by Christopher Fulkerson
CF Conducting Maxwell Davies
Vesalii icones
Certainly this band merits the praise they get. They were, indeed, amazing. Yes, the MO "made rockers rethink their work ethic and musical goals." They did this for me - I went into Classical composition, to a noticeable degree thanks to Mr. John McLaughlin and his colleagues. But they need a much better written history than this. Way too many contradictions are included here - I hope the band's possible reuniting survives the detritus that a book like this probably kicks up. It's just not tasteful to quote the things that get said here - no wonder the band is lukewarm about re-uniting. Or so this book would lead you to believe.
If you are an admirer of the MO, I regret to concede that you have to get and read this book. But selective skimming is most definitely called for. A better writer is still needed to write the official history of the MO.
Expressed in rock music terms, the MO came onto the scene after Cream disbanded and Hendrix died. Who was going to be the CLG - the Chief Lead Guitarist? Jimmy Page seemed right. But there was an extremity of eccentricity to the Led Zeppelin sound, and the pop music model was developed, but not really advanced too much. Page embraced the whole world of guitars - this was good for the songwriting, but didn't always answer the amateur’s urgent question about sustained, single minded soloing. When McLaughlin came on stage it was clear the MO was not going to be about a particular guitarist - he was astonishing, yes, but so was the whole band. It was going to be about purely musical values.
This book makes it clear that, amazingly, the violinist, Jerry Goodman, was the rocker. The rest of the band were jazz musicians. But first, the sound was built up by JM and Billy Cobham. Kolosky has too little musical awareness to notice, or too great a partisanship to say, that this was same way the Van Halen sound was built - drums with guitar. In rock, it seems forbidden to speak about other musicians. The MO call for heightened musical values is certainly not woven into this book's method. These are guys who were listening to, and Jerry Goodman was apparently playing, the Classical repertoire, including Bartok and Webern. Kolosky's one reference to the band being "atonal" is of course however wrong. And what he says that 100 years from now the band will be considered Classical, is stupid. The other reviewers who complain about Kolosky's "over enthusiasm" are correct.
I attended one of MO's 1972 Winterland performances with ELP, after which Carlos Santana apparently went to meet John McLaughlin. Kolosky allows a mistake here - the concert was not in May, it was given twice on March 24 and 25. Everything every testimonial so laboriously repeats about the band blowing people away is absolutely true. I also attended the solo show the MO did in Berkeley about a year later; for this show, MO was the headliner - I think the only act.
The March 1972 MO set began with a strange, quiet noise, in the dark. It lasted about two or three minutes. Pointed headed teenager that I was, I did not know then what it was. Years later a drummer friend told me it was one, single press roll that Billy Cobham played. Just astonishing technique. In one discrete note, not even officially part of the concert, Cobham let everybody who had the awareness for it know that he was the commanding drummer of the time. If you didn't notice, you could go on blathering, and that was fine. This is real artistry, in which musical values matter more than personalities.
But the writing is so bad in this book, a class action suit is called for to make it safe to read. Apparently anybody who said anything positive, or as an exception was famous, could contribute a "testimonial," and the quality of these is uneven, to put it kindly. The musical excellence of the players does not insure the excellence of the remarks made by them. Pat Metheny's remark that the MO was "face meltingly loud" merits special prosecution. This is not musical commentary. A good writer will sort through this stuff, rather than just let the logorrhea run on. Kolosky himself commits the worst errors in propriety. Accounting for someone's career setbacks by openly talking about their "personal problems" is libel if true, slander if not. He doesn't see through George Martin's sly remark that on the MO(2) orchestral collaboration, "Mike Gibb's score was excellent." Rod Sibley makes a real back-handed compliment - the MO(2) was so good that "people in the audience stopped talking." Kolosky thinks it's a compliment to say that a chart "kicks a**," exclamation point. This is rubbish that does not benefit the memory of the band.
It seems to be a requirement in rock music that only the stupidest notions of artistic creation are allowed to be printed. Kolosky is not a trailblazer here. "I do not expect musicians to tell me how they create, because they do not know themselves." Speak for yourself, Walter. Like other writers on rock he has no clue that he is not speaking well of the musicians when he talks too much about the sound engineers. In the REAL "Meeting of the Spirits," you will see John McLaughlin standing at fifteen paces, with not one but two account books of all the notes he played. And that's just his part. There are four others.
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First posted 3/11/ 2011
Copyright c 2011 by Christopher Fulkerson.