Despite all appearances, guitar heroism is a relatively new cultural phenomenom -- a product, really, of post-war ennui and manifest destiny for twentieth-century schizoid man. All due respect to the legacies of Segovia, Reinhardt, Christian, et al, the guitar didn't pick up steam as a significant musical tool until the century was half over; suddenly the world went guitar mad and the rapid glorification of this highly portable, sexually charged stringed instrument started to sweep the globe.
This thumbnail history is brought to you in the interest of perspective; the electric guitar is a young thing. That, in part, is why we love it so. You have to wonder, then, when one of the instrument's prime icons remains vital and undaunted over a course of time normally long enough to see the rise and fall of three or four such heroes.
Johnny McLaughlin, electric guitarist, is by all reliable accounts a pivotal guitar hero, an innovator who struck out at an early age to find a new route of expression and wound up spearheading a budding generation of players after more than the quick pop buck. McLaughlin - a.k.a. Mahavishnu - was on a daring onramp of inspiration when his Mahavishnu Orchestra stormed onto the scene in 1971. Here was an intsrumental cosmic fireball of a group - seizing the excitable glands of the rock crowd with the ample deposits of loud and fast, and massaging the change-starved intellects of the post-free jazz quarters as well. There was a spiritual subplot, too, with McLaughlin's Eastern ideology and submission towards his guru Sri Chinmoy. McLaughlin cut an unusual, spartan figure in his white garb, cropped black hair and cumbersome double-neck axe. played with face ever squinting skyward in surrender and devotion.
A decade and a half later, numerous incarnations, recantations and instruments under the bridge, the newly formed and more pragmatically scoped Mahavishnu has released its second record, entitled Adventures in Radioland. Along with his new cohorts - charismatic bassist Jonas Hellborg, saxist Bill Evans, drummer Danny Gottlieb and keyboardist Jim Beard -- McLaughlin's new band is streamlined, melodically driven, athletically interactive and studded with rhythmic fiber that has more to do with Brazil and urban funk than religiously laden ecstacy.
Despite the fortuitous timing - lately we've witnessed a veritable fusion redux - Adventures in Radioland owes it's melting pot moves more to McLaughlin's fusing fretboard agility to mental muscle. Fueled by flamenco, modern jazz, classical music, Indian thought, Hendrix and other stray coordinates, the young Scot was shuffling around London in the mid-60s, making a name for himself among jazz adventurers. McLaughlin got a chance to put his ambition to the test when America called; his transplanted Anglo pal bassist Dave Holland was eager to introduce the star-struck kid to Tony Williams and Miles Davis. McLaughlin may have been the only guitarist for the job of spiking Miles' and Williams' fiery, proto-fusion Emergency work -- short, perhaps of Jimi Hendrix.
Inevitably, McLaughlin wasn't long for the role of sideman. He fused. He grafted. This was music's great white hope of "fusion" at it's utopian best, long before the stigma and the industry maneuvers set in.
His own early classics - the quirky, modal English jazz turns of Extrapolation with reed wiz John Surman and the continuously popular acoustic idyll of My Goals Beyond -- announced a burgeoning bandleader. The early Mahavishnu records -- Inner Mounting Flame, Birds Of Fire -- came out fully formed, full of both quixotic compositions and an uncorked energy that thrashed about in mad soloing frenzy on tracks obviously recorded extra hot on the poor VU meters.
The band was probably too hot, in fact, to stay alive long. After two years, it was over, despite the undimming public support. Notwithstanding a few other electric efforts with an expandable lineup, McLaughlin / Mahavishnu was already on his way to the first radical changeover: denying the electric outlet. The music world was never really ready to accept the acoustic group Shakti on its own terms. But McLaughlin's tough, beautiful concept was to mate Indian music's intimacy and musical code with his own Westernized compositional thinking and his modified guitar -- with frets scalloped out as in a sitar. The band's three poor selling albums were gems of ethnic esprit de corps.
Two juicy electric projects put to rest suspicions that McLaughlin forgot how to play with pickups and beefy amps: 1977's Johnny McLaughlin was a collage of groupings and loose tunes, while the underrated Electric Dreams made an appealing stab with the short-lived One Truth Band. McLaughlin then stepped back to regroup yet again, and came back with the unusual instrumental architecture of his Belo Horizonte group; balance of energy sources was the key factor, with McLaughlin playing acoustic guitar against an essentially electric band. It was not rock'n'roll, but a delicate ensemble with an undertow of fury.
