John McLaughlin is a guitarist who for many, I would suggest, rose with little trace in the 1960s, until the complete revelation which was his debut album Extrapolation¸ in 1969. McLaughlin’s next move was to conquer America and dominate a particular style of jazz-rock guitar, in the seventies and beyond. In seventies, McLaughlin played with Miles, created the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and drove jazz-rock into a particular cul-de-sac with Tony Williams’ Lifetime, in which he was joined by Jack Bruce. Since that rise to eminence, I would suggest, McLaughlin has often divided opinion. Although in many ways a protean musician, there has always been a shtick with McLaughlin, the sheets of sound, loud volume approach to electric guitar playing which one either buys into or one doesn’t. McLaughlin’s undoubted virtuosity has been placed in sharp relief by lyrical brilliance and rise to world guitar dominance of the even more protean Pat Metheny.
Colin Harper’s Bathed in Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond is a hefty, slightly sprawling book which, in the first half, charts McLaughlin’s presence in London in the sixties. Harper shows the kind of acclaim which the aficionados of that period consistently offered McLaughlin whenever he picked up a guitar. And shows how McLaughlin wove a complex path through the R & B scene in the London of that period. Not only did McLaughlin work in the Selmer guitar shop and sell guitars to many future guitar heroes, he also worked as an in-demand session musician. How many of us knew that Petula Clark is one of McLaughlin’s greatest fans, and considers him ‘A Genius’?
Harper provides considerable detail about that London R&B scene. He offers portraits of figures such as the organist Graham Bond, whose Organisation was pivotal in holding onto a jazz and R&B music at a time when the Beatles were virtually wiping out British jazz. In part, the first half of this book is also a loving tribute to Duffy Power, arguably Britain’s finest R&B voice of the sixties. Power possessed a super-group backing band of McLaughlin, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker; and died, after many years out of music, only in February of this year. Harper also describes in loving detail, the club scene in London at the time. Not just the Marquee, the 100 Club or the still-extant Ronnie Scott’s; names which live on, but also such forgotten haunts as the Flamingo, the Scene club, and the Zeeta Club in Putney. In each of these places, McLaughlin was quietly growing into the guitar player’s guitar player; at time when Clapton, Page, Jeff Beck, Renbourn and Jansch were growing into their own eminence, and Hendrix was flying in.
Sometimes, however, the first half of the book seems to wince at really getting to grips with the man who became the later John McLaughlin. His childhood, firstly near Doncaster and then near Newcastle, is fitfully described. We learn that his two older brothers had PhDs which seems very unusual in the fifties, but John’s own education is alluded to only briefly. At one moment, he’s in a primary school, the next he’s attending Whitley Bay Grammar School. Little is made of McLaughlin’s clearly autodidactic musical education which saw John Surman reduced to ‘shock horror’ with the 13/8 time signatures for the Extrapolation sessions. In the Mahavishnu Orchestra, McLaughlin and drummer Billy Cobham cheerfully traded licks in equally horrific time signatures; complications which carry on into his current work with the 4th Dimension Band. But McLaughlin’s musical education also led to his writing orchestral pieces for violinist Viktoria Mullova, and Michael Tilson Thomas and the LSO!
It’s interesting that Harper writes that the first half of the book was almost an addendum. That is because the second half describing McLaughlin’s time in the US in the seventies, is almost a different book: taut, focused and very compelling. He makes a convincing case that Tony William’s Lifetime, a band that really does divide opinion, and which McLaughlin flew to the States to join, was both badly managed and never really recorded properly and certainly not when Bruce was with them. During this time, McLaughlin was appearing on most of Miles Davis’s recordings, though not part of Davis’ regular band. Thus, McLaughlin appears on some of Davis’ most important late work: Bitches Brew, Live Evil, and Jack Johnson. And Harper’s musical authority is most clearly shown in these very well written pages. Harper is good on the rise and fall of the first version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the internal factors which created both its greatness and its centrifugal fragmenting. Harper also is much better on McLaughlin the man at this time. And elements of his clearly driven nature emerge from Harper’s narrative of what he calls MO1. And when Harper goes into the details of the breakdown not only of the second and third incarnations of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but also of his marriage to Eve, and his loss of faith in Sri Chinmoy, then the book becomes a very moving portrait of a great man holding things together with considerable dignity.
It’s a real pity that the first half of the book is slightly weighed down with detail of sixties London. But even there, Harper’s prose and his musical knowledge often spark into life. In the second half Harper is clearly an authority to be trusted, and he can be very funny. As he notes, the Mahavishnu orchestra won’t ever go away; people are still listening to and paying tribute to MO1’s first two albums: I particularly recommend the Radio String Quartet Vienna’s versions!
Ian Pople