Bathed In Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond

By Colin Harper

On February 16 1969, John McLaughlin flew into New York, from London, in a snowstorm. The following day, Miles Davis, his hero, invited him to play on a record. Two years later, on the path of Bengali mystic Sri Chinmoy, John launched the Mahavishnu Orchestra—an evocation in music of spiritual aspiration and extraordinary power, volume and complexity, far beyond anything else in jazz or rock.

Curiously, it was also a huge success. John McLaughlin brought rock music to its pinnacle, the end point in an evolution from Mississippi blues through Coltrane, Hendrix and the Beatles. And then, in November 1975, he hung up his electric guitar and walked away from the stadiums of the rock world for an on-going, restless career in music of other forms.

To most of the world, John McLaughlin looked like an overnight success, with a backstory going back only as far as that February in 1969. Yet he had been a professional musician since 1958, experiencing all the great movements in British music—trad jazz, rock’n’roll, R&B, soul, modern jazz, free jazz, psychedelic rock—a guitar for hire at the centre of ‘Swinging London’, a bandmate of future members of Cream, Pentangle and Led Zeppelin, but always just under the radar.

Drawing on dozens of exclusive interviews and many months of meticulous research, author and music historian Colin Harper brings that unrepeatable era vividly to life. This landmark new work retrieves for the first time the incredible career of John McLaughlin before he conquered the world—and then chronicles how he did so.

Bathed In Lightning includes more than 80 photographs of McLaughlin and his collaborators, including many previously unseen images. The extended ebook edition adds 100,000 words of extra material—bonus features, if you like—including detailed discographies and concert listings that cover every known McLaughlin recording and live performance from 1963–75.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jawbone Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781908279521

Colin Harper

Colin Harper was born in Belfast in 1968. A professional writer on music between 1994-2001, contributing regularly to Mojo, the Independent and the Irish Times, he is currently a librarian at a Belfast music college. Recent projects have included co-authoring, with Trevor Hodgett, Irish Folk, Trad & Blues: A Secret History (Collins Press, 2004) and creating two wildlife charity albums (www.thewildlifealbum.com) for the benefit of the WWF and Ulster Wildlife Trust.

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Prologue

‘Playing as he does in a state of transported ecstasy – God playing through him, as it were – his music expresses a view of religion as heroic, epic, large-scale, of almost unbearable passion and grandeur. His YMCA swimming instructor features either wreathed in a beatific grin or contorted with the righteous efforts of a Good Man wrestling with the Devil, he radiates an incongruous air of preternatural calm in the midst of the unbelievably violent electronic/percussive sturm und drang of the music – like a man serenely bathing in lightning because he knows that it’s on his side and will never hurt him.’

Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 1975

‘Everything I do now I dedicate to the Supreme … God wants me to be perfect and, therefore, I will be perfect.’

Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, 1971

‘He was … a rock star who seemed to owe nothing to the sixties …’

Fintan O’Toole, 1996

Early in 1973, a young man called Michael Walden was living on a farm in Canaan, Connecticut, with a band from Miami, the New McGuire Sisters. They were getting away from the drug scene, getting it together and just waiting to be discovered by someone, anyone. One night in February, the Mahavishnu Orchestra were playing in Hartford, two and half hours up the road. Every musician of that time was in awe of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and its otherworldly leader Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. Michael was no exception.

‘I got a ride down to the concert,’ he says, in a reminiscence forever burned into his consciousness:

And when I got there it must have been the middle of the show – it’s a big theatre, and I can see from where I’m at, as I’m walking down the aisle, this bright light on Mahavishnu. He’s all in white. Bill Cobham and he are going at it – just drums and guitar. And they’re going at it so furiously, for so long, [and] it must have like maybe 17/4, 19/4 – something so odd that you had no idea what they were playing. But to them it was like taking a bath of warm water … and they would do these incredible breaks – stopping on a dime, going back at it hard again.

So I decided I would get right up to the bottom of the stage, right to where I could look up at John’s eyes to just see what was really going on – cos you would hear bullets just flying out of the amplifiers, the speed of bullets, and so much so that it was beyond the mind. And I saw his eyes were in the back of his head, his body was rocking back and forth, physically rocking back and forth. He seemed lost in a trance, playing this duet with Billy. And Billy, I must also say, was completely the most awesome drummer in the world – you’ve never seen or heard anything as powerful or as strong as he ever, ever, ever. James Brown funk but fused into jazz and fusion so furious, so profound that it would stop anyone. In fact, the whole audience was in a daze, just seeing something that had never been seen before. None of us had.

After the concert, I noticed there was a gentleman in the audience who I could tell was a disciple [of John’s guru, Sri Chinmoy].

I said, ‘Please sir, I know Ina Carmel [a disciple] in Miami, Florida, I’ve been to the Sri Chinmoy Centre down there – and I really want to meet Mahavishnu.’

He said, ‘Well then, wait here and I’ll see what I can do.’

I was nobody, just somebody in the audience. He came back in about ten minutes and he walked me backstage, back behind the curtains, and back to this [room], where I could hear Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer talking about John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and how they felt that night – all of this covered in exuberance and laughter. They were so high from their concert.

And then Mahavishnu kinda pokes his head up and looks at me and says, ‘If you’ll just wait in that room right there I’ll come back and talk to you.’

I said, ‘OK.’

So I’m waiting in this room by myself for, it must have been, ten, 15 minutes, and then he comes in – and it’s like meeting Abraham Lincoln, it’s like meeting some great soul or saint that you would never meet. It was because of God’s grace.

And in this room he says to me, ‘Hello, how are you, brother?’

And first I say, ‘Well my name is Michael – Michael Walden, I play drums, and whatever it is I’ve just seen you do, I want to be able to do. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I want to do what I see you do.’

‘Well, it’s all to do with my prayer and meditation life with my guru Sri Chinmoy.’

‘Well, yes, I know – I see on the back of your albums poems written from the guru …’

‘I’m going to see the guru at six in the morning in Queens, New York.’

And as he’s saying this I’m thinking, you’re not going to get any sleep! You’ve done the most dazzling concert I’ve ever seen and now you’re telling me you’re going to drive to Queens, New York, all night long and see the guru at six in the morning? That in itself just stopped me in my tracks.