It was at this point, four years ago, that Musician last caught up with McLaughlin. A good deal has transpired with McLaughlin since deputized

Learning to speak the unspeakable.

Photo: Paul Natkin/Photo Reserve
reporter Robert Fripp paid him a visit in his French home and wolfed his chocolates. Even apart from the sentimental meaning of Mahavishnu's renovation, their first album featured McLaughlin's pioneering use (live and in the studio) of the Synclavier guitar synthesizer, before it was commonplace. Some grumbling fans, enamored of McLaughlin's analog bite on Les Paul, were grateful to hear McLaughlin return to the land of the searing electric guitar on the new album.
On other fronts, the ever peripatetic guitarist has, last year, premiered his first guitar concerto -- commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- and has hit the big screen, in a bit role as an American guitarist in the jazz-hued Paris of Round Midnight. For one often deemed as a guitar hero - a dispenser of licks - McLaughlin saw the concerto itself as something of a milestone - a well received opus that took three years to write and that he is still revising for future performance.
In fact, pages of a revised manuscript are in plain view on his hotel table as we talk. "I listen to classical music and I have amongst my friends some of the greatest classical musicians in the world," he explains, with the dense late fall thicket of Central Park looming outside his picture window. "But I'm a jazz musician at heart, and I always will be. That's my discipline, let's say. But that shouldn't stop me from playing with an orchestra."
McLaughlin speaks in measured tones, veers off into related detours and speaks freely, but is always a gracious conversationalist. Apparently his sweet tooth is verifiable; he offered this year's reporter a bowl of dinner mints at regular intervals. McLaughlin's mind is as quick as his guitar soloing. He probes and detours and hops tracks to other trains of thought. But all the while, he conveys the calm confidence one might expect of, well, a seasoned guitar hero.

MUSICIAN: Over the course of your career you've gone through distinct phases. Do you perceive it as a succession of new concepts realized chronologically?
McLAUGHLIN: I don't even think about it, to tell the truth, since I really indulge my musical instincts because I believe that they won't lie to me. In spite of the fact that it can lead me to some strange avenues.

But I believe we have to follow our own nature. I don't consciously think I should do this now or I should do that now. Really, music is the chief executive of these decisions. You're respected for what kind of music you play, you know. It's an interior enrichment, and for me this is very important. I continue to go along with these musical impulses.
MUSICIAN: What was you motivation in reforming Mahavishnu?
McLAUGHLIN: Hmmm. Probably a number of reasons. One being the fact that I tried to reform the original band many times over the years and I was never successful because of Mr. [Jan] Hammer, who refused categorically. Jerry [Goodman] refused also, but they were very close and then they fell apart and I became pals with Jerry again. So then everyone was enthusiastic about it, but I could never get Jan to do it. And it was all or nothing. I tried for quite a few years. Maybe it was partly because of frustration.
There are two reasons, really. One, to try to prove that this petty bullshit has nothing to do with the music - but I was wrong - and coupled with that, to show people that essence. That band was much loved by people and there was a great spirit in it.
That's the only reason I broke the band up, because the spirit had gone out. It was only after two years. We were really beginning to hit it big, but unfortunately, without the spirit of generosity or just joy. It was essentially politics that killed it, I think. I certainly didn't want to continue without the spirit.
The spirit of Mahavishnu is joy, vitality, energy -- That's what it means to me. So I think I was frustrated by not being able to do it. I think I have again. Not I have; the band does what it does. The musicians are great. I'm very happy. At this point, the original reunion idea won't happen anyway. Jan is firmly in his TV writing right now, which is a shame because I'm such an admirer of his. He's such a great musician and a great player; he's demeaning himself. But that's my personal opinion, of course.
MUSICIAN: It's very interesting that you've recast the band the way you did. For one thing, the presence of a saxophone player draws it closer to traditional jazz.
McLAUGHLIN: I have a great love of the saxophone. Dave Sanborn has worked a couple of times with me. I love Dave. And Bill [Evans] is a great talent. I played with a lot of violin players -- my mother played violin. But I didn't know any other violin player who would stimulate me the way Bill does on saxophone.
