on July 30, 1988. Three weeks later, while “Roll With It” was still the top single, the album made Number One.
Winwood’s triumph, however, wasn’t without controversy. The follow-up single, “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?,” which reached number six, was featured in a Michelob commercial. “I certainly got my share of criticism for that, but most of it was unfounded,” Winwood says. “Certain people tried to claim I had written a jingle for a beer commercial, but I had not. I wrote a seven-minute song, some of which was used in the commercial, but I don’t regret that at all.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of August 20, 1988
1. Roll With It, Steve Winwood
2. Hysteria, Def Leppard
3. Appetite for Destruction, Guns N’ Roses
4. Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
5. He’s the D.J., I’m the
Rapper, D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince