A Mahavish-Nu Year…

Forty-seven years ago yesterday, 30 December 1973, the Mahavishnu Orchestra Mk1 (John McLaughlin, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman, Rick Laird Laird, Billy Cobham) imploded in the snow.

Here is an extract from ‘Bathed in Lightning’ covering that period, and a fabulous recording from their fourth-last-ever concert, New York’s Avery Fisher Hall on December 27th:

EXTRACT

Over two editions of Britain’s New Musical Express back in July 1973 Ian MacDonald had taken stock of John McLaughlin’s career thus far, from a time when he ‘had a reputation for being one of the remotest and most difficult people to work with in London’ to his current status as a ‘Hero’ who ‘bestrides the world of the electric guitar like a solitary colossus’.
‘Ridiculous speed is the transcendental essence of McLaughlin’s recent work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra,’ he wrote. ‘[T]he fastest passages in The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds Of Fire are now being played so swiftly that the ear has difficulty in separating bar from bar, let alone note from note… This, in purely musical terms, means that in about six months’ time the Orchestra will be no more than a shrill aural blur with the members fading visibly into hyper-space, like Captain Kirk in the transporter-room of the Starship ‘Enterprise’.’
At this stage, it was difficult for anyone to cling on. But MacDonald’s timescale to oblivion was uncannily prescient. The band still had a mass of concerts booked across America, criss-crossing from New York to California, including cities in Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Washington State, Oregon, Illinois and elsewhere. Two dates in early November at the Roxy nightclub in Los Angeles saw thousands turned away and an A-list of musicians and music business heavyweights get in. Circulating recordings from post-Japan shows, including several made in remarkably high fidelity off the desk by their sound engineer of choice, Stuart ‘Dinky’ Dawson, reveal a musical unit still capable of incomparable, stunning performances, despite Jan and Jerry no longer being on speaking terms with John – each side as entrenched as the other.
‘Within the band there were factions,’ said Billy. ‘You’d have Jan and Jerry, and maybe Rick, or John and myself, and maybe Rick would go with us. Rick was weird, he’d go back and forth. He was the needle on the VU meter…’
Armed with the knowledge that this was a train hurtling off a cliff at break-neck velocity, the modern day listener to Dawson’s thankfully preserved artefacts might be tempted to hear fury, resentment, rage and other negative energies in the playing. And that listener might well be right.
‘You can make some great music out of negativity, but only for a very limited time,’ said John, reflecting on the period five years later. ‘I realized that it was the opposite of what the music needed and what I needed. You can get angry on the stage and scream through your instrument, which can be nice… but you cannot just keep doing that. You have to have the other side as well, in any relationship. So I realized the love affair was over, and it was a shame.’
Billy had told Snyder-Scumpy that the problems, in his opinion, all stemmed ‘from the basic immaturity of some’. He was talking about the two youngest members. ‘Some of the cats feel that they don’t get their just deserves [sic] when it comes to notoriety and exposure. On the other hand, they don’t try to get themselves exposed. It’s like [they’re] waiting for somebody to do something for them.’
Ironically, John had done something for one of them: Jan’s ‘Sister Andrea’ was one of the three pieces on Between Nothingness And Eternity, recorded in Central Park in August and released in America in December ; it was also one of three pieces featured in what would transpire to be the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s national TV swansong on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert the previous month. Whatever the tensions onstage, nobody looked like they were ‘phoning in’ a performance. There was still fire in the dying dragon, but it was certainly dying.
Two weeks after the broadcast Billy Cobham had what he later termed a breakdown prior to a show in Atlanta, Georgia: ‘I was very, very emotionally upset… I was playing a game of my own in saying ‘sure, everything’s fine’, when in actual fact all that we had worked for, and the effort I had put in personally, was more at stake than I wanted to face… I missed a concert. I just didn’t go. And I really don’t know why I did it…’ Billy just stayed in his hotel room watching a Charles Bronson movie repeatedly on TV. ‘The point was no one really cared anymore.’
Seemingly unaware that his advice was too late, one reviewer of the live album singled out ‘Sister Andrea’ as giving a general sense of possible new rabbits in what was now an otherwise well-worn hat of light-speed ferocity, where ‘all you can do is watch and wait for the sound to catch up’:
‘This track seems to stand out a little,’ he mused, ‘maybe because although it has the same sound everything they do has, the flavour has been altered ever so slightly. It would be a wise idea to check into the composing abilities of all of the Orchestra, judging from the track by Hammer and Cobham’s new album [Spectrum, also released in December], which is a slam in the crotch from the word go… If they were to break up we’d all lose, but better to see a creature die quickly than suffer along pretending to be alive when the soul is gone. Their future lies not in a one-man dictatorship but a five-man entity. All giving, all sharing, all leading and non-leading. God likes that. Mankind is like that.’
‘I don’t like it very much,’ opined Ian MacDonald, on the live album’s January 1974 UK release. ‘It sounds like it was a good thing the band broke up before they attained the speed of light and destroyed the universe. They play like maniacs. They play very loudly. The whole zaperama is as predictable as Marc Bolan’s press statements.’
‘We were knocking on the door of something really new,’ said Billy, from the wrong side of New Year 1973, and the pained resolution it brought. ‘Something unique. Something that had never been done before in rock and roll. And we came so close… and we lost.’