MUSICIAN: The new music is increasingly Latin and flamenco in temperment. Are these new fascinations of yours?
McLAUGHLIN: I have loved flamenco music since I was thirteen years old. But I couldn't find a flamenco teacher -- I was in this hick town, you know, way up in the north of England. I mostly heard blues records just after I began the guitar -- old, old Muddy Waters... staggering. Then I began hitchhiking down to Manchester in the last week of every month, where they had a guitar circle and would invite flamenco guitar players -- real flamenco guitar players. So flamenco came, and I got really distracted from the blues for a while. Flamenco really overpowered me. And then I heard Django Reinhardt one day, and that was really a combination of both because he was a real gypsy. When I first heard Miles, he was playing a Gil Evans composition, "Blues For Pablo." I flipped, I just went really out of my mind because of Miles, this incredible orchestra of Gil Evans and these Spanish chords.
MUSICIAN: Were there any specific guitar players you coveted at that time?
McLAUGHLIN: No. It was all horn players or piano players -- Gil Evans, unbelievable. But it always bothered me that Coltrane never had a guitar player, or Miles. I said what's wrong? I was a great Wes Montgomery fan, Joe Pass, Tal Farlow, Jimmy Raney, Jim Hall, but they wouldn't fit into Coltrane's quartet. No way. Coltrane was exploding.
So I was a bit disillusioned with guitar playing. All I wanted to do at this point was play tenor sax; I was a big Sonny Rollins fan, too. He played so well. He's a great man, too. He and Coltrane and Miles; great artists and great men. There aren't many around. When you look around, they aren't anywhere. This is one of the things that spurred my interest in philosophy and religion.
MUSICIAN: That was directly related to your musical ambition?
McLAUGHLIN: Yeah. But Lord knows why I became fascinated with it, because I just started by being curious about comparative religion. I grew up with no religious education whatsoever. I was the perfect devil's advocate. But I became very interested after I left school, and of course when you start to discover things about other religions, your outlook changes. India particularly struck me as a foundation of wisdom. Even before I was interested in its music, I was interested in its philosophy.
MUSICIAN: Did one lead you to another?
McLAUGHLIN: I think it just happened by chance. However, I was reading the works of a man, the great Manamarhashi -- not to be confused with the Maharishi -- who was a saint. This was the first experience I'd had of living religion. They don't view religion the way they do in the West, as a dogma. In my inquires into Indian thought, I became aware of the fact that religion and music were not separate but mixed. I thought that was a very interesting idea, that they should be aspects of one essence. I think at that point, that thought affected the way I started to look at life. Could the development of a philosophical, interior way be expressed in musical terms? That was very powerful.
MUSICIAN: Could you distill what you learned in your stint with Miles?
McLAUGHLIN: Listening to Miles, for me, is like looking at Picasso. He's a master of economy, which is one of the great gifts of art and something that I hope I'll learn more about as I get older. He is very soulful, a great artist.
How can one not learn? That, I think, is the question. For anyone who is aware and observant, interested in human nature, in just life, in art and music, to be around someone like Picasso, how can you not benefit from that? It's impossible. If you hang out with a spiritual master, how can you not learn something? Carriage -- how he walks, how they move, how they sit down, how they drink a cup of tea. To me, these things reflect an interior state of being. Miles is no exception.
From a musical point of view, I think Miles' great lesson to all of us who worked with him was clarity in conception. Miles would ask for things that nobody else would think of. He'd tell the bass to play two notes and then don't play and then come back in two bars later and play again. He did the same thing with drummers. In fact, that's what he would do with everybody. "Do this kind of thing here..." you know, space. He would work with the instruments like that, say, "Don't play here. If you don't feel it, don't play."
I know this goes back as far as Herbie [Hancock]. Even when I knew he'd be playing, with block chords playing the accompaniment, Miles would say,"If you don't feel it, stay out." Even Tony [Williams] would stay out sometimes. So Miles encourages on both fronts: one, to be honest with ourselves and second, to learn the value of space.
MUSICIAN: There must have been some burning bush-like epiphany when you discovered distortion. It's almost as if the overtones give you a Coltrane-like thickness of timbre.

"I love the sound of distortion."

