The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Features / Apocalypse: George Martin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra

Apocalypse: George Martin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra

by 35 Comments

Colin H on George Martin and Mahavishnu Orchestra

NOTE: I was thrilled to be able to put some questions to Sir George Martin for my book ‘Bathed In Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond’ (Jawbone, 2014). The Mahavishnu album he produced is merely one of many dozens of records he sprinkled magic over, but it was one of his own favourites. This is an abridgement of the relevant chapter. RIP.

(Because of gremlins in uploading the chapter it will appear in the comments below.)

3

Comments

  1. PART 1:

    ‘Was it meant as a concept album? I must have missed something. No concept as far as I was concerned, just a mass of good music.’
    Sir George Martin, 2012

    ‘The Mahavishnu Orchestra is dead – long live the Mahavishnu Orchestra,’ declared the front-page of Sounds on December 22 1973.

    ‘I am sure it will work out for them,’ said John, door-stepped at a Tony Williams club gig in January by Melody Maker’s man in New York. ‘I am happy that it’s over… I’m doing some homework at the moment, which is a change… [But] there’s no such thing as taking it easy in a spiritual life. I am working just as hard, but in a different way. I’m writing a lot and thinking much about what new forms of music I can make… The Orchestra was five people and to add something… was kind of taboo. There were times when I felt like adding more instruments but the others didn’t take too kindly to this… It’s early to say what I’m doing… All I can say is that I have found an incredible rhythm section…’

    By the end of 1973 Michael Walden had moved from Canaan to the almost-metropolis of Norwalk, Connecticut, where Sri Chinmoy had a Centre. The guru had asked him to play in a band of disciples called Jatra. He was also working as a bus boy at Mario’s Restaurant:

    ‘Towards Christmas, I receive a phone call from Mahavishnu.

    ‘I’m going to Puerto Rico, to see Guru, over Christmas-time,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ask Guru about playing with you when I return. And I’ll let you know. Would you be interested in joining the Mahavishnu Orchestra?’

    ‘My God! Absolutely!’

    When he returned this is exactly what happened: he came downstairs at my house, the Jatra house, and he began to teach me how to play with him – in 7, in 9, in 11, in 13, 15, 17, 19…. Whatever it would be that he’d want to work in, where I wouldn’t be fooled by his cat and mouse game of never giving a ‘one’. He was so adept he could play for measures and measures and measures without ever giving you a ‘one’, which could confuse anyone. So he would teach me how to do that. It was a real science. And he would teach me the study of Indian musical theory – because primarily what he was doing was on a jazz and blues format putting a heavy dose of Indian musical philosophy into it. 80% of it was Indian influenced, everything was around that – the time signatures, how to begin a solo, how to end a solo. So we really took time to study these things. That’d be in January.

    And then not long after he said, ‘Why don’t you bring your bass player, Ralphe Armstrong?’

    ‘Okay…’

    ‘And how about the girl who plays keyboards in Jatra?’

    ‘Gayle Moran?’

    ‘Yes, bring them both and I’ll bring Jean-Luc Ponty.’

    ‘Okay…’

    So we did: the five of us got together and that was a beautiful time to come together, which is what he needed at that time. That became the nucleus of Mahavishnu II.’

    Ralphe Armstrong, bass player with Michael’s secular band, the New McGuire Sisters, had already jammed up in Canaan with John. A prodigy from Detroit, schooled in both a conservatoire education, at Interlochen, and road work with Motown acts, Ralphe recalls an audition for the MO2 job:

    ‘After the audition, John said, ‘I’m going to call you to play bass…’ In my mind I’m thinking, ‘Man, this cat is not going to call a black kid from Detroit to play. He’s full of shit!’ So I went on home and it was a kind of snowy day in February 1974. I was living on the east side of Detroit and I got a call and it was him on the phone, Mahavishnu! He says, ‘I got somebody who wants to talk to you. He wants you to play bass with him…’ Carlos Santana! I’m 16-and-a-half and, you know, I worshipped Santana as a kid… I don’t know if they flipped a coin, but we all ended up with John McLaughlin. I ended up flying to New York and rehearsing for about two months straight.’

    Gayle Moran was born near Detroit (like Michael and Ralphe) and was the daughter of a Christian minister, accompanying choirs on piano from 14 and on one occasion singing solo to 50,000 at a Billy Graham crusade. Having acquired a teaching qualification at the University of Washington: ‘I decided I didn’t want to be a teacher. I wanted to be a performer, but didn’t know what kind of music.’ After spells in the Norman Luboff Choir, a folk group and a Victorian-themed supper club act, she was invited to join a touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar: 18 months on the road. Having met Chick Corea, whose Scientology path she would embrace and whom she would later marry, he suggested she move to New York: ‘The only reason I went was to meet creative musicians and spread my wings – to open myself up to anything musically…’

    Somehow, Gayle wound up in Jatra, house band of the Sri Chinmoy movement: ‘We rehearsed in a loft for six months and only got two gigs. But John McLaughlin came to hear us and he wanted women to be in his new group so I qualified on that point.’

    ‘I’m particularly happy that we have some girls in the group,’ John told Rolling Stone, in May ‘74, his new 11-piece group being complete (including three women). ‘The other band was, at times too aggressive, too masculine… I actually could have pulled out [of MO1] a while ago, happily. To me, the volume of the band had become oppressive… [W]e ended up defeating our object, which was to play music and be enjoyed… I’m absolutely convinced that volume does not equal intensity. And I don’t think people go to concerts to hear volume; they go to hear intensity.’

    Even the intensity was an eye-opener for Gayle: ‘Chick hadn’t really heard me play [but] he recommended me for the band. Later when I heard The Inner Mounting Flame, I said to [him], ‘What were you thinking?’’