‘And when I see the guru in the morning I’m going to tell him I met you.’

‘OK …’

‘Make sure you give me your phone number.’

And I did.

* * *

On July 14 1973, Ian MacDonald – a gifted writer in a less cynical age – felt that the time had come to give readers of the New Musical Express a page of religious instruction. The impetus for doing so was the inexorable rise of Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, a rock star with a vision and proficiency far beyond the norm.

Over the previous two years, this softly spoken man dressed in white, serene, smiling, clean-shaven and sporting neatly-cut hair which was shockingly short for the time had become the loudest, fastest, most awe-inspiring musician on the planet. He wielded a double-neck guitar, he was a vegetarian, he eschewed drugs and alcohol, he espoused discipline, he woke before dawn to meditate and every record he released came with esoteric words by somebody called Sri Chinmoy printed on the sleeves. The music within seemed to be without precedent. It transcended jazz and rock, and yet this man, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, had apparently travelled, by stealth, from the first of those worlds (in England) to emerge fully formed (in America), on a path which led resolutely toward the pinnacle of the second. His Mahavishnu Orchestra were the gods of the rock pantheon: night after night, they performed at the edge of the possible.

‘I certainly don’t identify with the rock culture,’ their leader mused, to a magazine that pandered to it. ‘[But] a rock audience, if it’s good they don’t care what it’s called or who’s doing it – as long as it’s for real. I discovered this many years ago. I’d play at Ronnie Scott’s and get one kind of feeling, and then play Middle Earth and get a whole other feeling. … I’d take the rock audience any time over the jazz audience.’

By 1973, hundreds of thousands of rock fans across America and Europe were reciprocating the love. And love, spreading the word – through the medium of fiendishly complex music at high volume – was what it was all about for Mahavishnu John McLaughlin.

‘Our possibilities are, in fact, infinite,’ he explained. ‘If all of us truly realised this, how much better a world it might be. In a small way, through the Mahavishnu Orchestra and my other writing and playing, perhaps more people will be challenged to unlock their gifts. We have so much more within us than we suspect. God is in you – but He’s asleep. Some people you can nudge and they’ll wake up. Other people you shake, but they want to sleep on for another few lifetimes. I’m awake. Through the grace of my Master [Sri Chinmoy] – I’m awake.’

Who, then, was Sri Chinmoy?

‘Sri Chinmoy,’ wrote Ian MacDonald, ‘is a Yogi from Bengal who has attained the highest consciousness it’s possible for a human being to reach … He’s gone so high that God has met him coming from the other direction and now they’re fused. God has manifested himself on earth in Sri Chinmoy – and in several other Yogis as well, although they don’t figure here because John McLaughlin didn’t go to them to sort himself out. It’s Chinmoy we’re concerned with. According to him, God is everywhere and in all of us … but neither sin nor evil actually exist – only the state of ignorance. … Chinmoy says we’ve got to reject this ignorance and strive toward God.’

‘He is no ordinary human being,’ said John. ‘He is divine with divine qualities like love, compassion and beauty. To his disciples he represents a divine incarnation. All his powers are the powers of the Supreme Being – God in other words.’

* * *

A week after Michael Walden had met the Mahavishnu, the phone rang:

It was Mahavishnu on the phone – and this was a big deal.

‘Do you remember meeting me?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I want you to go to a meditation tonight in Norwalk, Connecticut. The guru will be there. I can’t be there but I want you to go.’

‘OK, I’ll do my very best.’

When he hung up the phone I looked in the mirror at myself. I knew disciples didn’t have beards, so I immediately shaved off my beard. I brushed my hair back – I had a big afro – and the only white clothes I had was a kind of white dashiki my mother had made for me. So I put on my white dashiki …

When I got down to the centre I got there a little late. The guru was already on his perch, in this room, in a house, in a basement, all painted white and blue, and he was singing, playing the harmonium, singing spiritual songs in Bengali or whatever his native tongue was. And the girls are sitting there, beautifully dressed in Indian saris on the right hand side and the boys dressed in white on the left hand side. But the boys’ side had no extra chairs. There was one extra chair on the girls’ side.

I sat down on that chair, and the guru looked at me as I walked in – and I saw him look at me and I could feel this power that I felt from John McLaughlin, Mahavishnu, at that concert. The same intensity, something heavy going on in the room, and you could cut it with a knife. So I sat down and then, after he finished singing, this other little woman got up to read. Her name was Akuti, she had grey hair, and she got up to read out of a book called The Dance Of Life Part 2. The poems were longing for God, crying for God – ‘Oh Lord, when will I see your face? / How many tears must I cry / Before I will see your face? / How many more days must I live in loneliness / Before I will see your face?’ – on and on like this.

Each poem was just an assault on your heart. And I’m there thinking, I’m not ready for this! I want to be ready but am I really ready for this? Because it was just so intense. It wasn’t anything you could just shrug off. Like, you can’t ignore the sun: the sun was that bright you gotta deal with it – or you gotta walk into a dark room!

After the meditation we were told to go to the library upstairs in the house and look at the books. And I was so lucky I met this black disciple who put me at ease. His name was Lelihan – still friends to this day – and he was extremely friendly.

He said to me, ‘How are you?’

‘I’m … all right.’

‘I want you to come with me through to the library, and then after that we can go to Guru’s vegetarian restaurant called Love & Serve.’

‘Oh, OK.’

So we walked upstairs to the library – and I was very happy now – and in this library there were so many books that this guru has written, well into the thousands. I’m very poor, I’m dirt poor; I have just enough to buy the book that Akuti was reading from downstairs. So I buy that book and as I’m beginning to walk downstairs and turn the corner Guru’s standing right there – right there – and I’m stopped in my tracks. And he begins to meditate on me, he begins to close his eyes, half at a slant, and his eyes roll up in his head like I’d seen John Mahavishnu’s eyes roll up in his head. And I felt this deep feeling come over me. And as he stood before me I tried to become receptive to what he was doing and tried to open myself to let him come into me.

And then he said to me, ‘You are Mahavishnu’s friend?’

‘Yes, Guru.’

‘He is flying in an airplane right now and thinking about us. You would like to become my disciple?’