Photo: Michael Putland/RETNA
McLAUGHLIN: I love the sound of distortion. I discovered it many, many years ago, through feedback. This goes back to the days I was playing with the Graham Bond organization -- with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. In those days, you could get this Vox amp. Bad sound. I wanted a big amp. I found a circuit diagram for something -- maybe a Fender. I knew this cabinet maker who would build me a really big speaker. I had fifteen-inch speakers in the cabinet.
The thing is, Ginger used to play so strongly, along with Jack and Graham. I'll never forget the day I got this amp. We were on the gig and plugged it in. I found out that I could get feedback, but it was uncontrolled because I was playing a Gretsch guitar at the time -- a hollowbody with pickups on it. But I noticed there where some notes I could get to really feed back on me. If I really pushed the amp, I could get it to distort, which was, to me, quite a revelation.
It was kind of scary at first. I didn't know how to handle distortion at the time, but I discovered with this amp if I got up to the amp with the guitar and it came out as screaming feedback because it didn't like it. I'd go up to it with one of the notes it never liked and the amp would go grr-r-r-r-r-oowl. There was something in that. Of course eventually the Marshalls came out -- a legend.
It reminds me of what you said about harmonics and the tenor saxophone. Trane sounded so rich. Sonny Rollins too. The overtones were so rich -- Trane would make notes break from sheer power. There was something so beautiful about this that affected everybody.
For me, personally... there are instances where anything goes -- this is true. But the where is very important, and the why too. Otherwise, indulgence comes in and I'm very nervous about indulgence. So I bailed out. But at the same time, I learned something in working with these people: that anything can go. When you lower all the barriers, you can find things about your instrument you wouldn't normally find out.
Jimi certainly approached music that way. When you hear " Machine Gun," whew. Astounding. He was really a revolutionary.
MUSICIAN: It seems like both of you were busy deconstructing the blues in the late 60s. When I hear early solos of yours, I think of the blues by way of Calcutta or something.
McLAUGHLIN: Well, you know, I think you need the blues as much in Calcutta as you do in Little Rock, Arkansas. It may not be with the minor third, or minor pentatonic, but the blues sure as hell is there. Maybe I'm being facetious. I'm not trying to. You're talking about the American blues. I never tried to decompose it, or de...
MUSICIAN: ... construct it. I don't means that in terms of not respecting the music, but reinventing it in your own emotional likeness.
McLAUGHLIN: For me, the blues is everything anyway. I'm talking about the American blues. The whole universe is singing the blues. However, there are intellectual approaches to it, too, which I also pursue. For example, a piece like "The Dance of Maya" is directly, inextricably connected to the blues, irrespective of how weird it may sound. Having deconstructed, to use your word, all of the elements from a musical point of view, we reconstructed another way, but with the same elements. How you construct is important, too. That's just one example out of a lot where I just took blues, three chords -- E, A, and B.
MUSICIAN: Well you use some strange passing chords -- an F7, for instance -- and abrupt modulations.
McLAUGHLIN: The first chord is an E7; it goes from low E to G#, B. The next note is G# and a D on the top. That's right, for me. In spite of the fact that it ends up, in chordal terms, an Ab major 7 sharp 4. For me, that's a blues chord. You give me that and I'll play a blues on it, in spite of the fact that it's a very angular chord. That's just a musical example of what I did in that one tune. In that whole period of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, the American blues was everything. Indian rhythms came in -- this is true. But the structure was based around the blues.
MUSICIAN: A lot of people weren't quite prepared for the intense sound of Inner Mounting Flame, coming out of what you had done prior. It was a shock wave of sorts, and a real bridge between the jazz and rock worlds. Just before that landmark, you had done the relatively meditative acoustic album My Goals Beyond. How did the transition between those two extreme poles transpire?
McLAUGHLIN: Mahavishnu was already being planned before I went in to do My Goals Beyond. The thing is that... would you like another mint?... dreaming up plans and executing them sometimes don't happen with due speed. It takes time to make them happen. As far as the concepts of Mahavishnu Orchestra, I was very clear even when we went into the studio to do My Goals Beyond. That was, however, an album that I'd wanted to do for a long time and I thought, "A good time to do it." I've been playing acoustic guitar all my life. Even when I'm touring on the road, I've got my guitar here (points to his acoustic at bedside). It's timeless. So I went in and recorded that album. It's my record with the greatest longevity. It's been recently re-released. I wonder if it's because of the acoustic guitar.
