Weather shut England and delayed the jammed
flight to Paris by three hours, so I landed at 1:30
pm. A mad taxi driver helped to make up the lost
time by driving like a mad taxi driver (the only
madder ones than Paris' are in Milan). This guy only
hit one car but we *nearly* collected a second-a
young Parisien jumped the light so we took it kinda
personal, sped up and aimed. He backed down
when he sized the opposition.
 
Then we drove through the No Entry sign to John's
streed; his number was inconveniently at the wrong
end. I got out at the front door of the
quintessentially French apartment building, in what
looked suspiciously like a pedestrian zone, a small
back lane of one of my two favorite cities in the
world.
 
John McLaughlin should need no introduction, but I
suppose editorial etiquette necessitates an
exposition of the highlights of his extraordinary
career. John probably would be equally admired
had there been no Mahavishnu Orchestra - his
turn-of-the-decade work with Tony William's Lifetime
and his contributions to Miles Davis' epochal
_Bitches Brew_ (known forever as the first fusion
album) and _Jack Johnson_ would have ensured
that - but it is unquestionably the Mahavishnu
Orchestra, with its jagged explosions of cosmic fire
and odd-metered funkiness that remains
McLaughlin's best loved and most celebrated bad.
The Orchestra's cheerful acceptance of rock 'n' roll
and other non-jazz idioms never diluted the
pyrotechnical excellence of its musicians, Billy
Cobham, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman, and Rick
Laird.
 
Both before and after Mahavishnu, McLaughlin
quietly established his jazz credentials as a band
leader in a more subdued but more personally
expressive medium with such brilliant albums as
Extrapolation, _My Goals Beyond_(recently
rereleased), the underrated _Johnny
McLaughlin-Electric Guitarist_, his
collaboration-meditation with Carlos Santana _Love,
Devotion, and Surrender_ and his latest _Belo
Horizonte_. McLaughlin is one of the very few
guitarists who have consistently held my respect.
Not all his music is my bag of bananas, but I've
learned from all of it. And he's still moving. The
traditional arguments about technique - no feel, no
music - don't work with this man. My hunch is that
the streams of notes don't even come close to the
tearing, ripping spray of what is trying to get out.
Except sometimes.
 
I am warmly greeted by John and his attractive
roommate ( and the keyboard player in _Belo
Horizonte_), Katia LeBeque. Katia and her sister are
a classical music duo with a four-hands piano
rendition of Gershwin's _Rhapsody in Blue_ selling
modestly in Europe. John is a dapper dresser; today
he's in grey: flannels and pullover, shirt and tie not
quite matching and just enough so that either you
knew that he knew, or maybe he knew you didn't.
This subtlety of stressing the discontinuities, come
exquisite Basque confectionery placed between us,
the charm of the apartment - in mellowed pink, the
ceiling veeing into the roof, spiral stairs - hinted at
an intermezzo between the acts of flying. John is
straightforward, friendly, and a gentleman. He
speaks softly in a curious mix of Scottish, Indian,
and French accents. We discussed the several
occasions we had previously met for a time, and
then I assumed a more jounalistic role.
 
Fripp: Why do you think you became a musician?
 
McLaughlin: Happily, my mother was an amateur
musician; she was a violinist and there was always
music going on in the house. We got a gramophone
one day, and someone had Beethoven's Ninth, and
on the last record, which is at the end of the
symphony, there's a vocal quartet in which the
writing is extraordinary...the voices and the
harmonies. I must have been about six or seven
when I distinctly remember *hearing* it for the first
time. I suppose that's when I started to listen.
Because when you're young, you're not paying
attention. What do you know when you're a kid? It
was *unbelievable*, what it was doing to me was
tremendous. I began to listen consciously to music
and I started taking piano lessons when I was nine
and went on to guitar at eleven...
 
Fripp: Did anything trigger the guitar in particular?
 
McLaughlin: Yeah, it was the D major chord. My
brother showed it to me on the guitar, and I had
this feeling of the guitar against my whole body...
 
Fripp: Did you have the F# on the bottom string?
 
McLaughlin: No, no. I was playing full-note chords.
Eleven years old...what are you going to do? You
have a small hand and, you know...What about you?
Did you have a similar experience?
 
Fripp: I was ten. Definitely no sense of rhythm, and I
spent a long time wonderting why it was that such
an unlikely candidate would become a professional
musician. But I knew right away that I was going to
earn a living from it. Thinking about it over the
years, I think music has a desire to be heard, such a
kind of compulsion to be heard that it picks on
unlikely candidates to give it voice.
 
McLaughlin: Yeah, I think that it basically comes
from love. I mean, the kind of attraction that you
have when you listen to it when you're young. It's
inexplicable in a way.
 
Fripp: It's a direct vocabulary...
 