And then it hit me like a smack on the head. ‘I think I’m ready …’

And then he looked at me, smilingly, and said, ‘I accept you within my heart.’

And as he said that he kinda walked away. But within me I felt an explosion, I felt a real explosion. Something happened to my heart. And I felt extremely grateful that Mahavishnu’s guru – who is behind all this music I’m hearing – just accepted me. It was overwhelming.’

* * *

‘I had one experience in music, with Brian Auger’s band in 1963, ’64,’ said John, trying to illuminate his mystical path to an English journalist as the purifying flame of the Mahavishnu Orchestra burned brightest. ‘One night we were playing, and suddenly the spirit entered into me and I was playing, but it was no longer me playing. The music was, is and always will be. … I was just there, and it was coming through me, in a never-ending stream, and it was just delight, and fulfilment, and joy. In that little moment, the consciousness expands … and you can see things during that experience. I became aware that this thing was a permanent state, if one could reach it …

‘Around 1967, there arose in me the need to offer my work to God. I was still unaware of the fact that He was the only creator. One still has ego problems, thinking that one does things, but He is the only creator. It culminated when I went to America, at the beginning of ’69. … There’s a saying that when the disciple is ready the master appears … and [Sri Chinmoy] appeared through a friend. Within two weeks, he’d made [my wife and I] disciples, and what happened since then … when I look back over my life, at my consciousness then and my consciousness now, I feel truly blessed …

‘I have a master who has accepted me as his instrument, therefore I have become a god – because he is the incarnation of God. … He gives the music to you through me.’

* * *

Around July 1973, Michael Walden went to see another Mahavishnu Orchestra concert, at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. It was another breathtaking experience, made all the more so by the public debut of a new custom-made Rex Bogue twin-neck guitar – the ‘Double Rainbow’ – which had taken its maker a year of full-time endeavour. It was as if Arthur had acquired Excalibur.

This time Mahavishnu said to me, ‘You live not too far from here, right?’

‘Well, I live in Canaan, Connecticut, which is about a two hour drive’.

‘I have a station wagon. I’ll put my new guitar in the trunk of that station wagon and you drive me to your house and then we can play tomorrow’.

‘Really?’

So he did just that: he put his Rex Bogue in the back of the station wagon and he gives me the keys to drive. So I’m driving him to my house – and, man, this is unbelievable. The biggest musician in the world to you, and now I’m in charge. He’s sleeping; he has no idea where he’s at. So we finally arrive at my place, which is right out in the middle of nowhere. He gets out and he walks to the house and the people [in my band] are just dumbstruck: Ralphe Armstrong, bass; Sandy Torano, guitar; Greg DiGiovine, one of our helpers; Greg Fells, our manager; and Billy McCoy, our pianist. They can’t believe that walking into the house is Mahavishnu John McLaughlin.

So then we make some food. I make a bucket of casserole. And in the morning I offer him to come meditate with me, in my cabin. And in my cabin I have a wood floor, my stone shrine. He bows down and we begin to meditate for about 20 minutes or so. And in that 20 minutes I can hear what sounded like I had left my sink on, the waterspout, because I could hear this drip … drip … drip …

And I thought, oh God, this is gonna really distract him. Shall I get up to turn it off? Or just pretend it’s OK? Or just ignore it?

After about 20 minutes of just silence, he bows down again and touches the floor – his face is on the floor. And I then bow down and touch the floor with my hands and my face. And when I get back up I bow to him. He’s now facing me, so I face him. And when I see him then it hits me: that sound I was hearing were his teardrops hitting the wooden floor. And that scared me. What am I getting myself into? These people are so intense – maybe it’s too much for me? Here he is, his whole face filled with tears, in my cabin. Oh my God …

‘Well, we can go play now,’ he said.

So we walked across to the barn and we began to play very fast – very, very fast. Ralphe Armstrong, myself, John on a high chair, Sandy Torano standing up playing guitar and Billy McCoy. So we play this fast funk and he signals each person to solo, and they do their very best to just burn – and they do.

So, finally, now Mahavishnu is going to solo. He turns his body on the chair to face me, and his face makes no expression at all, like kind of a stare but with no emotion at all, which is very freaky to me. It’s all freaky to me. I close my eyes and the sound he’s making is phenomenal, it’s phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. So I decide, I’m not going to look at him, I’m going to close my eyes and I will then be able to play with him – and I do. So I close my eyes and I can just soar with him, we’re off and I’m hearing music he’s taken me to. And after a while there he was again, playing this kind of – I won’t say ‘cat and mouse’ with his face, but there just wasn’t any emotion.

You know, you’d look at Jimi Hendrix and you can see on Jimi’s face what he’s playing: John was showing me he could play like that without showing anything on his face – which I’d never experienced before. If you can imagine, it was so loud and so precise that you would expect something on his face – there was absolutely nothing on his face. I just kept playing with closed eyes.

* * *

One of John’s last recordings prior to becoming a disciple of Sri Chinmoy was Devotion, made early in 1970 with Jimi Hendrix’s producer Alan Douglas.

‘I got a call from John when I was in New York,’ says Brian Auger, an old friend from John’s days in London. ‘He’d never really let go up to that time, but he said, Brian, you gotta hear my new album – I know you’re going to really dig this. And when I went to listen to it – Wow! John wasn’t there yet, but Alan Douglas was there, and these guys were mixing the thing and it was absolutely blazing. And all of a sudden the door opened and in came Jimi Hendrix. And I said, Jim! God, great to see you! We sat at the back of the studio, chatting, listening to stuff. But the interaction between Douglas and Jimi – it was like, We got the new guy here – listen to this! You’re done Jimi!’

By the end of that year, Jimi Hendrix was done – not as any consequence of his friend, John McLaughlin, but as a consequence of ‘rock’n’roll culture’. Mahavishnu John McLaughlin would take Jimi’s innovations and build a tower of magic, with all of the rock’n’roll and none of the culture.

‘I love rock’n’roll,’ said Carlos Santana, ‘but when it comes to the rock’n’roll of Mahavishnu, there’s no comparison. What they play is not just a mask, a loud, glittery nowhereness. It’s true joy.’