    Joseph D’Anna, from the first band’s crew, became road manager. Michael Walden’s roadie, Greg DiGiovine – who would soon join the Sri Chinmoy path and who would later manage Carlos Santana, Tony Williams, athlete Carl Lewis and the post-MO solo career of (Narada) Michael Walden – was welcomed aboard:

    ‘Gayle was like a beautiful little hippy goddess woman,’ says Greg, ‘like a fairy earth mother or something – very beautiful, very loving, very flowing, like someone out of a forest. Ultra sweet – and she played keyboards just like that. There’s several reasons why John picked the people he did but consciousness had a lot to do with it as well as John needing to have control. He got burned out by the previous band challenging him left and right and asserting their power. [With] the second Orchestra there was never a question amongst anybody that John was in charge… In Mahavishnu Orchestra anybody can be replaced except John… The members of the band were so in awe of John that nobody really had a voice, no one even dared, barely, to voice an opinion. Whatever John wanted was the way it was. Everyone was so much younger and inexperienced, except Jean-Luc, that no one could really say anything. They were just happy to be there.’

    Jean-Luc Ponty, similar in age to John McLaughlin, was similar in stature as a musician. Having established a formidable European career as a jazz violin prodigy from 1964 onwards, and having experimented with free improvisation in his own Jean-Luc Ponty Experience for a year, he had relocated to America and spent a year as a featured musician in Frank Zappa’s band. He left, planning a solo career, in September 1973:

    ‘I started recording a demo of my music with musicians in Los Angeles,’ he says, ‘and [then] John called me. And I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I didn’t say yes immediately. I was very tempted indeed because I liked John’s playing and music so much, but on the other hand I had started the process of putting a band together… So I made the decision [after a month] to postpone my own project. In the meantime, though, the demo had been recorded and sent to record labels and a few months later I got the record contract offer from Atlantic. That’s why my first album for them [Upon The Wings Of Music] was recorded between tours with Mahavishnu, at the end of ‘74.’

    The five-piece core of the new Mahavishnu Orchestra began rehearsing at Studio Instrument Rentals (SIR) in New York:

    ‘It was a blessing to me,’ recalled Ralphe. ‘It was a great thrill. I learned so much about music from [John]. He was a real disciplinarian with us. He made us play, man. He really worked on Narada and me to get us to play and I thank him for that. He worked our tongues out!’

    ‘I remember it felt very happy to be there,’ says Jean-Luc, ‘and there was a very good atmosphere among the musicians. It was funny, because when I met Narada, [on] the first day of rehearsal, he greeted me with a flower, with his white suit, very mellow – and then he sat behind the drums and turned into a beast!’

    The new MO would indeed have greater dynamics, greater light and shade, than the first band but for all John’s talk of limiting the volume, the machine had different ideas:

    ‘By and large, the sound was outrageously loud,’ says Greg, of the rehearsals and all the concerts thereafter. ‘But a lot of that was to do with Narada, because Narada was loud. But Billy was probably louder than Narada.’

    ‘I remember during a rehearsal Jan Hammer walked in unexpected,’ says Michael. ‘And I had such tremendous respect for Jan Hammer. He’s walking in, looking right at me, just staring me down. And I just played so hard for Jan – having Jan Hammer in the room was a make or break moment. And Jan left, I didn’t speak to him but I heard later he liked my right hand – and I took that as a very nice compliment.’

  2. PART 2:

    ‘With the old Orchestra, there were set limitations; we could only go so far,’ John explained, to Down Beat. ‘I wanted to get into symphonic things last year. For some time, actually; I’ve thought about this for several years. But to do that you need complete co-operation, and it wasn’t there.’

    Mike Gibbs, John’s old friend from the London jazz scene, had been asked in early 1973 to arrange some of John’s material for band and symphony orchestra:

    ‘I was very surprised to be asked because the ‘hot’ arranger/writer of those days was Bob Cornford, who was close to John. Anyway, I got the call and didn’t argue! I went to Queens [NYC] where he was living, spent a week there talking about the music… John was still new in the Sri Chinmoy thing and I was somewhat uncomfortable and perturbed by how chauvinistic the male/female relationship was [in that world]. Women were very subservient. I was there a whole week and we had carrot juice every day – I was worried I was going to turn orange!’

    Mike also met John at Trident Studios in London, during the MO’s aborted third album sessions:

    ‘Jerry Goodman was unhappy about doing something with other strings. I’m sure there was more to it than that. [But] it all collapsed… And then a year later I got the call again, ‘I’ve booked the orchestra – do it, do it!’ Right from scratch.’

    John had booked the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), AIR Studios in London and Beatles producer George Martin, seemingly at a few weeks’ notice, for recordings in March 1974. You could do that sort of thing in those days – at least, you could if you were John McLaughlin.

    ‘George was mostly in a managerial sort of position,’ says Geoff Emerick, who would be engineer on the project. ‘So he didn’t do many sessions – he could pick and choose, but he wasn’t doing much. But, yes, normally you’d think you would be booking all that six months in advance.’

    The orchestral conductor would be Michael Tilson Thomas, a 28 year-old prodigy who had only decided to major in music at 18 and who was now musical director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

    ‘Young people are not interested in stock performances of the standard repertory. Neither am I,’ he had declared, in 1971. ‘I like to hear things I have never heard before.’

    John had met Michael at Columbia Records, where the idea of collaborating was first kicked around. He then went to visit the maestro in Boston:

    ‘[For] some reason… he decided not to bring his guitar with him,’ Michael recalled. ‘So there we were in my apartment and I said, ‘Well, what exactly is this music that you want to do? What does it sound like?’’

    After underwhelming attempts to demonstrate his ideas on Michael’s piano, John vocalised some phrases, and Michael – already an admirer of the Mahavishnu Orchestra records – saw the magic.

    John was working towards a suite of pieces he would call Apocalypse. At least one piece, a portentous relative of ‘Dance Of Maya’, ‘Vision Is A Naked Sword’, had been rehearsed with the first MO but rejected by Jan Hammer, who disliked it. The first piece to be rehearsed by MO2 was another epic, ‘Hymn To Him’.

