Birds of Fire
Happy Birthday John McLaughlin. McLaughlin, Muddy and Jimmy Herring, oh my.
Happy New Year and thanks for tuning in. This is going to be a big year and with the bulk of my work done on my fourth book, Brothers and Sisters, which will be out July 25, I have a little more time to turn my attention back to Low, Down and Dirty. I hope you’ll all continue to join me on this journey. As always, this blog remains free. If you enjoy it, please subscribe and share! Thanks as ever for your readership and interest.
I’m sharing the following in honor of John McLaughlin’s 81st birthday. Happy birthday sir.
In 2017, I had the pleasure of attending the Jimmy Herring/ John McLaughlin show at New York’s Town Hall, sitting in the third row with Andy Aledort. I’ve seen Jimmy many times since I first walked into the Ritz in NYC in 1992 to see Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit open for the Dixie Dregs and was completely blown away. My appreciation of Bruce and the band is here. I’ll share more about them in the future. Since then, I’ve seen Jimmy with many bands, including Jazz Is Dead - I showed up in the dressing room of a show in Detroit and we had a great reunion after not talking for years - the Allman Brothers, Phil and Friends and Widespread Panic. At Town Hall, his opening set with his new band was great, as always. Then McLaughlin came out. I had never seen the genius behind the Mahavishnu Orchestra and so much of Miles Davis’ great electric albums like Bitches Brew and On The Corner. He was, in a word, fantastic.
In a few more words: regal, soulful, complex, moving. He and his incredible band, which included drummer Ranjit Barot scatting in a completely different time signature than he was playing and incredible, gloved bassist Etienne M'Bappe, were enrapturing. I was probably the only person in the sold-out theater who did not intimately know the Mahavishnu Orchestra music they were playing but, man, it was good. The night ended with a set including both full bands, two bassist, drummers, keyboardists, etc. Just amazing all around, and the after-party was a blast.
In 2018, I wrote the following story for Guitar World about the tour. It was an honor to interview Mr. McLaughlin, a truly higher level being, and fun as always to catch up with my old friend Jimmy.
In 2017, John McLaughlin, 76, the founder of the visionary Mahavishnu Orchestra, announced that he would tour North America one final time. He was joined on the 25-date Meeting of the Spirits tour by guitarist Jimmy Herring and his Invisible Whip band. Herring opened, then McLaughlin played and then both bands – nine musicians in all – took the stage for a set that leaned heavily on Mahavishnu’s classic material from their Birds of Fire, Inner Mounting Flame and Visions of Emerald Beyond albums. One of these sets – which had grown men weeping – is captured on the album Live in San Francisco (Abstract Logix).
“John McLaughlin is just larger than life and hearing Mahavishnu Orchestra was life changing for me,” says Herring. “ I had not realized that anyone could play like that. It was like athleticism on a musical instrument but it’s a lot more than that. As I began to understand the spiritual and compositional depths, I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard in my life.”
So, Herring’s reason for wanting to tour with one of his heroes is clear enough, but why did McLaughlin want his protégé along for his final North American ride? “Jimmy is out of sight,” McLaughlin says on the phone from his home in Monaco. “He’s incredible. I really wanted to make the tour big and important and there’s nothing like two guitars.
“It was just wonderful, a real joy. That’s a very important aspect of life that we don’t see enough. People equate joy with young kids, who are naturally joyful. We all are, but we lose it in our messed up society, which is such a shame. We had pure joy, on this tour and you don’t always get that, even playing with great musicians. To achieve it, you need a kind of deep complicity. There was a spirit in this band that was the closest thing to the original Mahavishnu I have experienced. That gets inside the music and comes through the notes. It is human emotion and without that, even the greatest technical playing is just empty sound.”
Check this out. Muddy Waters recorded a Dr. Pepper jingle written by Randy Newman. Both the interview and the song are just incredible. Enjoy! And thanks to whomever dug this up and posted it on YouTube.
Alan Paul’s last two books – Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band – debuted in the New York Times Non Fiction Hardcover Best Seller’s List. His fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s, will be released on July 25. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. He is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.
Now I'm thirsty for some Dr. Pepper!
Ahh, what a fine tribute. Jimmy Herring is spot-on, “life changing” indeed when speaking of Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. I saw the original incarnation of The Mahavishnu Orchestra several times in NYC and the musical power produced and lofty heights they reached were incredible and unforgettable. I think the greatest drummer I’ve seen may be Billy Cobham and I put John McLaughlin certainly among the top guitarists ever. The 2017 tour with Herring was a wonderful experience. I hadn’t seen Jimmy before and he indeed is remarkable.