Santana wasn’t the only Woodstock superstar turned on to the new sound. Alvin Lee, homeward-bound speed merchant with Ten Years After, didn’t want to get there last. ‘I’ve been listening to the Mahavishnu Orchestra,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be a dated musician. I want to stay with what’s happening.’

‘John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu group – they are going to be huge,’ predicted Jimmy Page in 1972.

For Jeff Beck, the seemingly incongruous mix of possibilities and popularity inherent in John McLaughlin’s band were a revelation. It would also light the pathway to resurrecting his own muse. ‘What really upset the applecart for me was Mahavishnu Orchestra when they played Central Park,’ he said. ‘If they could do this concert with masses of people going bananas for this extreme radical jazzy rock stuff … it wasn’t jazz, it was violent. I felt this is it. This is what can be done.’

Beck had a game he could raise, but not everyone who wanted to could pull off their own Mahavishnu-inspired ‘Jazz Odyssey’. Gary Moore, who could out-run Alvin Lee on his way back home, or anywhere else, would hold his hand up to defeat. ‘Every guitarist of that era was listening to John McLaughlin and playing in weird time signatures. The people doing it properly … were from a jazz background. I came from a rock background … I didn’t have the theoretical or harmonic knowledge to pull it off. Sometimes I’d be so drained at a gig [from trying] I’d have to lie down for an hour after coming offstage.’

Frank Zappa, a fascinated observer on many shared bills with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, wasn’t quite so enamoured with the architecture but certainly admired the masonry. ‘A person would be a moron not to appreciate McLaughlin’s technique,’ he declared. ‘The guy has certainly found out how to operate a guitar as if it were a machine gun.’

For Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, it wasn’t just the masonry. ‘The reason that someone like John McLaughlin is so superb is that he combines a great deal of soul with his mastery of the guitar.’ He could see the spirit at work.

Bill Bruford shared bills with the Mahavishnu Orchestra as a member of both Yes and King Crimson. ‘Like all great outfits, they came like a bolt from the blue,’ he recalled. ‘It was an upstate college in New York in about 1972 – the Kinks, Yes and Mahavishnu, as I recall. … When they started, I couldn’t believe it – never heard anything like it. I grabbed Rick Wakeman and pushed him out to the front of the house with me. It was stunning.’

‘The best band we ever played with was the Mahavishnu Orchestra,’ said Rod Argent, leader of Argent, whose own ‘God Gave Rock’n’Roll To You’ might well have been cultural flag even John McLaughlin could get behind. ‘It was in the States, and something happened that freaked me out. The whole Orchestra came to the side of the stage and listened to our set. … It freaked Bob our drummer out a bit. He was playing his drum solo and Billy Cobham was taking pictures of him!’

There was never any sense of superiority or competition from John or his band members toward anyone else on the bill. They were only in competition with themselves – and they couldn’t be beaten. But their presence alone could still incur terror for their fellow travellers. Emerson Lake & Palmer were rumoured to have cancelled gigs through fear of following the Mahavishnu Orchestra; the people responsible for Yes refused the use of their PA to John’s band on at least two open-air festivals. Others at least tried to rise to the challenge.

‘Our very first tour was with Mahavishnu Orchestra,’ recalled Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. ‘That was a bit weird – like Hendrix [touring with] the Monkees.’

‘We used to sit behind Billy Cobham, and next to him was one of John’s cabinets facing us, so we could hear every note perfectly from behind,’ said Brad Whitford, of the same band. ‘It was a mystical experience. They would go places.’

‘Later we realised it was good for us,’ said Joe Perry, Aerosmith’s lead guitarist, ‘because we had to play much better to try and win his audience. We had to kick ass every night, and later we’d listen back to the tapes and it would sound almost professional to us. Meanwhile, these geniuses in Mahavishnu had been to fuckin’ Mars and back, every night.’

The cosmic analogy seemed the only appropriate one to many of the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s peers. Their sound and their proficiency were unearthly. Solo guitar pioneer Leo Kottke opened for the Mahavishnu Orchestra on several occasions. ‘Each of those nights was astounding, moving,’ he recalled. ‘Each of those nights was travelling out to the stars forever.’

‘For bands like the Doobie Brothers or the Allmans, even if they were headlining above Mahavishnu Orchestra, it didn’t matter to John,’ says Greg DiGiovine, the faithful roadie. ‘But these musicians would almost always be on the side of the stage watching John, trying to learn something or just scratching their heads, thinking, what the heck is this all about?’

King Crimson’s Robert Fripp was a regular at the side of the stage. Members of Wishbone Ash and Caravan, who shared a European tour with the final incarnation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, couldn’t quite believe it was real. ‘On a musician’s level,’ says Wishbone ash man Andy Powell, ‘I look back and think, jeez, yeah, we were headlining over Mahavishnu Orchestra – how bizarre is that? You have to pinch yourself.’

For Caravan’s Geoffrey Richardson, it might all have been a dream. ‘I look back and think, I toured with the Mahavishnu Orchestra – wow! I treasure the memory.’

* * *

In December 1973, as the Mahavishnu Orchestra were on a seemingly inexorable path to transition from Top 20 album/10,000-seater arena status to the very highest levels, John McLaughlin pulled the plug. The first Mahavishnu Orchestra were no more.

‘Since becoming a disciple, I have become super-sensitive and I can look at people and see what they are thinking, and that can be terrible,’ he had explained. ‘I don’t want to proselytise, but I know the truth and it fills my mind and body.’

None of the other four guys in the Mahavishnu Orchestra knew that truth. The music was great, but the tensions were greater still. This was hardly a setback: it was surely all in God’s will. As a new year began, it was time to create a new Mahavishnu Orchestra – this time, with like-minded souls.

‘I don’t want to call it Mahavishnu II,’ he told the man from Rolling Stone. ‘Actually, it’s the real Mahavishnu Orchestra.’

* * *

The second Mahavishnu Orchestra – the closest John McLaughlin ever came to bringing his spiritual and musical vision together – would tour the world, make three albums, captivate the hearts and blow the minds of millions. Yet within two years the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in any form, was gone.

