I was only 13 and I still don’t know why but I’d bought a copy of Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Inner Mounting Flame and I rarely bought records because I had no money, so I have no idea how it all happened and why a 13 year-old boy chose this revolutionary, intense jazz fusion
But I did and it led to a great passion for their albums and the wider genre to this day. I recall that what I loved was the sound of the guitar, fast loud and overdriven plus the barely believable intricate drumming by Billy Cobham,
While that record remains a milestone both musically and personally, the follow-up Birds of Fire was the most popular chartwise making #20 in the UK and #15 stateside, which is some achievement for a record that starts with someone hitting a gong. It’s just as frenetic as the debut but it hits you like a right hook. Still loud and overdriven, John McLaughlin appears to have a sonic fit on the guitar. Wild and barely controlled, it sounds like one of those first jam bands you play in as a teenager where everyone is knocking seven bells out of their instrument and everything is turned right up.
Cobham is immense, just relentlessly beating and hitting crash symbols. And that’s just the opening title track. It does have quieter moments, at least until John crashes in with his guitar set on stun playing a weird rhythm really fast
You’d expect a track called Celestial Terrestrial Commuters to be an excursion into altered states and that’s the sign post we’re following as they seem to push each other onward and higher.
Interludes of radio tuning come and go like a passing UFO. Things cool off with Thousand Island Park but even that has some fast noodling. It’s like they can't stop showing off, like there is no containing their talent. It keeps bursting out. McLaughlin just plays the whole album like no one is listening. Just flying up and down the neck and making that doubleneck scream. The sheer joy of playing guitar is unconfined.
The longest track at over 9-minutes is One Word which opens with more frenetic drumming and a vaguely menacing rhythm.Throughout their whole career, through different line ups they painted scenes and moods with a jazz muso's lack of concern for commerciality. True art.
Those first two records reach a peak that subsequent releases found hard to scale but they all leave you in a different place than where you started from.
More remarkable still, they all charted in the 70s, perhaps showing a breadth of taste less evident today. It was 1974 when I fell in love of their music and I don’t expect to grow out of it any time soon, despite my dad’s insistence that I would.