McLaughlin: Exactly. Perhaps what you say is truth
insofar as the music itself chooses, but it's not a
one-way street from music's point of view. In a
sense, you know, we fall in love with the muse and
the muse falls in love with its prrospective voices.
 
Fripp: The sentence I would add is that the music
needed me to give it a voice, but in a feeble way. I
needed music more, far more than music needed
me.
 
McLaughlin: The most difficult thing, I think, in
being a musician is to get out of the way.
 
Fripp: How do you get out of the way? Do you have
specific techniques or regimens that you use? Can
you just get yourself out of the way without thinking
about it?
 
McLaughlin: If I'm thinking about it, I'm in the way.
You have to forget, to forget everything. The minute
we forget everything is when we're finally found.
 
Fripp: How do you forget everything?
 
McLaughlin: Oh, it's so hard...it's so hard because
you're always looking for colors, for new scales, new
chords, new ways to say what you feel. But to be
able to say "I want to say what I feel" comes >from
a selfish point of view. Idealistically, the music
should take what it wants and so we should bear it
open and allow it to be. That's difficult because it's
a paradox, Robert. You have to know everything,
then you have to forget it all. Learning is relatively
easy. It's difficult to recommend *how* to get out of
the way (laughs). That's what I'm learning how to
do myself.
 
Fripp: For a number of years, you worked with Sri
Chinmoy. How did that help you?
 
McLaughlin: It helped me in many ways...because I
felt a long time ago that music and being are
aspects of the same mystery. I felt I was very
ignorant, in fact, about me, ignorant about what is a
human being.
 
Fripp: Was there a time when you kind of woke up
one day and thought, "I see things in a different
way!" or was it a gradual thing?
 
McLaughlin: I think it was gradual. It started when I
was about nineteen or twenty. I had no religious
education whatsoever. I was taught religious
instruction at school, which was completely
meaningless. Christ, God...it didn't *mean* anything
to me. And, in fact, it was my association with
Graham Bond that really triggered a desire to know.
This must have been around 1962. You know, we
were smoking dope and this and that I remember
having a few acid trips, and that itself is a very
profound psychic influence, I think. Psychological,
too. And Graham Bond wwas, bu this time, involved
in the Tarot, but, how shall I say, not just the cards,
but from a philosophical point of view. He had this
book he showed me one day, which I found
fascinating. He was talking about what is
possible...which seemed *science fiction*...what kind
of powers we're capable of. I bought the book and
traced through the author, discovering through his
index that he was a disciple of Romana Maharshi,
who was a great Indian saint. So that was my first
contact with Indian culture in general and
philosophy in particular, and I joined the
Theosophical Society in London, since my appetite
was whetted. The best thing about the place was
the library. They had *incredible* books in this
library by people you don't find in the local library
around the corner. And it was through reading that
I came in contact with the Indian philosophy. I felt I
was walking into a new world. It's a wonderful
feeling to suddenly discover after all these years
that the world was not how you thought it was. In
fact, everything was possible...to discover that
everything's magical, nothing's ordinary. I've been
digressing, What was the original question?
 
Fripp: How did you get to Sri Chinmoy?
 
McLaughlin: By the time I was 27, I'd already
started doing Hatha Yoga and doing mind and
breathing exercises. I felt more capable mentally,
but I had this feeling I was being tuned up but not
being played very well, which relates to what we
were talking about a while ago. I felt the need to
learn >from somebody who really knows. I arrived
one evening at a meditation featuring Sri Chinmoy
and he invited questions. I thought, "Great, this is
the first time anyone has ever invited questions," so I
said, "What's the relationship between music and
spirituality?" and he said, "Well, it's not really a
question of what you do. It's what you are or how
you are that's important because you can be making
the most beautiful music sweeping the road, if
you're doing it in a harmonious way, in a beautiful
way." It sounds so simple, of course, but it was
everything I wanted to hear and I felt I should stay
with him, which I did for five years. Meditation in
itself is a very subtle and complex process. I have to
say that in the first two years, the only thing that
happened in meditation was that my subconscious
regurgitated everything, all its obsessions and fears
and desires...which I think is normal when you try to
still the conscious mind. It doesn't like it. It likes to
vibrate and think and hook into different emotions,
good or bad, so when you *force* this process and
you stay still for thirty minutes, an hour, two hours,
what happens is that the punch starts to manifest
itself, and this is sometimes horrifying and
sometimes wonderful, but always good, I think,
because you start to learn about yourself and you
accept the good with the bad.
 
Fripp: How did your discipline work within the
Mahavishnu Orchestra? Was that your band, was it
cooperative...?
 
McLaughlin: It was my band in the beginning and it
became more and more democratic...but the whole
relationship with Sri Chinmoy was a cause of
acrimony.
 