In the summer of 1975, on a two-month tour of the USA with Jeff Beck, John’s irreplaceable Rex Bogue guitar shattered into pieces in an incident that seemed inexplicable but felt profound. ‘It fell from a bench,’ said John, ‘no one was near it, very peculiar circumstances – and it hit the ground on the front and split the body right up the middle.’

Loss adjusters took it away and it was never seen again. That same summer John McLaughlin, no longer Mahavishnu, was to find that faith, gurus and marriage were also breakable, imperfect entities. Only God, after all, was worthy of trust.

* * *

Sri Chinmoy died, aged 76, in 2007. His writings and paintings are numbered in their tens of thousands; endorsements from Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Princess Diana, two Popes, a UN supremo and sundry other figures of international notoriety decorate his website. He was careful to collect them. He was, perhaps, the last of the 60s pop-culture mystics who drew toward them musical icons and world leaders like moths to a flame. He may have been a very holy man or he may have been a charlatan; he may have been selfless or he may have been a self-publicist. Advocates of all these views can be found. Perhaps most helpfully, as Mahavishnu veteran Bob Knapp concludes, at the distance of half a lifetime, ‘I met Sri Chinmoy on several occasions … and thought he was a very interesting man.’

The enigma remains, but so too a body of work from his most devoted disciple, which stands as substance forever: whatever the nature of the guru – placebo or active ingredient – he was the final, decisive factor in allowing an already great musician to create, for the duration of their association, the greatest music of his life and the pinnacle of all rock music. Perhaps only John McLaughlin, the world’s worst nostalgist, would disagree.

‘Oh, I think it’s always flattering that people find your previous work interesting for a number of years,’ he once reflected, as yet another inquisitor brought the subject back to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and those heady days of sold-out Albert Halls and seas of people in the open air. ‘Rock stars are subject to the adulation which instrumentalists are rarely subject to. The success of Mahavishnu was something even I didn’t understand … any artist has delusions of immortality. My personal view is that when it’s finished, it’s done. There’s nothing you can do with it any more. I have my souvenirs, some very nice souvenirs, but I’m alive now. If I have a concert tonight, it’s the most important concert in the world. … If you have an audience, whether it’s ten or 10,000, it’s still an audience. If you have one person listening, that’s just as important …’

Chapter 1

Beginnings (1942–62)

‘Coming to the point where you can make the instrument speak for you takes an awfully long time. When I started on the guitar at 11, I didn’t realise this … [but] it was a love thing that occupied all my waking hours, one way or another.’

John McLaughlin, 1973

‘I don’t think about my past the way anybody else does,’ John McLaughlin once said. ‘I don’t even think about my past for the most part. I’m too busy with today, my life today. And I’ve got new ideas today, what I feel about today and that’s really all I’m concerned with – with the exception that sometimes I’ll have a reflective period in which I feel the need to think about what I’ve done and bring it up to date. I’ll discover something that I wrote some years ago and I’d say, Well, I didn’t work it enough – there are some things I can find out about that. Otherwise, I forget what I’ve done. I just go from day to day, like you, like everybody else!’

In the early 1970s, John McLaughlin told a friend that ‘he does as many interviews as he can, because they’re a way to clean out the soul’.¹ And in that spirit, John gave many interviews from 1970 onward. While never much of an anecdotalist, when asked about his past and his influences he was always very open, although most encounters with journalists would be steered back toward discussion of matters spiritual and philosophical. Consequently, while the detail of his musical path through the long 60s would remain hazy, most of the pieces of the jigsaw were at least glimpsed. The most clearly elaborated period prior to his move to America in 1969 was his childhood discovery of music. His whole life has, in essence, been spent trying to recreate, for himself and for others listening, that same all-consuming rush of elation.

John was born on January 4 1942 in Kirk Sandall, an outlying parish in the Borough of Doncaster, in Yorkshire, a northern county of England and former Viking stronghold. The Church of St Oswald, a seventh century king of Northumbria, is the historical heart of the parish. The McLaughlins, however, were no slaves to tradition.

‘My parents were totally agnostic,’ John explained, ‘they never went to church, and they never took me to church. They disagreed with the governance of the church, which was quite a healthy attitude. … Christianity can address the profound questions of existence, but when I was young, the church didn’t seem willing to.’²

John was the youngest of five children. ‘I have three older brothers and an older sister, and I owe a great deal to each of them.’³ His father was an engineer, his mother an amateur violinist and each of his three brothers was into music.

‘My brothers really helped in developing a musical awareness at an early age … basically it started before I was aware that something was going on. I remember when I was about seven or eight, one of my brothers, an avid classical music listener, tuning into the BBC a lot. One night I heard something that was very beautiful which impressed me. We got a gramophone about that time too, which was quite a rarity.’

John’s brothers had been teaching him French from the age of three and ‘from when I was about four, there was a lot of music happening the house’. But it was the arrival of the gramophone, and 78 RPM discs, circa 1949, that brought music into focus for him.

That was the first time I actually heard anything in music, ever recognised anything,’ he said. ‘I remember quite regularly putting a record on the player, and getting one of my mother’s knitting needles and waving my arms around in front of the mirror and ‘conducting’ this orchestra. But I quickly found out that it was much more satisfying if I knew the music, because then I could bring the violins in here and the horns in there.’

‘When I was seven years old and I heard the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on a 78 record,’ he recalled, ‘it made my hair stand on end and gave me goose bumps. That was the first indication of what music could do to someone – namely myself. It was a message to my heart and soul more than anything – just the fact that if music could have this effect on me, it could have an effect on anybody. I was only seven, so I didn’t stop to consider what was happening to me, but there was always music in the house, so fortunately the experience was repeated. It used to happen every time I listened to it, and when I started discovering Mozart, Schubert, and so on, and I realised that I could make music myself, that was quite a wonderful discovery.’

* * *

Around this time, when John was seven, his parents separated. John’s mother and all the siblings moved 125 miles north to Monkseaton, a small village by the North Sea, around ten miles from the nearest city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. ‘I remember very little about my father,’ he said.

Monkseaton dates back at least as far as the 12th century but, perhaps of more practical concern to Mrs McLaughlin, its primary school had just opened that year, in 1949.⁴ There was a piano in the McLaughlin household, and John’s sister was already learning the instrument. When he was nine – ‘when I realised that I, too, could hopefully make music’ – John asked his mother if he could also take piano lessons. She said yes.

