A Conversation with John McLaughlin – HuffPost 10.21.11

Mike Ragogna: John, I’m honored to be talking with one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time.

John McLaughlin: One of the great, marginal musicians of all time.

MR: Oh no sir, you don’t get away with that.

JM: (laughs) Nice speaking with you Mike, how are you?

MR: I’m doing well, how are you, John?

JM: Very good, very busy, but that’s fine with me. It’s better than twiddling my thumbs.

MR: You may not be twiddling but you are juggling many projects including your latest, Abstract Logix. Can you talk about that a bit?

JM: It’s a little festival with the man who’s behind Abstract Logix. We’ve been working together for about a few years. He put together this guitar festival last year and we were there. There were many guitar players on it and the DVD, which is the same as the CD recording, but it’s good to see it in video too. What was special about that was you don’t just see my band or hear my band, but we had a special guest artist, one of my oldest friends, Zakir Hussain, the tabla player, and he sat in. It was kind of like The 4th Dimension plus Zakir Hussain. In this kind of sad state of musical industry, which I’m sure you’re aware of, Abstract Logix is doing a great job for them. And it’s rough for them because of the piracy, it’s taken the wind out of many sales, Mike.

MR: It absolutely has, but it’s beyond privacy, it’s all redefining itself and I think we’re all just caught in the tide.

JM: It is, in a way, that we’re going through a chaotic period. That’s the best way to put it, it’s redefining itself, with much suffering, especially for the young musicians. For people like me, the old timers, we’ve had an audience since the sixties, so we’re still around, still kicking and having a good time, but it’s rough for the young players. It really remains to be seen how it will sort itself out, but it has to sort itself out in some way. The young guys have to find a way to play, to record, because it’s a vicious circle. You know what it’s like with an economic crisis–people don’t have enough money, they lose their jobs, they lose their homes, and it’s a downward spiral. We will inevitably come out. There’s no crisis in music, there has never been a crisis in music. There is a crisis in the industry and the way people access music. It’s not all bad, not that I want to defend the pirates, because I’m the other side of the universe as far as pirates are concerned. The great thing about the internet, and what some of these pirates do, they make available music to people in countries in Africa or somewhere in Central America or South America, where they normally wouldn’t have access. So, in a sense, that’s necessarily good, but it’s a difficult situation right now. We’re just kind of hanging tough, that’s all we can do.

MR: But also, John, don’t you think there is a problem with expectations? Like, if you fall short of being a superstar, then game over.

JM: This is the other side of success. There are two kinds–there’s artistic and there’s commercial. They do meet from time to time, fortunately, because we would all be playing Schlager, you know what I mean? The integrity has got to be maintained, but, of course, integrity does not guarantee you to be able to pay your mortgage at the end of the month. The situation with regards to musicians being able to record, that’s really difficult. The studios, for example, now, don’t put anything new out, even my old one, Sony. They are just doing a re-release, remix, HD mix of the album from 1973. They don’t have to pay for that anymore. It’s great they are going to add some unreleased material, but nevertheless, I talk to these guys and ask they why don’t they release a great concert, like CBS before it was Sony recorded a live concert we did in Cincinnati. It was a magic night and it’s a great concert and it has never been released. I ask them and was point blank, “So why don’t you release that concert? Is it a question of money?” He said, “Well kind of.” So they don’t have the means just to finish it off. They are not angels either. For how many years did they overcharge for LPs, audiocassettes, and CDs? All musicians were in agreement over that. They charged terribly. What does the listener do? We saw that with audiocassettes in the seventies–they copy the LP and before you know it, it’s normal. Nobody thinks about stealing, it’s just normal. So, in a way, they have themselves to blame for grossly overcharging over the last 30 years. It will all work out in the end somehow.

MR: In all fairness to the other side, there are labels like Legacy that do search for new material when they are exploring expansions of projects, let’s say Billy Joel’s The Strangeror other expanded, classic albums.

JM: There’s been a big retro wave going on for a while, Mike. (laughs)

MR: (laughs) That brings us back to your classic albums with Mahavishnu Orchestra, likeThe Inner Mounting Flame and Birds Of Fire.

JM: What a great band.

MR: John, you’re one of the pioneers of “fusion,” but I guess some people would take offense to that.