    On February 21 1974, violinist/conductor Isaac Stern was booked to perform at a benefit concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic:

    ‘A few days before, Isaac pulled out for one reason or another,’ said John, ‘so Michael said, ‘Why don’t we play one section with the five-piece group and the Buffalo Symphony [sic]? Of course, this really appealed to me…’

    The core unit of MO2 dressed in traditional orchestral garb of tail coats and ties, with the symphonic players wearing street clothes, to perform Mike Gibb’s orchestrated ‘Hymn To Him’, as a warm-up for the London recording. Both Jean-Luc and Ralphe had substantial orchestral experience, though John was recalled as uncharacteristically nervous:

    ‘It was the first time I was standing up as the soloist in front of an orchestra,’ says Jean-Luc. ‘I thought it was funny, the way I looked with long hair, beard, compared to the classical players, and my amplifier was loud. So there was an ironic side to it, for me. There was a section where we, the band, were improvising, open-ended, and then we played some phrase which was a signal for the conductor to bring the orchestra back. Except that he missed it! And after playing that cue we were supposed to stop, and let the orchestra come in. But there was silence! I got the instant reflex to play the line again – and Mahavishnu followed me immediately. And then Michael Tilson Thomas heard it and the orchestra came in. So I must say that my past experience in classical music helped me for that gig, because I knew how orchestras worked.’

    ‘It was about 20, 25 minutes long, a very triumphant piece,’ says Michael. ‘And I remember afterwards I didn’t want to leave the stage, it was a standing ovation and I just couldn’t believe what was happening. It was phenomenal. And I guess not long after that we were told we would be working with George Martin at London AIR Studios, and Michael Tilson Thomas would be conducting the London Symphony…’

    *

    While the Buffalo gig had been a triumph, track was still being thrown down in front of the train. World-class examples of studio, orchestra, conductor and producer had all been booked for the second week of March; Mike Gibbs was feverishly working on orchestrations; and John was still recruiting people for the band.

    Phil Hirschi had graduated in English Literature from Yale in 1973. He was a cellist, had played in the Yale Symphony Orchestra and was on the Sri Chinmoy path. He had a casual connection with John since having seen him and Eve playing devotional music with Larry and Julie Coryell at a health food restaurant a couple of years earlier. By now, as he recalls, ‘John McLaughlin was a superstar – and within the Sri Chinmoy Centre he was clearly a superstar who was getting preferential treatment’.

    In January 1974 Phil was one semester into a post-graduate course at Rutgers University:

    ‘I didn’t know what I was going to do with this English degree,’ he admits, ‘but my father was paying for it and that was good by me! But, I’ll never forget, I got a phone call, ‘This is John McLaughlin – would you like to play in my band?’ I was dumbfounded. And it took me all of a nanosecond to make up my mind that this was a lot better than grad school.’

    Also familiar to John as a fellow disciple was violinist Carol Shive, a highly schooled musician who had attended Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and had recently been a member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra (appearing on Elvis Presley’s Aloha From Hawaii broadcast and album, among others). Carol was also a committed fan of the Mahavishnu Orchestra:

    ‘The original band – each one of them was a raging genius,’ she says. ‘Totally. I’ve perfect pitch, so I could hear and see on the piano all the notes that were being played all at once. And this was not on drugs! So it was just fabulous. It changed my life to hear Jerry Goodman play what he did.’

    Given to psychic experiences, Carol had recently given her life to Jesus but found an epiphany in the spiritual realm when Sri Chinmoy came to Honolulu:

    ‘I’m an Empath,’ she says. ‘We feel other people’s feelings before they know it and we have dead people coming back to us and stuff like that. To a small degree, thank God – I never see them, I just feel them. There are negative forces in my family origins and bad things had started to happen to me. Bizarre things had been going on which were very frightening to me… It was horrible, like having drugs – and I’ve never been into drugs… [So] I was primed for a Sri Chinmoy kind of experience… I saw Guru meditate and go into a state of consciousness that was peace-like and bliss. And I went, ‘Oh my God, that’s where I’ve been wanting to go, I want to be where he is now, where it is through his eyes – I want to be in that place, in the inner dimensions’.

    ‘And so… I left the Hawaiian islands and a good job to go to New York to investigate this thing with Sri Chinmoy. If it hadn’t been for Sri Chinmoy and the two people who gave me a place to live [in New York] I wouldn’t have met Mahavishnu. I was invited to go play my violin at the New York Centre – to play a Bach partita [No.3 In E], which is pages and pages of 16th notes – and I had no idea that that person sitting down there amongst all the other people in white was Mahavishnu… Also, I think, he had heard me practice outside in the back yard, ‘cos I lived in Queens, the Bartok Violin Concerto… Eventually, I was in the New Jersey Symphony and Mahavishnu called and said, ‘Do you want to be in this group?’ And I’d just got this audition with the New Jersey Symphony!’

    John asked Carol to look for more string players, although he himself kept looking, and also looking for brass players. The first musician he found, perhaps curiously, was violist Marsha Westbrook, a non-disciple:

    ‘Marsha was a good New York session player,’ says Phil. ‘For her it was a gig that she was being paid for. She was a good player. [But] Marsha was not a rock’n’roller.’

    ‘She was very nice, very sweet,’ says Greg DiGiovine. ‘She seemed quite conservative, kept to herself, very on guard, never let her hair down – had a nice sense of humour but she rarely ever came alive. But always sweet and nice and pleasant – and played like that. She was probably just a little bit shy and maybe a fish out of water.’