*

‘The flower has to grow; the universe has to expand,’ John mused, a few months later, innocently adding to the literature of astro-physical references surrounding his music. ‘But before a new era can be born, the old one’s got to fall away.’
Poetically, after a Boxing Day show in Florida, the cliff’s edge was reached with two nights at New York’s 2,600-seater Avery Fisher Hall on December 27 and 28 – most of which was captured for posterity by ‘Dinky’ Dawson. Unfortunately for the symbolism of the New York shows, the band’s cumular limit was to be found two nights and 500 miles away in Detroit on December 30, at the 4,400-seater Masonic Temple. In between, there was a sports arena in Toledo, Ohio.
‘It was so anti-climactic,’ said Billy. ‘We played two shows after New York, which is where it all started. We should have finished on a high in New York. Why trudge through the snow to Detroit on New Year’s Eve [sic]? Come on, who needs it?’
‘We never even said goodbye to each other after the last concert,’ Rick told a reporter from the New York Times. ‘Pride – that’s what ultimately destroyed us. I feel we’ve let down a lot of people – especially the huge audience that we had gained… The first year and a half was spent with us battling [John’s] so-called enlightenment, and him battling our so-called ignorance, which is the highest form of bullshit I ever heard in my life. Nineteen seventy four promised to be the year in which we could have possibly made some money as individuals, and that too is gone. It’s very unfortunate.’
‘At the finish we were playing what was still the most intense stuff around,’ said Jan, with the benefit of hindsight. ‘But we were totally disinterested [sic], we were just detached from it completely. It was really weird, there was no purpose to it… None of us will ever be the same after that band – and a lot of other musicians won’t be either… But it all happened so fast. We were ill-prepared to deal with the complex personal problems that arose. Oh, it wasn’t only the commercial recognition, it was also the quality of the music, the volume, the intensity, everything combined. It changes you. It made it quite intense to deal with each other. Toward the end we used to joke that we were going to have five separate limousines.’

*

However painful the last days of the Mahavishnu Orchestra were, John had always maintained more than one creative iron in the fire: he had, throughout, been studying the vina (an Indian instrument, ancestor of the sitar) with a vina master at Wesleyan University, as often as the insane touring schedule would allow; he had periodically been performing sacred guitar/vocal music with his wife Eve, at religious venues ; and he was apparently working on a large-scale choral piece. However aghast Columbia Records may have been at the impending dissolution of their rising star act, John McLaughlin – by nature, temperament and spiritual certainty – was effectively primed to shrug his shoulders and get on with the furtherance of his vision. In John’s world, the will would always triumph.
Billy Cobham, himself getting on with what was looking set to be a successful solo career, mixing his second album in London within weeks of the band’s demise, had less bitterness than the others, and some insight into a potential problem within John’s cast-iron certainties:
‘I think [John] always meant well,’ he said, in sincerity. ‘He wanted to do right… And he did something bold in a way, because he went from [one extreme] completely over to the other side, to not smoking, no drugs whatsoever, totally vegetarian, cleansing his system, and to me he’s an indication of someone trying to find peace of mind and to do what’s right… But there’s a lot of stuff that’s tearing at him, and frustrations come out… [W]ith all respect to him putting on a white suit and finding a guru master… I think the man is at odds with himself. He’s gotta deal with that, deal with two people that are tugging at him from the inside, the involuntary John McLaughlin and the voluntary Mahavishnu, the cat that he’d like to be, and be looked upon as. [Still, there’s] one thing I learned. If you want to have a say, just put the band in your name!’’

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