JM: They took offense to it in the 1970s, Mike. (laughs) I never pretended it was jazz. I’m a jazz musician by discipline. I grew up with rock ‘n’ roll Mike, like everybody in the sixties–I’m a kid of the sixties. I grew up with The Beatles, Sly and The Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix, not to mention the whole blues thing that influenced me from a very early age. I grew up with different things in my head and my heart too. I think fusion was inevitable, really. I just happened to be there at the right time. Miles was way before me..he was way ahead of everybody, really. You listen to Bitches Brew or Jack Johnson, that solo he does on “Right Off” that was just really a jazz star in the studio. Miles…he told me afterwards, years later, that was his favorite record out of the records he made. But on that record he never played on any of the record like he played on that recording. We just hit a groove, like an r&b thing, and he just ran into the studio with his trumpet and just played for twenty minutes and it was unreal. He loved that, every other record, he’s walked in very well organized, but with Bitches Brew, which is 40 years now, I remember those recordings. He didn’t really know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want.

MR: In addition to playing with him, I’m imagining that you got spend some quality time with the man.

JM: Oh yeah, he really took me under his wing the moment I arrived. I was playing with Tony in Lifetime, of course. That was another rad band. I mean it was really radical, have you ever seen that band?

MR: No, never saw it.

JM: No…before your time, Mike. It doesn’t matter, those were the sixties, it was a radical decade. There was a lot going on, and society had a very different atmosphere than today. The music reflected it, and it reflected the desire for new ways of thinking and there was a great deal of hope and a great deal of anticipation in those days. The way the music was coming together, out of the end of the sixties into the early seventies, that was wonderful. To be a part of that Miles thing, I learned so much from just being with the man, he was really special to me. And, of course, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, he was behind that too. I remember we finished a date at a club outside of Boston called Lenny’s On The Turnpike–great name, huh? It was just me and him after the gig, and he turns to me and says, “John, you need to form your own band.” Since he was the most honest man I’ve ever met, I said, “I’ve got to do it, just to prove him right.”

MR: Herbie Hancock also has some amazing stories in the same vein, how Miles took people under his wing. He really looked after his protégés.

JM: He loved his musicians. Miles was much misunderstood, particularly by the media, but the musicians loved him, and he loved the musicians. He took care of them. He would be talking to me and out of the blue, he would say, “You eating?” And before I could give an answer, he would stuff a hundred dollar bill in my shirt pocket, then he would just keep on talking. he made sure that his musicians were taken care of. Of course he payed us for the records and the dates, and just like that out of the blue. He took care of us, and he took care of his musicians.

MR: In A Silent Way was another classic Miles album you played on.

JM: Yeah, that was a great one.

MR: What a great run.

JM: (laughs) What he did for me and what he did for so many players–he brought Coltrane, Bill Evans, and people like that to the floor because he had that name. He had the fame too; he was a star in Europe in the fifties, even way before he was a star in America. You know that movie he made Lift To The Scaffold?

MR: Yes.

JM: He just improvised the music on that whole movie, and it’s just so beautiful. He was the darling of the Left Bank in Paris in the late fifties. He not only had an impact on many people, but on music, inestimable. He said, “John, time to form your own band,” and I did, the Mahavishnu Orchestra was the result. I was on another trip, I was just coming out of the sixties asking all the existential questions: “Who am I?” “Who are we?” “What is this?” “What’s God?” “What’s religion all about?” “What’s the meaning of life?” These are very important questions for my generation, and my influence from India, the music from India, the philosophy of India had an impact and still has an impact to this day.

MR: John, what is the meaning of life?

JM: What is the meaning of life? Tell a good joke. (Laughs)

MR: (laughs) I’m also a fan of the work you did with Jimi Hendrix tracks.

JM: I was struggling, because I had this big acoustic guitar, and it was so loud in the studio. My guitar was just feeding back all the time. I should have had a Les Paul or a Stratocaster. I got to meet Jimi on a couple of occasions. He turned the world on its ear, especially the guitar world. He turned all of us on our ear. It was great, actually. I was very happy at what Eric Clapton did because Eric was already pushing the envelope as far as blues playing, what he did with John Mayall in the mid-sixties. I think when Jimi came over, he couldn’t get it together in America. He made that trio with Noel (Redding) and Mitch (Mitchell), and I think heard what Eric was doing and he took that and turned it into a new thing, which was Jimi’s thing. It was marvelous. Those two–we have a lot to thank those two for, Eric and Jimi. Jimi, particularly, was revolutionary, wasn’t he? You see some of the clips of some of the things he was doing at the Monterey Pop. I showed that to Miles. Miles had never seen him. I remember our chatting in 1969, and that movie came out in ’68 when there was Ravi Shankar and Jimi burning his guitar. So, I took Miles to the movies the same afternoon, it was one of those cinemas downtown. I took him there and got some popcorn, he was sitting there and damn! It was beautiful to see.

MR: John, on Bitches Brew, you have a song named after you. How did that happen?