    Among other ‘divine enterprises’, John was financing a vegetarian restaurant, Annam Brahma (run by Eve and staffed by disciples) in the Parson’s Boulevard area of Queens, near Sri Chinmoy’s HQ:

    ‘I remember eating there,’ says Phil, ‘and John McLaughlin passing through and saying, ‘This one song that we’re doing, it’s in 11…’ And I’m thinking, ‘Well, I know how to count to 11, I don’t know what it means to play in 11…’ And he goes ‘Dubba-de dubba-de dub-a-dubba-de dubba-de dubba-de dubba-de… You see? It’s 3-3-2-3 – ‘Wings Of Karma’.’ And to this day I can do that. So that was the real challenge. We started to rehearse [at SIR] on 54th Street: James Taylor was in there, Yoko Ono was in there… There was a lot of time in rehearsal there.’

    ‘We rehearsed every day, except Sunday,’ says Ralphe. ‘It was a month at least, every day. I was excited, like a kid – excited and honoured to be in that position. There was room for improvisation once you got to certain passages. It was great music.’

    ‘That quartet, the core of the new Mahavishnu – John, me, Narada and Ralphe – was so strong,’ says Jean-Luc. ‘I remember feeling that power, a united force, the four of us, the communication was so strong.’

    The search to find remaining players was still ongoing when, in the first week of March, eight of the eventual 11 members of the second Mahavishnu Orchestra (along with roadies Joseph D’Anna and Greg DiGiovine) flew to London to make their first record. The LSO had been booked for three-hour sessions every morning, bar one, from March 9 to 15. Already, half of the band were Sri Chinmoy disciples, and the ratio would soon rise.

    ‘I remember some discussion that he was going to lose at least a million dollars,’ says Greg DiGiovine. ‘Everybody around him – lawyers, management – they all completely flipped out when he broke up the first Mahavishnu Orchestra and formed the second version. They figured he was throwing millions down the toilet. The business people around him were all scared of his association with Sri Chinmoy and they were worried how far John would go with it. And then when they heard he was going to get a string quartet and horns and have predominantly disciples in the band, they thought for sure this was their worst nightmare – from a business perspective. Of course, John didn’t care.’

  3. PART 3:

    ‘Judging by the size of recording studios he part owns in London’s Oxford Street, George Martin is – to say the least – comfortably off,’ wrote Richard Williams, in 1971. ‘Those eight years when the Beatles reigned supreme certainly set him up financially, enabling him… to indulge in his personal desires. AIR London, the name of his luxury studios, is the result, and within that context Martin is operating very contentedly, in a position to pick and choose what he wants to do…’

    ‘1974 is such a long time ago, and the older I get the more I forget,’ says George. ‘[But] I remember getting excited about working with John McLaughlin as I had always admired his work and I knew he was a fine musician… I regarded the recording as a big challenge, which turned out to be an even bigger assignment than I expected. I have always believed in live recording, and I began by setting them up all together in the same room – No.1 Studio at AIR in Oxford Circus…’

    ‘I remember the first day we arrived,’ says Jean-Luc, ‘and were all in the same studio and immediately everyone realised it was impossible, with the volume of the drums, with Narada being such an especially loud drummer – it’s already overpowering a full symphony orchestra.’

    ‘On the first downbeat from Michael Walden, George Martin stopped the whole proceedings,’ says Mike Gibbs. ‘And so we had to spend an hour or two putting them in another room and connecting the video link – which today could be done quickly but in those days it was still new.’

    ‘Poor Michael Tilson Thomas was less prepared for the onslaught of sound from the band than I was,’ says George, ‘and he could not hear a note from the London Symphony Orchestra in front of him. So I changed tack quickly. Working in a studio of one’s own design was an advantage. I decided to use two studios in harness, linking them by audio so that they could hear each other, and it seemed to work. I wanted to avoid overdubbing if possible, so the result was pretty well all live. A little repair work was done by overdubbing, but not much.’

    ‘Tilson Thomas brought the whole thing to life in an amazing way,’ says Mike. ‘First of all, he walked in straight off a plane, 10 or 15 minutes late, wearing an overcoat. He’d never seen the music before, walked in, taking off his overcoat, and as he stepped up onto the podium he lifted his baton and gave a down beat – and I was flabbergasted! The first piece [‘Vision Is A Naked Sword’] had a lot of crunchy chords in it and eyes were rolling among the [LSO] musicians, thinking ‘What is this?’ But Michael wasn’t perturbed at all. He could see by looking at the music what it was before he heard it. Me, I had to hear it to see if what I’d done worked or not. So I was very pleased and flattered by him – not by saying anything, just by how he treated the music. He’s extremely competent, absolutely knows what he’s doing, so the orchestra therefore are very comfortable and the music sounded ‘right’ right away.’

    ‘We transported the rhythm section into [Studio] No.3 control room,’ says Geoff Emerick, one of George Martin’s trusted colleagues from the Beatles era. ‘No.2 Studio at that time didn’t have any isolation booths to put the rhythm section [and] there were no other studios available… No 3 was a remix room, an overdub room – not a proper studio… I had one overhead mic on the drums, a bass drum mic and a snare mic and not enough room for a hi-hat one. It was a very small room. The bass was in there… and I can’t remember if John overdubbed his guitar afterwards or not on some of the stuff… I knew John’s ‘dynamic’ and I used my regular Tube B47 microphone on his amp. It was a very fluid sound… So John may have been in the overdub booth in No 3. But the rest of the rhythm section I set up in the control room of No.3, with very limited microphones, and then I think we organised a video link so the rhythm section could see Michael conduct. I see Narada quite often [these days] and he remembers that session like it’s indelibly printed on his mind as one of the best sessions he’s ever done – he could never get over the drum sound we got on it! I didn’t have any room for any more mics plus we’d got the orchestra in the other room, which is costing money, so it was a question of making this change as fast as possible. There were no screens around the drums, Michael was just behind the mixing console in No.3, where the faders are; the rest of the rhythm section were the other side of the console.’