This is one of the things that I always liked about acoustic guitar, particularly the Lamb gut-string guitar, which I've been playing for a lot of years now. I stopped the steel-string acoustic guitar in '79 -- well, that's seven years -- one of the reasons being that the percussive effect of the nylon-string guitar, a powerful, soulful sound to me, is much greater than the steel-string guitar. With the steel, instead of a percussive effect you get more of a slap.
A nylon string dies. You know, that's something that I like. The note comes and you put as much expression into it as possible; it dies and it has a very short life. For me it's a little being that is born and it lives and dies, in the space of that one second or two seconds. There is something very poignant in that, which is the reverse of the electric guitar.
MUSICIAN: When you did play electric guitar, there was something emphatically electric about it. It wasn't just a matter of gothic volume and blinding speed; you found some new threshold of musical expression.
McLAUGHLIN: I think, in a sense, almost everything's experimental. In terms of the concerto -- after all the years of experience, I'll sit down and write and play it and, who knows? Nobody knows until you try it, but then you run the risk. That's good. Without the risk, those nerves... it's irreplaceable in life.
Mahavishnu played with an edge, an energy that you can't get in the studio. It's clinical in the studio.
MUSICIAN: How do you go about working in the studio?
McLAUGHLIN: Suffering.
MUSICIAN: Not a pleasant process...?
McLAUGHLIN: It can be. But maybe I like to sufer a bit [laughs]. Actually it's true, if somebody cameup to me and said, "I've got this magic pill, and your suffering would be gone forever, no after effects," I wouldn't want it. It's the salt of life. Strangely enough, we all try to avoid it. Life would be extremely boring.
MUSICIAN: You play a lot of Les Paul again on this new album, after using the Synclavier almost exclusively on the prior album. What is the status of your affair with the guitar synthesizer?
McLAUGHLIN: When Mitch Forman left to join with Wayne Shorter, I asked Jim Beard to come in right away. But Jim plays exclusively synthesizers. So we started rehearsing and we started one tune on which I played synthesizer guitar and it seemed to me that the two synthesizers were phasing each other out. I could see that either we do a lot of work in sound design, timbre construction, or I play another guitar. Timbre construction is a very long and arduous process, so I said, " Okay, I'll play acoustic guitar here." Bill has altered his playing completely to correspond to the acoustic guitar. So now the notes go bing. What happens is that you get this marvelous space.
MUSICIAN: It's nice to hear you playing a Les Paul again.
McLAUGHLIN: I'm very happy to, I must say. No synthesizer guitar can replace electric guitar. We know that. I think what guitar players are looking for is what keyboard player's have already had. When you've had another timbre, another sound, you play differently and this is good. Some things on guitar synth you're obliged to play slowly -- don't play a lot of notes, just play absolutely lyrically. You're obliged to by the instrument and this is very beneficial. We learn a lot from this, and I'm sure it's one of the reasons why we like it.
I continue to use my Synclavier all the time, as a compositional unit. I will certainly use it again in the studio, but it needs contrast. I think it needs contrast with an acoustic characteristic for it to have its place in the sound environment. To see black surrounded by white is best. Synthesizer surrounded by synthesizer, I don't know. I am also using a Macintosh at home; I use the Performer Professional Composer software. I also use the Southworth software.
MUSICIAN: Allow me one more question. Let's see, what's the zinger here? Viewing all the various elements and directions of your career, it would seem that you're an embodiment of creativity as a sort of restlessness. Is to be creative synonymous with being a searcher?
McLAUGHLIN: I have the feeling that any musician, in any field, everyday is looking for better ways, more subtle ways to speak what is essentially unspeakable.
MUSICIAN: The unspeakable isn't easily cracked.
McLAUGHLIN: The unspeakable defies you to the death. And we will die trying, Joe [laughs]. It's a fight to the death, but what's life without a fight? I'm not talking about war. A fight always had implications of violence. It doesn't have to.
The battleground is inside. I've certainly waged war. I'm in constant battle, with my own stupidity, my own incapacity, my own indolence. That's where the battle takes place -- inside. Better there than outside. How, in the shadow of the H bomb, can we continue to kill each other? Well, I don't know if that was a zinger [laughs]....