JM: I never knew anything like that until the album came out, and I bought the album. He would come and he would never have titles on his tunes. He would come in with a piece of brown paper that he just carried his coffee in. He would scribble down a few chords on it, we never had titles, they would just come on the album. I was shaken and to tell you the truth, and very proud. At the same time it made me feel very humble. He was not just a great musician, he was a true artist in every sense of the word. To call it by my name, I still react to that when I hear it, even just now.

MR: Sweet. On your new album New Universe Festival 2010, there is this amazingly long jam to you, for you, by the artists who participated. Even more McLaughlin mania.

JM: There again, I’m humbled and flattered at the same time. There is no predominating feeling there, a mixture of flattery and humbleness.

MR: You’ve got Lenny White and some contemporaries playing on this project. What was the atmosphere like when you guys played?

JM: It was beautiful. The thing is it was like coming back to Mahavishnu again, we didn’t know it at the time. I was writing this music and the band was playing, and how they were playing it was…wow. That band, retrospectively, we see now that it was very new and pretty radical, but in fact, it affected many people in different ways–guitar players especially. This opened up the door to looking at more sophisticated or complex music as opposed to just playing a 12-bar blues. Don’t get me wrong, however, a 12-bar blues contains the infinity of music. I know because a 12-bar blues–look at the Indians, they don’t even play a blues, they play one scale and they say it all. It’s not a question of that. Since I grew up with jazz and harmony and with different rhythms, I wanted to fuse them together in a way, integrate these different influences together, and really, that’s what the music was about. Of course, I was under Miles’ tutelage, and to see the way he worked and for him to say, “You’ve got to do it, John,” that gave me the impetus to go for it.

MR: What a terrific run of records with Mahavishnu Orchestra, my favorites being Birds of Fire and Visions of the Emerald Beyond.

JM: Me too. (laughs) Visions… is some crazy record.

MR: How do you create? Where does it come from?

JM: Listen, if I knew the answer to that question, I would tell you. I don’t know, but I don’t care. (laughs) I’m going to record a new album in early December and I’ve got too much music, Mike. I can be sitting in a train or a bus or driving, even meditating, and stuff will come into my head and I have to write it down. My wife knows, she always carries a pen in her bag. We’re in a restaurant and I say, “Oh, I’ve got to write this down,” and she says, “Don’t worry, here’s a pen and a napkin.” (laughs) I say, “Thank you very much,” and I keep doing what I’m doing. I don’t know where it comes from. Where does existence come from? Where does consciousness come from? We don’t know the answers, it comes from this big mystery of the unknown and unconscious. We’re all one in the end, aren’t we?

MR: I think we are. John, by the way you’re talking to a town that’s big on consciousness, Fairfield, Iowa.

JM: Really?

MR: Yeah.

JM: Well, you know what I’m talking about then. People call it God or a spirit, but it doesn’t have a name. We’re all an integral part of it. We’re all a part of each other, and a part of it. So, I cannot say this comes from here, and that comes from here, because I have to occupy my body, but if you cut my body off you’re not going to find me are you? Where do I really live? That’s my question to you, Mike.

MR: Well, I don’t have an answer to that, at least not today.

JM: Thank you very much, I don’t want an answer.

MR: (laughs) I also think that’s where music resides, don’t you think? On the level of consciousness?

JM: You know, it’s very mysterious to me, because I don’t know. I hear something, it comes into my imagination. From where? I don’t know, but all of a sudden, it’s there. I hear it in my head, but that sparks off a whole plethora of new ideas. It’s self-propagating, I don’t think I’m any different from any other musician that writes music. I think we all access it. I want to tell you one small anecdote. I really do believe that music needs us, music loves musicians…I know it might sound a little weird. I had a dream once when I was down in Australia. I have a brother down there, and I was asleep in this guest room down there. I had this dream and in the dream, the music came to me–I know it seems far out. It came in a feminine form, it was like a woman. I was lying down in my bed in my dream. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I love you.” Of course, it’s far out and ridiculous, but nevertheless it’s very real to me. When I say music loves us, how is music going to come down to other people if musicians don’t go up and get it.

MR: What you described, others have named “the muse.”

JM: You can call it anything you want, a name doesn’t mean anything. The whole idea of music is amazing, it exists and always has existed, but somebody needs to go and get it, but only musicians, because they love music so much. They are an antenna to music, so the music comes. I thank God for music everyday, and I thank God for the privilege to be a musician, but of course, I dedicated my life to it to be worthy. I’m not saying that with false modesty, I’m a hard worker, but it’s not work, it’s my life. Here I am, 69 years old and still kicking. I’ve just got to keep this up until I fall down.

MR: Do you have any advice for new artists?

JM: Jesus saves. (laughs) Don’t let go, don’t let go. Give it everything, give it your best shot and music will give back to you much more than you give to her. It’s unbelievable.

Transcribed by Theo Shier