    This set-up, with the rhythm section crammed around a mixing console, may have been tried but, as Geoff suggests, Michael Walden recalls things very clearly. He, rather than John, ended up in the vocal booth off No.3 control room:

    ‘[I was in this] baffled room with a TV camera and a television screen, so I could see [Michael Tilson Thomas] conducting,’ he says. ‘And then when I looked out of my enclosed room I could see John McLaughlin through the glass and then Jean Luc Ponty next to him and then Gayle Moran next to him and then Ralphe Armstrong next to her. And that’s where we did our primary recording, with TV screens, seeing across the hall the conducting of Michael Tilson Thomas. And of course, wearing headphones, we could hear it. So that’s how we made Apocalypse, primarily. The first two days was getting a lot of it recorded live. But then at the end we did do some overdubbing – to the strings. One section in particular I recall of ‘Hymn To Him’ [the ‘swirling’ section of fast string parts] – counting 2,3,4 2,2,3,4. As I was counting, in between, it was dragging. So George Martin had to come by the window and slow me down in those passages.’

    ‘He could lag behind,’ says Phil, ‘but I think it would have been very painful for him! He played like a man obsessed, he would go into a trance.’

    ‘We were again trying to play at the same time as the symphony,’ recalls Jean-Luc, of the separate rooms idea. ‘But that didn’t work very well. So in the end I think they recorded first the symphony orchestra and then we overdubbed. That’s what I remember very clearly, after trying that and it didn’t work – it was very, very difficult to play together and in sync, being in a different studio…’

    ‘They had to stop and start all the time, having one issue after another,’ says Greg DiGiovine. ‘There were also some issues about enough inputs in the board. I think they needed both rooms and both boards to be able to do everything. The failsafe way to do it is separately but I think they tried as much as they could to play together. The whole thing was meant to have the feeling of a live thing, to get that energy down, but I think as everyone quickly found out… with a symphony it doesn’t matter. They’re not going to give you that anyway, they’re not trained in that.’

    ‘I’ve got a feeling, because of the continuity, we must have kept the rhythm section in No.3 control room,’ says Geoff Emerick, of the five remaining LSO/MO sessions after day one.

    Aside from the technical challenges, there was no escape from British bureaucracy:

    ‘I was able to play with the London Symphony the first day,’ says Carol, ‘and I felt so honoured to sit in the back of the orchestra – they were all men – until the [Musicians’] Union came. They complained to the Union who said, ‘Carol and Phil and Marsha are not adding something exceptional and different to what the band can do, so they are out’. It actually turned out that that was wrong. Because I can remember very well Michael Walden standing up in front of the London Symphony Orchestra – I’ll never forget this picture – trying to get it through the thick heads of those old men how to do dah-da-da, dah-da-da, dah-da, dah-da-da – odd time meters, that they were not used to doing. And here was Michael Walden, a skinny little kid with a drumstick, trying to get them to play right. And I knew it because I had been studying odd time meters from the moment I heard Mahavishnu when I was in Hawaii.’

    ‘I remember,’ says Phil, ‘John saying, ‘I’ve lost this battle with the Union – rehearse with them, and that’s good, you’ll get better on the parts, but you can’t record.’ [But] on the recording of ‘Hymn To Him’ the London Symphony Orchestra – even though they’ve got Michael Tilson Thomas – can’t play rhythmically: they’re lagging, they are not on top of it. It was just another gig for them.’

    ‘We always had problems with the Union,’ says George Martin, ‘but I did not expect the string trio [as part of the group]. It all ended smoothly though.’

    ‘George Martin was like an angel in human form,’ says Carol. ‘You look at him and the piercing light-blue eyes and the silver hair and his calm demeanour and I really felt there was something really exceptional about him – and I could see how he would have been a good influence on ‘the boys’, on the Beatles, because of his calmness.’

    ‘John invented a little string part, that wasn’t played with the whole London Symphony,’ says Phil. Thus, for a few seconds each, behind Gayle Moran’s vocal on ‘Smile Of The Beyond’ (the album’s sole vocal piece, with lyrics by Eve McLaughlin), the MO2 string trio were allowed to appear on the record.

    ‘They’re an extremely good orchestra,’ says Mike Gibbs, in defence of the LSO, ‘but it’s more down to the conductor than the orchestra. The orchestra just assume you’re going to get what you want; making it happen is up to the conductor. And Michael was so good, naturally good.’

    ‘I was so impressed with him – it was just amazing the way he controlled that orchestra,’ recalls Geoff Emerick, already by then a veteran of many orchestral sessions.

    ‘He’s a magician,’ says Phil. ‘We were all totally in awe of him, but he was a very friendly guy. [He and John] seemed to really enjoy working together and respect each other in a really big way.’

    ‘That element in the classical music world that tries to see one as a priest or a scholar disturbs me,’ Michael Tilson Thomas later mused. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s clear to me that music is at times perhaps a very elevated form of show business. You’ve dressed up, the audience is sitting down, you enter, the lights go down, it starts and you enter another sort of time-frame. You suspend disbelief and you experience quite vividly what somebody else has dreamed.’

    On this occasion, the ‘audience’ was the LSO – a world-class but old-school orchestra (in fairness, at a time when orchestras were generally not given to the need or the will to be ‘progressive’). It was Michael Tilson Thomas’s job to not only make them play the unusual music John had written but to extract a performance that was musical, that allowed John’s dreaming to come alive for others via the recording.

    ‘It was a huge collaboration,’ says Carol, ‘from what John was hearing in his mind to what Michael Gibbs did [in orchestrating] for the London Symphony. Mahavishnu was not one step, not one toe, into the past. He was right there in the present, creating the future.’

    ‘I played under him in Tanglewood Orchestra, when I was at Oberlin,’ she says, of Michael Tilson Thomas. ‘We were in a taxi in London between one of the sessions, and it was raining, of course. He was saying – I don’t know if it [had happened] right then – about how a famous composer had died and he, MTT, had been asleep in the hotel room and was awakened in the middle of the night, in a semi-trance or something, and he had to get a pen or a pencil, and he wrote down this stuff on this paper on his desk… and went back to sleep. He came to find out that was part of this famous composer’s will. I can’t remember [who it was]… He’s brilliant, no two ways about it, and he even had a psychic experience himself – so another guy who’s, energy-wise, like Mahavishnu.’