‘I did that for about three years, taking lessons; then a guitar came into the house via one of my brothers. It went from him to the next one, to the next one, to me. And that was the beginning of the beginning.’

For John, playing a D chord he had been shown, the impact was sonic, tactile and immediate. ‘It was quite a thrill. I actually fell in love with the guitar at that moment. [It was] the sound. I could hold it … you could hold it close to you, very personal. And you made the notes! I had heard my brother play but I had always liked the sound. My brother was just doing D, G and A7 chords. The instrument fascinated me and when I realised I could do it, it was something super special.’

‘I feel nervous without a guitar,’ he later confessed. ‘It’s part of my body. I’ve felt that way since the beginning, since I first picked up a guitar when I was 11 years old. That same day I was taking the guitar to bed with me, so that gives … an idea what I feel about it.’

John’s piano interest faded in parallel with his guitar intoxication. ‘I had this dragon of a piano teacher, but at the same time I used to listen to a lot of music and practise on the piano, and every time you practise without reading music you’re developing your ear, you develop an appreciation of music. It can only help.’

His new instrument came with an equally intoxicating repertoire, an African-American sound at that stage gradually seeping into the consciousness of cognoscenti in Britain. It was quite different from the European art music which had soundtracked his earlier years. ‘My brothers … they were part of this blues movement which was just surfacing. Fortunately for me they had records. … For me, the blues was a revelation … it was an introduction to black culture.’

Early heroes were all acoustic, mostly Mississippi-style players: Muddy Waters (pre-electric), Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly and Sonny Terry. ‘I was really into Sonny Terry (he wasn’t with Brownie McGhee then), and the whole blues-harmonica-guitar-bottleneck thing,’ John recalled. ‘I didn’t even know what a bottleneck was. For years I thought they were doing it with their fingers. I was trying to sing and play like Big Bill and Muddy, you know, sing da blooze. I was around 12 then.’

John’s brothers must have been remarkably hip: this was circa 1954, and while ‘trad jazz’ was the in thing among the progressive young, the skiffle phenomenon, which kick-started post-war British pop music and youth culture as we know it, had yet to begin. Nevertheless, while a 12-year-old John McLaughlin, stuck in Monkseaton, was listening voraciously to their records, some of these inspirational figures were actually performing in Britain, and increasingly so as the decade progressed.

Leadbelly, the self-styled King of the 12-string Guitar, had died in 1949 but as a performer had made it as far as France in his last year. In 1951, Big Bill Broonzy embarked on a trip to Europe and it was there, in Germany, that he ran into one Bert Wilcox, a British jazz promoter. Wilcox brought Broonzy to a Methodist Hall in London in September 1951 to perform ‘a recital of blues, folksongs and ballads’. From blues scholar Paul Oliver’s own recollection, about 40 people turned up. In 1951 Broonzy’s recordings also made their debut in Britain. That year alone, Vogue issued no less than six Big Bill Broonzy UK 78s. Several further trips to Britain – sponsored by the very popular trad-jazz bandleader Chris Barber – were considerably more successful, and from 1955 on into the mid 60s, Vogue, Pye, Columbia, Mercury and other labels serviced Broonzy’s rapidly expanding UK market. Broonzy died in 1958, and while few of those who made their names in the British folk, blues and jazz scenes of the mid 60s could lay claim to having ever seen Big Bill in concert, his influence cast a long shadow. Everyone had heard his records.

The harmonica/guitar duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, on Big Bill’s recommendation, also began regular trips to Britain from 1958, initially via Chris Barber’s patronage. The same year, again via Barber, Muddy Waters made his first foray into this strange land of well-heeled white people who were slowly but surely becoming enraptured with the old music of poor black America.

‘When I first heard blues music, Muddy Waters, it was amazing to me because it was an untempered scale,’ John later explained. ‘And also there was such a kind of elegance about it, an urban elegance. I didn’t know how to play it, I didn’t know anything about it, all I knew was that it was saying something to me which was very important. About feelings and about being.’

Muddy Waters’s first trip to Britain in 1958 was rather baffling for the bluesman: the only records the British cognoscenti had heard of him were acoustic; he had since moved on to amplified ‘Chicago blues’. The fans weren’t happy. When he returned a couple of years later – with an acoustic guitar, hoping not to disappoint – the reverse applied. By this time British listeners had caught up, and the beginnings of the amplified British R&B boom were taking hold.

‘I still think back to him with great affection,’ John would later say of Muddy, and his primal, instinctive music. He would also later find, and delight in, certain similar qualities between rough-hewn blues and Indian classical music. ‘They don’t work with a tempered scale [either]. You can go up a quarter tone or even less and it’s a different note; like a flattened third in jazz or blues.’

John’s next discoveries, again through his brothers, were flamenco and guitar-centric Spanish art music, which he found passionate, soulful and exciting. ‘There was a sense of freedom like that in blues and jazz. There was also improvisation. And there was a passion that hit a certain spot in me. That was when I was about 13 … my piano became sort of neglected.’

John’s early flamenco and classical inspirations included Laurindo Almeida (probably his 1954 album The Guitar Music Of Spain); progressive flamenco pioneer Carlos Montoya (probably the 1950 album Spanish Guitar Solos); and guitarist/lutenist Narciso Yepes.⁵ He would also express admiration as a teenage listener for British classical guitarist/lutenist Julian Bream, whose international performing career was only beginning in the mid 50s, but who was a tireless proselytiser for the hitherto marginalised guitar within that world, regularly featured on BBC radio broadcasts.

‘I had been put on a piano stool at an early age but I soon knew that the guitar was the instrument for me,’ Julian later explained. ‘At that time, though, the guitar was considered an oddity, and teachers were very hard to find.’

Julian eventually found a man who claimed to have taught the last Czar. Such was the low opinion of the instrument in establishment circles, Julian was obliged to take piano as his main instrument when attending the Royal College of Music. Nevertheless, Julian Bream’s indefatigable zeal for the instrument, his unequalled mastery of it and his maverick flair cannot be underestimated in any discussion of guitar players in the 20th century.