Fripp: I wondered how the other musicians dealt
with the ideas...
 
McLaughlin: They rejected them *outright*. For me,
I can still say music is God, music is the face of
God. That's everybody, that's the hearts of men. And
that's important to me. But that's not the way
everybody sees it. And, of course, what happened in
interviews, especially in collective interviews, was
that people would ask me questions and I would
talk about development and ideals, about which I
already have talked too much this afternoon, and
these questions would be posed to the other
musicians and they would say, "We don't want to
feel that way at all, we're not into that."
 
Fripp: Everybody is always asked a perennial
question that they wish not to be asked again. For
me, it was always why did we break up King
Crimson? For Bill Bruford, it was "why did you leave
Yes?" What would yours be?
 
McLaughlin: Probably, "why did the Mahavishnu
Orchestra break up?" or why did *I* break it up.
Because that...that was a group that people
enjoyed. It was loved by a lot of people, in fact, and
it's kind of sad to see that happen. I mean, it's like
when the Beatles broke up. I was very *shaken*.
This is the kind of thing...you just don't think is
going to happen. I must say, thought, that I tried to
put it together, for one concert, a few years ago,
just to show that...that...all bullshit aside, we loved
to play. Everybody but Jan (Hammer) wanted to do
it. Jan...I...I still can't figure it out. He's a very
enigmatic person. He's such a great musician and
he's a big, big lover of rock 'n' roll. But perhaps still,
there's a certain...I wonder...maybe he still feels bad
about something in that band. I can't figure it out.
But it was enough for him to say no.
 
Fripp: As we're talking through these heavy things,
I'm munching without any guilt at all through my
favorite French confection.
 
McLaughlin: Can I get you more coffee?
 
Fripp: I should love more coffee. Where do these
chocolates come from?
 
McLaughlin: They come from the Basque coast,
where we go a lot of the time. Maybe one day you
can come and visit.
 
Fripp: I should love to do that. I use French
confection as an analogy sometimes. People say,
"What's the difference between earning a living, or
having a go so it's more than just a mundane
process?" and I say it's the difference between
Hershey bars and French confectionery. You have to
know French confection to understand what a
Hershey bar is.
 
McLaughlin: Did you ever see _The French
Connection II? There's a scene where Gene
Hackman is in France and although there's all this
Swiss chocolate around, he only wants a Hershey
bar...(laughs)
 
Fripp: I never did drugs, you see, so I was only told
about the connection. It seems to me that details
such as chocolate or clothing give insight to the
person...
 
McLaughlin: It's the small things, how a person
walks, how a person talks, what they say, how they
say it. We learn from that. I learn, surely.
 
Fripp: Do you dress in a certain kind of way to say
anything deliberately...?
 
McLaughlin: Well, let's look at it in music. I'll tell you
what I'm looking for. I'm looking for *eloquence*,
*accuracy*, and *elegance* - among other things
such as profundity, pathos, joy - but I think these
three qualities, which are written on the back of
_Love Supreme_ by John Coltrane; reading those
liner notes had a great effect on me. It's a way of
life, a way of being. I don't think one can strive for
elegance and eloquence and purity in music and not
in life.
 
Fripp: Your playing has always struck me as very
similar to Coltrane, but I don't hear a guitarist with
mere technique, which you obviously have...it isn't so
much a geezer going through scales, it's just
*ripping* out...
 
McLaughlin: Looking for the way, just going through
everything he knows to find out what he doesn't
know, and that's what we're all trying to do. I mean
improvisation. I think it's safe to say that you're
really happiest when you've gone through what you
know and...
 
Fripp: You discover something you didn't know
before.
 
McLaughlin: Yeah, and suddenly the doors open
and you see this incredible avenue with all kinds of
tributaries going off...it's the most *incredible*
feeling that can happen in music.
 
Fripp: How do you increase the conditions under
which it's more likely to happen? What specific work
do you do, what practice or exercises?
 
McLaughlin: Well, we can include working, playing.
If you're on a tour, you increase the possibility of
being in the right place at the right time, rather than
being at home and practicing. But I also reflect. I
don't meditate or fast or anything, but I *reflect* on
the ramifications of what I do. For example, there's
a relationship between two chords that you've
known, that I've known, for a long time, and only
recently do I begin to discover this more intimate
relationship, what it *means*. Even though I've
looked at these chords from every possible
viewpoint, I'm looking for a way that maybe exists
up there, but I don't know where it is. Then, a little
while ago, I discovered it, it just arrived. So the
work that we do, I don't think we benefit from it
until later. But once we have colors and palette, the
richer the palette is, the richer the music can be.
 
Fripp: That D major chord which changed you from
a pianist to a guitarist, what color would that be for
you?
 
McLaughlin: What color...? (pause) I think it could
be green.
 