    ‘From what I recall, it was a mutual admiration society,’ says Greg, of the ‘three chiefs’. ‘I think everyone was pretty clear on what they were trying to accomplish. It was just a question of ‘could it be done?’’

    ‘Michael Tilson Thomas was at that time not very well known,’ says George Martin, ‘but he was very respected by his musicians. The LSO had some difficult parts to play and he eased them through with his technical mastery of the music which could be most challenging. I enjoyed listening to the sounds that emerged and realised that I had to muster up the best of my ability to cope with it, especially when it came to editing some of the performances. Selecting the precise place on the tape to splice was tricky to say the least, whereas a time signature of say 13/16 would be like a walk in the park for John.’

    ‘We overdubbed our parts and George put all the pieces together, with John,’ says Jean-Luc. ‘But George, he was an expert, of course, so he would be suggesting sometimes to shorten some improvisations. We had some solos that, well, we would go on forever! Too long…’

    ‘There were a couple of little problems with edits and how we did different sections,’ says Geoff Emerick. ‘Because some of the tracks, I can’t remember which, we did in sections and then edited them together… There were a few times where we thought, ‘This is impossible’, but we managed our way around it… Because we understood each other so well I could basically read George’s mind and he could read my mind, so there was never much conversation or discussion on the sessions between the two of us. We knew what each other were thinking.’

    Several of the Mahavishnu Orchestra – Ralphe, Michael, Carol, Phil – were Beatle fanatics, and somewhat in awe of even meeting George Martin:

    ‘From my standpoint,’ says Michael Walden, ‘I wanted to know if he’d put some phasing on my cymbals in some places. But George said, ‘No, no, we’ve already done that – we can’t do that now’. I felt kinda sad about that ‘cos I really wanted to use a few of his tricks, but no, ‘We don’t do that anymore’!’

    The fact that Jean-Luc Ponty was not especially in awe of the Beatles might have helped his own relations with the quintessential Englishman:

    ‘I really enjoyed working with him,’ says Jean-Luc. ‘And it was very funny because he noticed me accent and after two or three days he came to me and said, ‘So, are you French Canadian or French French?’ And I said, ‘French French’. And he’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t mind…’ British humour! And we were friends right after that. So while John and all his friend disciples were going to the vegetarian restaurant George, who liked good food and good wine, invited me to his house. He realised that I was not, er, part of that circle. So we shared our love of good food and good wine.’

    ‘John always struck me as being very serious on the session, let’s put it that way,’ remembers Geoff Emerick. ‘Jean-Luc Ponty was great fun, of course. The way I remember it is if he hadn’t been there the sessions would have been… not dismal, but because he was there it made it a little more light-hearted.’

    ‘For me, I was just there to play my instrument,’ says Jean-Luc. ‘So that’s probably why I was more relaxed. And also, again, since I had been myself a member of a symphony orchestra for a few years before that it was nothing that impressed me to the point where I was worried.’

    ‘[The LSO] played with us some of the time and we would also do inserts at times,’ says Ralphe. ‘It was kinda hard to get in sync with them, but we worked it out, we found a way of doing it. It turned out better than I thought it would!’

    ‘I’ve got this vivid recollection of sitting in No.2 control room,’ says Geoff Emerick. ‘I guess that’s where we did the overdubs. And I remember Gayle and a couple of the others used to bring little vases of flowers with them and dot them around…’

    Gayle Moran, on keyboards and, on ‘Smile Of The Beyond’ on vocals, was less in awe of George Martin than her colleagues because she was simply unaware of who he was:

    ‘I did this pretty song of John’s… and the orchestra and I were just running through it,’ she recalled, four years later. ‘I had the sheet music there – I was going to read it – [and] I had gum in my mouth. Afterwards, I said I wanted to do it a few more times, and perfect it, and George Martin said it was ‘magic – that’s it’. So I stood there disagreeing with George Martin, this highly respected producer of the Beatles – which I didn’t even know at the time!’

    ‘For her it was a rehearsal,’ says Mike Gibbs, who was there at the time. ‘George Martin said, ‘No, this is way, way too good’. Because there was some amazing magic, which often happens in a first take, and she was so upset: ‘No I’ve got to do it again, I didn’t know what I was singing!’ But that’s the kind of thing a producer does: make magic happen or when it’s happened see that it’s kept. And so he said, ‘No, we don’t need another take’.’

    ‘Gayle Moran’s singing in ‘Smile Of The Beyond’ was for me breath-taking,’ says George, ‘and one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. The one and only take was perfect to my ears, and while she thought she could do better I insisted on going with that performance and never regretted it. The others agreed, and I think today Gayle has come round to appreciating it like I do.’

    ‘He said I’d never do it again like that with that first innocence about it as if I wasn’t really trying. I’m glad now we kept that take.’

    ‘It was so beautifully written, so beautifully done,’ says Michael Walden, of the album as a whole. ‘And when Michael Gibbs would hear playback in the control room he would just sigh, you could hear him sighing, grabbing his hands up by his heart, being completely in Heaven.’

    ‘The shape of each piece was [John’s],’ says Mike Gibbs. ‘All I did was turn the written notes, the guitar notes, into symphonic form. The tune and the harmony and the structure of the pieces – that’s all John. The timbral colour of the orchestra, apart from the Mahavishnu band, is mine.’

    ‘Extremely good’ is how Mike describes John’s capability with written music:

    ‘We’d worked on studio dates [in the ‘60s] where he’d turn up, read music for the first time, play it once, then record, get paid and leave. Oh, he knew what he was doing.’