‘I’m one of Julian Bream’s greatest admirers,’ John later declared. For any budding guitarist attuned to classical music growing up in 50s Britain, Julian Bream would have been an almost solitary shining beacon of possibilities.⁶

‘After a year of flamenco music, when I was 14, I heard Django Reinhardt. That really turned my head around. I became a great fan of Django’s and developed a linear approach to the guitar, which was really Django’s thing.⁷ Also, Django was playing with Stephane Grappelli. My mother was a violinist, so there was this thing about the violin that touched me. As a result, I think the combination of guitar and violin affected me in a way that maybe wasn’t realised until many years later on.’

John’s only vision in forming the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in 1971, was that it should feature a violin, and he has always attributed this to his mother’s influence. As for Django Reinhardt, he was perhaps Europe’s single greatest contribution to jazz: creating with Grappelli a ‘gypsy jazz’ style of playing unique to Europe, adding significantly to the vocabulary of the idiom. His linear style – blistering, liquid lines of notes rather than chord-based extemporisation – was partly one of necessity, two of his fretting fingers having been damaged in a fire. To judge by Django’s immortality as the father of a genre, necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

For about 18 months John took guitar lessons, having realised that he had exhausted what he could do at that point through self-tuition. ‘I was 15 when I began taking guitar lessons from a teacher, but actually he was more interested in listening to me play my imitations of Muddy Waters and Bill Broonzy than teaching me!’ John recalled, more than half a century later.⁸ ‘However, he did instill in me a certain discipline which has continued to this day.’

If there is one word that would characterise John McLaughlin, to admirers and detractors alike, it would be discipline. Technique might be another: in trying to emulate Django, John realised that fingers alone would not suffice, and started using a pick – an approach he would use almost exclusively thereafter.

‘Music made everything else kind of pale in comparison,’ he reflected. ‘At that age you live in a daydream world. My daydream world was immersed to the core in music. I used to spend all my time listening to records. Finally when I found the Voice Of America coming from Frankfurt with Willis Conover through the static,⁹ I discovered American jazz.’

‘I used to tune into [it] every Thursday night,’ he recalled. ‘They played all the new releases. You’d hear lots of terrible background noise but I was very active in looking for music on the radio.’

By this point John was, of course, at secondary school. Two of his brothers went on to take PhDs, in Petro-Chemicals and Marine Biology, and John concedes that it was a family of ‘high achievers’ – and also ‘itchy-feetists’, the siblings all getting out of the North-East as soon as possible. But John himself was clearly not suited to this path.

‘The greatest thing about my school – and it was a pretty dreadful school – was my music teacher. Of course, he taught classical music, but the fact that he had some students that were interested just in music and wanted to play, for him was enough. He just encouraged me, encouraged us, and that was really great. There was a music club where we could play jazz records – in those days it would be Jazz At The Philharmonic, Oscar Peterson …’

John’s next discovery, in 1956, would be Tal Farlow, the only American jazz guitarist he would go out of his way to laud as an influence while at the height of his own fame. (He would pay polite respect, if asked, to other pioneer American jazz guitarists like Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall.)

‘I was walking by a record store in [Newcastle],’ John recalled in 1978. ‘I heard a record with a guitar player. I couldn’t believe him. He just knocked down my socks. I ran in to find out who was making this incredible music. It was Tal Farlow. So Tal Farlow became my real hero. His harmonic concept, even now, I think is stunning. He was quite revolutionary on guitar.’

Tal’s technique was based around his unusually large hands – an advantage John shared. ‘I think having big hands and long fingers helps. My hands are pretty big so I can get some tough chords – partly because I use my thumb for some. On My Foolish Heart I have to do some serious stretching. Tal Farlow, in fact, inspired me to do that. … He has a flowing lyricism … he’s just fantastic … he’s the king of jazz guitarists.’¹⁰

John would feature ‘My Foolish Heart’ – an Oscar-nominated song, published in 1949, describing the beguiling force of romantic passion, with an invocation to ‘beware, my foolish heart!’ – as a solo piece during late period concerts by the second Mahavishnu Orchestra, after the failure of his third marriage, and would record it in this form on Electric Guitarist (1978). ‘The lyrics have a special meaning for me,’ he said.

While John was discovering American jazz, a charismatic fellow called Lonnie Donegan had risen from banjo player in Chris Barber’s trad-jazz band to become the driving force of a national epidemic: people learning guitars, and most of them requiring only three chords.

‘Rock Island Line’, a frenetic interval item from Barber’s live act, lifted from American songster Leadbelly’s folk-blues repertoire, had been recorded for a Chris Barber album in 1954. Belatedly released as a single, it shot up the UK charts in January 1956, and the ‘skiffle’ era was born: uptempo American roots music, folksong with a backbeat. There would soon be a generally ersatz British equivalent to the rock’n’roll craze that was sweeping America in the late 50s, but skiffle, preceding it and briefly running in tandem with rock’n’roll, was a distinctly British invention and a cultural watershed.

Between 1956 and 1962, Lonnie Donegan racked up 34 UK singles chart placings, revealing a canny sensibility for broadening his appeal into comedy and ‘variety’ when the initial craze for skiffle subsided. Skiffle’s heyday was 1957. That year, the BBC Light Programme, responding to an obvious demand, launched Saturday Skiffle Club with a weekly audience of two and a half million listeners. Its producer Jimmy Grant was concerned at the time that ‘the trouble with most amateur skiffle groups is that they lack basic musicianship’. But then that was the whole appeal of the thing. By October the following year, the new show quietly dropped the word ‘skiffle’ from its title but remained an oasis for live, British pop music in an otherwise dusty broadcasting schedule, and in an era long before commercial radio, pirate radio or even BBC regional stations. In due course, some of John McLaughlin’s earliest recordings would be for Saturday Club. But nobody would be accusing him of lacking basic musicianship.

* * *

Back in Monkseaton, the most exciting cultural development was the founding of a Morris Dance troupe in 1955 by a teacher at Whitley Bay Grammar.

‘Fortunately, our music teacher was of the enlightened kind,’ said John, ‘and convinced me to play in front of the class with whatever formation I could round up among my fellow students. This was a great experience for me and I thank him to this day.’