Fripp: Exactly what I would've said...
 
McLaughlin: It's got to be yellow and some blue.
 
Fripp: A major for me is yellow and A minor inclines
toward white, which is my C major. Graham Bond
said it was red.
 
McLaughlin: C major, red? No, E major, I would say,
is red.
 
Fripp: E major for me is very blue, a kind of royal
blue, and when you get to E minor it becomes more
of a night blue, with kind of stars...
 
McLaughlin: That's very interesting...
 
Fripp: G is very greenish, but not quite.
 
McLaughlin: I thought about this color aspect of
music but I never literally tried to make an analogy.
What I *have* done, and what I still today find very
interesting, stems from the Tarot, because they
assign twelve astrological signs to the twelve tones
of the chromatic scale. Since I know what my own
different signs are, I could find out what kind of
harmony is, in fact, going on between my
astrological signs, or between the signs of other
people I'm playing with. There was a time when I
was writing solos for people on the basis of their
astrological key.
 
Fripp: How did the musicians feel about solos given
to them because of their astrological sign?
 
McLaughlin: It wasn't very significant to them. A lot
of people, they don't consider these kind of things.
 
Fripp: When did you come to Paris?
 
McLaughlin: Well, I've been coming here more and
more for the last four or five years. I've been...
 
Fripp: More French confection, please.
 
McLaughlin: I've been coming here since 1977.
 
Fripp: Do you find any similarity between Paris and
New York?
 
McLaughlin: Yeah, I do. New York's more dynamic,
more vital, more energetic. It's more violent, too. I
consider myself European, culturally speaking, even
though the music that I play is enormously
influenced by American music, so I'm a kind of
mid-transatlantic person. But I've always loved
France since the very first time I came here. I love
the food. I love the language, the culture, the
architecture. So I feel happy to be here. Although I
must say, I love to visit New York. I really get a
*kick*, I just feel *great*, just...whew, I love it. It
personifies everything American, from best to worst.
 
Fripp: What's the work climate for you here in Paris?
 
McLaughlin: I play here once or twice a year. We did
this television show, and there's another one coming
up. So to be here gives me the possibility to
participate more than I can do in New York (laughs),
because, you know, the media in America, in relation
to music, is much more precisely defined than here.
In Europe it's much more possible for *me* to
appear on television - simply because I don't play a
very popular kind of music. Here there's less
emphasis on what is sellable. And that, I think, is
very important. At least, important to *me* (laughs).
 
Fripp: At this point, I should *love* another coffee.
What I like about America is, because it's a
commercial culture, it's very malleable, if you learn
that particular vocabulary to do with making money.
But you have all these traps. Gurdjieff said,"Make
money with your left foot." That's about as much of
yourself as you should have in there.
 
McLaughlin: But that's tricky. Just to keep your left
foot in there and not let the other foot get dragged
in...
 
Fripp: Meditation in the marketplace, meditation on
your feet, in a way. I did it for a while, I could hold
it together for a while but...boy, it's very difficult.
How did you get on with touring? Actually long
periods of being on the road. How did you handle
it?
 
McLaughlin: How did I, how *do* I handle it? It's my
life, Robert. It's your life, too, in a sense.
 
Fripp: John Williams (classical guitarist) will only
tour for six weeks a year.
 
McLaughlin: Well, I need to play more than he does,
maybe I need to play out for people, and to create
the possiblities we talked about before, of things
accidentally happening. Because only in playing,
when you're playing every night, do you increase the
possibility of this happening.
 
Fripp: But after five weeks and three days,
something changes and I think musicians go crazy.
We've just done three months and it did me a lot of
damage.
 
McLaughlin: I don't think it's so bad. Were you
playing the same music every night?
 
Fripp: Yes. But I mean in the sense that
improvisation is a long line from one end to the
other. It was the same but at the same time it was
completely different.
 
McLaughlin: Two guitars, more or less the same
program every night...you have to be careful because
you can even get trapped in improvisation, n'est pas?
 
Fripp: Yes, or should I say oui.
 
McLaughlin: But to have one of those nights that we
were talking about, where we fly like an eagle...
 
Fripp: We had four in New York - two shows for two
nights, one after the other and *all* of them were
out of this world. Then we did one show in Los
Angeles. Boy, that turned me around. It really did.
 
McLaughlin: Do you take sugar in your coffee?
 
Fripp: No, only in French confection. I'm surprised
that after living in Paris and New York, you still
drink tea. By the way, I'm terribly embarrassed
about these wonderful Basque chocolates...I've
ravaged the box! You've worked with my favorite
drummer, I think: Tony Williams. I mean, you've
worked with two of the most important drummers
of the '70s, Tony Williams and Billy Cobham. Tony
was *my* man...with no disrespect to Billy...