    While John was drawn to rather austere 20th Century orchestral music, there is a lush, almost Romantic flavour to much of the orchestral writing on Apocalypse, despite its strange meters. John had given Mike remarkable freedom:

    ‘In one instance I was too Romantic,’ he admits, ‘and he looked at me and said [in humorously admonishing tone], ‘Michael! Are you kidding?’ I do remember, though, that I had [that bit] in twice and he took one out and left the other in – I mean, literally it’s one bar of music that goes by in a flash. Other than that he left it to me.’

    The most richly developed purely orchestral section of Apocalypse, which would be brilliantly compressed into a solo guitar cadenza in live performance, were the opening two minutes of ‘Wings Of Karma’, involving various solo voices from the woodwind section and exquisite use of both brass and string sections to build tension and add depth. Here, at least, Mike Gibbs does take some credit:

    ‘Actually, the opening of ‘Wings Of Karma’ was mine – I can’t remember, but John must have said to me, ‘Write me an intro’. So yes, the beginning isn’t John’s really; maybe the melody. I had more freedom with that little opening. I know I was influenced by… well, you might find it similar to a piece by Shoenberg called ‘Music For An Imaginary Film’.’

  4. PART 4:

    ‘It was my first trip overseas,’ says Ralphe. ‘I was blown away… [T]hey picked us up in Rolls Royces and Daimlers. It was quite an event to go there and stay at the Churchill Hotel on Oxford Street and record at AIR Studios. I saw a lot of stuff [in London]. I’m a bass aficionado, and I learned a lot of the history of my instrument in London… going to see the British Museum. I was hanging out with Jeff Beck every day! Talk about British hospitality – he is the epitome of a gentleman. Jeff was so cool, man… I was a kid, and Jeff drove me around London, we would hang out, talk about guitars and basses. We’d go to the Speakeasy, different places. We became friends…’

    One of George Martin’s next projects, in October, would be a jazz-rock album for Jeff Beck. It would include two pieces orchestrated, by George, and would revitalise Beck’s career. Mike Gibbs was on an upward trajectory too:

    ‘I got a lot of attention from other groups after that [wanting arrangements],’ he says. ‘Within the last year I twice listened to ‘Vision Is A Naked Sword’. And one time I did enjoy it and the other time I didn’t enjoy it. And I’m not sure why! To my ear it’s a variation from John on his ‘Dance Of Maya’ – it’s the same kind of time signature and harmonic movements, which appealed to my sensibilities a lot. I was so glad for the opportunity to do an orchestral arrangement of that. I also wrote a piece of my own using similar chords, and recorded it [later in 1974], and John heard it and recognised where it came from – ‘Just A Head’ it’s called, on an album [called Just Ahead] live in Ronnie Scott’s.’

    ‘The whole work took little more than a couple of weeks,’ recalls George Martin. ‘For me there is no doubt that Apocalypse was one of the most difficult albums I have ever produced and also the most satisfying. I’m very proud of it and I think it has stood the test of time and will do so for many years to come.’

    Geoff Emerick agrees: ‘I remember the album fondly and it’s one of the greatest sessions I’ve ever recorded. At the time of doing it it was just amazing, just ‘awesome’ – though that’s a dreadful word.’

    ‘We were all just fledglings,’ says Carol, ‘and – pow! – all of a sudden we’re in the middle of this symphony and all these famous people: we were on our toes!’

    ‘While we were there [in London],’ says Phil, ‘Carol and I went to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the LSO in a performance of [Stravinsky’s] Petrushka – unbelievable. We went backstage, saying hello to Michael Tilson Thomas – man, my head was in the clouds. I thought, ‘This is my life – my life forever!’’

    ‘We have a beautiful sound on the album… and altogether it was an amazing experience,’ said John, ahead of its release in May, ‘very enlightening, invaluable in many ways… I hope people enjoy it as much as I do. I think they will. I think it’s really the beginning of a new era.’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obaySHtIXI

    • Fantastic work, Colin, as ever. Silly but genuine question: what’s a good starting point for the MO? I have a hi-res rip of Thieves And Poets and would like to explore further.

  5. “Dubba-de dubba-de dub-a-dubba-de dubba-de dubba-de dubba-de… You see? It’s 3-3-2-3”

    Dubba-de (123) dubba-de (123) dub-a (12)-dubba-de (123) dubba-de (123) dubba-de (123) dubba-de (123) is 3-3-2-3-3-3-3. Which makes twenty-one, not eleven. Just sayin’.

        • Yup. Those I can do. And 6/8, and in “five”, too, thanks to Take Five, and Living In The Past. When it gets to “eleven” (and seven, and other odd sigs), though, I’m adrift. I have no idea how to follow the beat, how to count it, and the example above is no help at all. Where do the beats fall? And is this particular piece of dubba-de-do accurately transcribed?

          • With the difficult ones, I find it easier to break them up. For example Zappa’s Watermelon In Easter Hay is in 9/8 time, but it makes more sense to think of it as alternating bars of 4 and 5.

            Same with Money by Floyd. It’s in 7/4, but much easier to follow by counting them as alternating bars of 4 and 3.

            These songs are more or less static throughout (although Money modulates into 4/4 for the guitar solo) so they are not too hard to play. It’s when the time signatures change from bar to bar, as in some of the Mahavishnu tracks, that it gets beyond the reach of most mortals.

            You’ll notice that when a drummer writes a song it’s nearly always in an odd time signature. See the Ginger Baker tracks on the Cream albums for example.

            • @H.P. Saucecraft. Surely you’ve got a copy of Zappa’s You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, Vol. 6 knocking around, HPS? In which case, listen to him introduce and count in Thirteen and learn how the musos do it. Yes, it’s really in 13 and features the great Indian violinist L. Shankar. Unfortunately not available on Youtube.

  7. Thanks for filling us in on the Mark II Mahavishnu Orchestra, Colin. Very interesting and a great band too. Witnessed them live and had such a crush on Gayle (well, there weren’t so many gorgeous women around, Sonja Kristina comes to mind).

    Presumably this means your next project will be a MO Mark II book?

