Perfect Tens Dept. - The Inner Mounting Flame (TL-DR)

This, the latest in a series of under-performing and strangely futile posts about albums that have no imperfections whatsoever, attaining a timeless status of outstanding artistic accomplishment, is ... er ... I'm not sure where this sentence is going, so we might as well bring it to a shuddering halt right here and, with a fawnlike grace, step lightly into the next paragraph.

The Inner Mounting Flame looked the business from the get-go. That powerful image of a flame burning in darkness, the band at its core, was art directed by the great Ron Coro (we are truly not worthy - 572 credits at Discogs) and designed by Chris Poisson [Fr. fish ha ha - Ed.], who went on to design four more albums for McLaughlin. The composition is balanced by the elegant typography, which always gives me a frisson of delight, because that's the kind of nervously sensitive type guy I am.

The back cover [above - Ed.] did everything a back cover is supposed to do, giving you more to study and enjoy in a way that complements the front. The whole package exuded class, confidence, and professionalism. Beautiful. When a label spends this much time and skill packaging an album, you can reasonably expect their investment to be justified. I had no idea what the music was like, and I was, like, blown away. I'd never heard anything remotely this ferocious. And it was uncategorisable. Jazz-rock? You mean like Chicago, or Blood Sweat And Tears? Absolutely nope. Like Soft Machine? Colosseum? Bitches Brew? None of the above. What about prog, then? Those dizzying time signatures, the complexity ... prog sounded laughably club-footed in comparison. This was '71, astonishingly, and nothing quite like The Inner Mounting Flame had ever been heard before, unless you'd picked up Larry Coryell's Spaces from the previous year, which hardly anybody in the UK had, and certainly not any rock fans. And that album, as excellent as it is, doesn't really prepare you for the massed sonic onslaught of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Calling it an orchestra seems right; it's not pompous or pretentious. These guys played at a level of virtuosity that produced a symphonic effect, from complex charts that allowed for little extended improvisation in the jazz sense; the uniqueness of the music had its roots in composition, themes like nobody else was writing, played at a speed that left thought behind. Time signatures came and went before you could tap a foot.

Note how image balances layout, breaking up text

It wasn't just a showcase for McLaughlin, either. Billy Cobham's drums made an equal impact, with his signature tash tash cymbal sound and hailstorm delivery keeping up with McLaughlin's blistering flurries, beat for impossible beat. Jan Hammer, a man possessed, scattered wild squalls from his keyboards, seemingly incapable of playing anything uninteresting. Jerry Goodman I knew, of course, the Flock violinist on the cover of Fill Your Head With Rocks, but this line-up un-clipped his wings, and he flew as high as McLaughlin. And then there was a bass player who'd got John's number from a card at the Job Centre. Maybe a showy, virtuoso bass player would have been too much, and the band needed a solid, unimaginative grounding. Whatever, no-one was complaining, least of all Rick Laird, the luckiest guy on the planet.

So: not jazz, then, and not rock. Neither jazz-rock as we knew it, nor prog. I'm not sure if the term fusion existed in '71 (except for the Indo-Jazz thing, something else again, that McLaughlin came back to later) but it's the best attempt at definition, with its associations of exciting electro-chemical reaction. Working back through McLaughlin's œuvre [Fr. egg - Ed.], as many then did, everything seemed like preparation for this blinding explosion. My Goal's Beyond even featured Cobham and Goodman in an unplugged format which was sadly never repeated.

The Mahavishnus went on to record some impressive albums, but the impact had been made. Birds Of Fire delivered the expected, but Inner Mounting Flame had delivered the unexpected. The genie was out of the bottle, making room for the lightning, and music was never quite the same again.

 

This post homologated by The National Association of Daves of America (NADA).