The Mahavishnu Orchestra – live at The Masonic Temple Auditorium in Detroit on December 30, 1973 – band soundboard, recorded by the mixer (not known at the moment).
Imagine, if you will, you are somewhere between your late teens and early twenties. You’v’e already been blown away by Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Genesis. Just discovered Van der Graaf Generator and are haunting the import bins at your local record store, making discoveries and exploring uncharted territory by bands from Italy and Sweden and France. The world is opening up.
And, if by some chance, you got bitten by the writing bug and became a Rock Critic (via your college or the old fashioned way; begging and pleading), started getting albums sent to you and got invites to clubs and concerts to give your opinion on things and sometmes get paid for them. And if a publicist at Columbia Records invited you to come see this new band with the somewhat improbable name The Mahavishnu Orchestra, you were excited to go because it meant free drinks and free music.
It’s The Whiskey A go-go and it’s the first night and it’s the West Coast Tour; the second for the U.S. but the first for Los Angeles. The club is packed and most everyone isn’t really there for the music, but seeing and being seen. A lot of people think it’s some spin-off of the Radha Krishna Temple and it will be an hour’s worth of chanting and incense and an economy-sized portion of bliss, delivered by an economy-sized cadre of Bliss ninnies.
But . . .the band saunters on-stage dressed in white – the guitarist who sports a double guitar mumbles something about being dedicated to the audience. And proceeds to destroy just about every brain cell within the four walls of The Whiskey with a barrage of sound that could best be described as cacophonous, and after the first ten seconds; life altering.
You have to understand; people never heard anything like The Mahavishnu Orchestra before – it was something completely new. It was Prog on its ear – it was a galaxy away from Pop and it bore no resemblance to Rock. But it was mesmerizing and the audience stood frozen.
A lot of people didn’t get it – this was too manic, too crazy for some. But those who did stay and who soaked up every note, were aware something was happening – something revolutionary.
The Mahavishnu Orchestra and their leader John McLaughlin set Contemporary Music up for a whole new excursion, an excursion that was already taking root in Europe – changing the direction of a lot of bands. Progressive Rock found kindred spirits. You could hear the influences of Mahavishnu in bands like PFM or Le Orme; bands that followed shortly after, contributing to the changing landscape.
It wasn’t for everybody – the world did not take them to heart instantly – but they did influence countless musicians in the years since. Had it not been for John McLaughlin and The Mahavishnu Orchestra, I’m not sure where contemporary music would be right now. Had it not been for embracing the complexities of music, we might not have appreciated the backlash and three-chord simplicity of Punk only a few years later. Gotta admit, opposites attract and record collections became VERY eclectic.
So this concert is significant on a lot of levels, not the least being that this performance which sounds the best of just about all the Mahavishnu concerts recorded during this time – they were a sound mixers nightmare. Sadly, the memorable Whiskey concert (which I was at and can attest to) sounded awful owing to gigantic splashes of distortion. A French Radio version only has a fraction of the show surviving and even that is mixed badly. So this one, recorded at The Masonic Temple in Detroit is the best sounding from this early, pivotal period.
If you aren’t already familiar – try and imagine you’ve heard nothing remotely like this before and keep an open mind. You also might want to crank it up just to capture the moments as we heard them, being sonically ejected from our seats.
Definitely historic – definitely worth a shot.