    • Thanks Declan. Actually, about two thirds of the near-100,000 words of additional content in the Bathed In Lightning ebook is about MO2, in addition to the three chapters in the print edition (of which this is one, in footnote-less/ennote-less form).

      I made a point of making the additional content (really, a book in itself, lengthwise) available not only within the standard ebook but as a stand-alone ‘bonus chapters’ ebook, for around £3.

      I thought it was a decent thing to do, but my publisher, amusingly, often has people complaining, like ‘Why wasn’t this in the print version! You greedy scumbags!’ etc. I guess they haven’t worked out that 100,000 words more in the print edition would (a) make it a bugger to actually read, and (b) add considerably more than £3 to the price. You can’t win! 🙂

  8. That’s really fascinating Colin, thank you. Not a great one for the Vish, as you know, but I’m listening to Apocalypse now (as opposed to Apocalypse Now), and it all makes a lot more sense with that background information.

    My brother-in-law was a classical flautist who did a fair amount of pop/film session work over the years. He used to complain that working on pop music was so simple-minded compared with the complexities of Wagner. He clearly never worked with John McLaughlin!

    • I’m sure most pop/film work was pretty simple, Mike. You might enjoy this anecdote from an earlier chapter in The JMcL book, where Howard Blake (yes, ‘The Snowman’ composer in later life), a pal of John’s on the late 60s session scene in London, recalls a moment when fellow sessioneer Big Jim Sullivan finally loses his patience with the snotty attitudes of the ‘classical’ guys:

      ‘Big Jim gradually got more and more furious with having to play on sessions,’ remembers Howard Blake. ‘Because he’d be practising these marvellous riffs and the string players would always say, ‘Would you mind keeping the noise down?’ It’d be a battle between him and what we called ‘the gypsies’. And one day I was at a session at Decca. There was a big string section and I was in the rhythm section with Jim and he had a big solid guitar with one of these big curly leads screwed into it, and the string players are saying, ‘Can’t you stop playing that horrible noise?’ And he got up and he just freaked out – picked his guitar up by the lead and he swung it over his head in the middle of this studio and all these string players, they all ran like crazy to get out of the studio! And Jim’s shouting, ‘You fucking bastards! I’m the one who makes us all the money off this – you just sit and play big fat potato notes! I’m doing all the bloody work!’ And to my knowledge that’s the last recording session he ever did!’
      Howard Blake was also drifting out of the sessions world himself, into writing music full-time on the back of his success scoring The Avengers:
      ‘I was immensely successful,’ he admits. ‘In 1968 I won a prize for the best commercial [advertising] track: I did about 204 commercials and made a fortune! I was a huge fan of Quincy Jones. He pioneered that [style of writing] – wrote superbly for big band but used funky soloists with it and I really liked that. Right after The Avengers in ‘68 I was asked to do a film, the follow up to Born Free, called An Elephant Called Slowly, and in fact it was awarded a ‘Top Black Funk’ prize! Somewhere on the internet it says, ‘Howard Blake, black funk guitarist…’! But I could easily have moved in that direction… And then I got married and it started to collapse through 1970/71 and I dropped out of the whole scene and I thought, ‘I want to go back to where I started’, which was writing classical music and being a concert pianist. I started writing again.’

  11. Before working on the book I had always found Apocalypse to be the most demanding of the Vish albums, the least ‘immediate’. Exploring its making helped my appreciation of it. We forget, or maybe don’t consider, how difficult it was, logistically and technically, to create music that combined the volume of rock with the textures of the orchestra in real time (i.e. not simply overdubbing strings/brass on a pop track). It was still pioneering times for that sort of thing in 1974, despite Concert For Group & Orchestra, etc. and George Martin, Mike Gibbs, Tilson-Thomas and the MO were giving it a brave attempt, aspiring to create something that wasn’t just a group+orchestra (or, indeed, Orchestra+orchestra) gimmick. Up to the listener how well it worked.

  13. That was excellent. Thanks

    I must confess to not owning or indeed having heard the ‘Apocalypse’ album, something I shall most certainly rectify 🙂

    • Thank you, Rob. It would have been fascinating to have heard further George Martin productions of JMcL records. Much as I love Ken Scott’s production on ‘Visions Of The Emerald Beyond’ (their next album, and very different in both production sound and concept), George had a different kind of magic. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose.

      Maybe Conch would know more about this, but given that Apocalpse was around 50 mins in length I’ve heard that it was often hard to find a faultless pressing, even at the time. It’d be wonderful to have an audiophile 180gram pressing…

      • Funny you should say that: played the LP last night and although my albums tend to be immaculate, never mind how old, this one has quite a bit of extraneous noise on it, despite looking perfect. Damn.

        Your article really was helpful in appreciating the juggling they did of the electric band relative to strings in the band relative to the orchestra proper. Apocalypse has always had a grandeur scarce in rock/jazz while still being unmistakably McLaughlin. The bit about Walden’s muscular drumming necessitating a separate room occured to me as well: they quietened him down a little too much, a bit more upfront could have given the album a little more sparkle, which it perhaps lacks, despite being great.

        • It’s about time both Apocalypse and Visions Of The Emerald Beyond had a really serious remastering job – neither has been remastered to the standard of the three MO1 albums (the relatively recent vinyl remastering of Birds Of Fire is sensational, and I notice that the first LP is due out on 180gram vinyl soon).

          Re: Walden’s drums, Ken Scott had a great trick that used on them on ‘Visions…’ opening track ‘eternity’s Breath’. The basic track (presumably pre recorded with a click or a guide drum part) was played back to Michael at twice its speed, to which he drummed; the track, when slowed down to normal speed, then had this colossal, slightly otherworldly drum sound. It doesn’t really come across so brilliantly via youtube, MP3 but it’s amazing on vinyl with decent speakers. Apparently the press playback session in London occurred at mammoth volume, with hacks suitably blown away.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB6dFl-UiBg

Leave a Reply