While the underground swelling of engagement in traditional music generally referred to as the British folk revival (peaking in the mid 60s alongside the British beat/R&B boom) was taking root in the later 50s, John never had any interest in it, let alone Morris dancing. For a start, where would he have found the time? At school he had no less than three bands on the go: ‘A kind of traditional jazz band, a George Shearing kind of band and, alas, I had a skiffle group!’ Even John McLaughlin played ‘Rock Island Line’.

George Harbertson, a school friend of John’s, recalled walking home past his house at 54 Warkworth Avenue one evening in 1955. Until that evening, George said, ‘I was not aware that he played guitar. He invited me in and I was astounded when I heard him play some blues, followed by some amazing flamenco. … I was utterly amazed by this experience, and duly made my mother’s life a misery by constantly pleading with her to buy me a guitar.’

Four weeks later, George had his guitar, and immediately decided to strip off its varnish and replace it with boot polish. ‘Needless to say, this was a total disaster. I can still see the look on John’s face when I showed him my handiwork, and asked him to tune it for me.’

George recalled that John’s skiffle outfit was called the Ram Jam Skiffle Group, featuring his sister on vocals and one Peter Simpson on double bass – a genuine, full-sized instrument, which would have been quite a cachet in a skiffle scene awash with homemade ‘tea-chest basses’ (one string, a broom handle and a box). Harbertson could not recall the other skiffle group players, but Simpson was very likely also in another of John’s combos.

‘I was very lucky, because among my friends there was a pianist, a bass player and a drummer, so we had a quartet,’ John later explained of his Shearing-esque band. ‘We never did any gigs, we weren’t that good, but we had the use of a church hall on Sunday mornings, so we would play sometimes twice a week. Helpful is the least I can say about the encouragement you can get from just playing with other people, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing.’

‘Trad jazz’ was the term used in Britain to differentiate New Orleans-based, early jazz (the likes of Bunk Johnson and Louis Armstrong) from ‘modern jazz’ (Dizzy Gillespie onward), otherwise referred to as bebop and its offshoots.¹¹ The trad/modern split in Britain during the 50s, when trad was at its peak of popularity as a danceable, hit-producing but still excitingly bohemian sound, was clearly delineated. Nevertheless, in trad-father Chris Barber’s view it was ‘a somewhat media fuelled controversy … Only [relevant] as far as Acker Bilk’s followers and the Daily Mirror were concerned. We always had modern people sitting in with us, guesting with us, recording with us. One of the most important records in my collection in 1950 was a Charlie Parker record as well as a King Oliver record. There’s much more in common between my music and Charles Mingus’s music than my music and Buddy Holly. Most of the blues musicians I know have this sneaking love for Buddy Holly which I can’t understand – the most trivial, awful music.’

Having a George Shearing-style band in tandem with the trad-jazz outfit and skiffle group indicates not only John’s voracious appetite for music-making but his catholic approach, a wide-ranging curiosity and willingness to engage that would characterise his professional career. Shearing was a Londoner, a born-blind pianist who achieved huge popularity during the dance band era in Britain before moving to New York. His style – certainly part of the broad church of bebop, but drawing on a rich well of stylistic influences – was groundbreaking in terms of mirroring his right-hand melody notes with left-hand chords, giving a sense of densely textured melodies, melodic blocks moving, octaves apart. Shearing’s chief vehicle was his eponymous Quintet, which included from 1949 guitarist Chuck Wayne, who would also mirror the melody lines (note-wise, rather than chordally). ‘Piano and guitar in unison, that was a big step forward in modern jazz,’ John recalled. While Shearing’s style would leave no overt influence on John’s music, the unison approach to playing motifs so beloved of, especially, the first Mahavishnu Orchestra might have the acorn to its oak here.

John was, after a fashion, using an electric guitar in his school bands: ‘an acoustic guitar that I put a pickup on and played through a record player’. The instrument itself was still the cheap one he had inherited from his brother and ‘with no money I was stuck with it. I used to go and stare at guitar shop windows … I wanted a good classical guitar. One day when I was about 16, my mother helped me buy a beautiful guitar. It had a flat top yet I could pull steel strings on it and have blues … I wish I had it now’. John would buy – and sell – a lot of guitars in the coming years, always to keep body and soul together. ‘You can always get another! You get attached … but still.’

John and his friends at the time had worked out, from studying the notes on record sleeves, that there were East Coast and West Coast ‘schools’ of jazz in America. ‘We were into the hard bop sound,’ he explained. ‘The West Coast sound was cool and lyrical and more lightweight. The heavyweight school was based in New York with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Miles [Davis]. This hard bop sound was what we were into and we turned our noses up at this cool West Coast sound. It was too ‘white’!’

John admired saxophonist Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker but regarded him as part of the jazz past. The jazz present, which captivated him as soon as he discovered it, was represented most vividly in two musicians of the East Coast ‘hard bop’ school who would remain his greatest inspirations, Miles Davis (trumpet) and John Coltrane (tenor sax), closely followed by Cannonball Adderley (alto sax), Charles Mingus (bass), Eric Dolphy (alto sax), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax) and others. Horn players, rather than guitarists, would remain the key touchstones in his musical development, and their relationships with drummers – invariably, great ones like Philly Joe Jones, Dannie Richmond and (a little later) Tony Williams – would similarly be an essential part of how John thought about music. Drummer and bandleader (of the blues-influenced hard bop ensemble the Jazz Messengers) Art Blakey would also be an early inspiration.

‘By 1957 I was listening to Miles,’ said John, ‘and Miles was making these records like Miles Ahead, with Gil Evans, [and] Sketches Of Spain – and here was a guy who was making fusion music already, with this Hispanic influence … Miles loved flamenco, he loved it, you could see it in the music. And Miles had an impact on Coltrane, when Coltrane made that record Ole [in 1961]. So they were fusing already, a long time ago. That sat very well with me – because I actually wanted to be a flamenco guitar player! But the little town where I was living, they’d never heard of flamenco, so that was out! And then jazz got me and I was gone. But you listen to Miles and the blues was always there – it never, ever left, even the most abstract thing. But you can hear the blues in flamenco [too] – I think that’s why Miles loved it. I hear the blues in