Thursday, March 13, 2025

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 not many had. As excellent as it is, it couldn't 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).

28 comments:

  1. " ... five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

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    1. Phantom Of The Rock OperaMarch 13, 2025 at 10:39 AM

      And 5000 years of civilization produced ~~~ The Teletubbies......

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    2. It's always worth celebrating Swiss achievements! In addition to the cuckoo clock, they have yodeling, some fine mountains, the fondue, Nazi collaboration, money-laundering on a planetary scale, and in 1990 gave women the right to vote! I lived there for a few years, and I have never suffered worse dinner parties, known more shallow friends, nor came closer to the pitiless aching void of human society.

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    3. And what would 'The Sound Of Music" have been without them?

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    4. May one ask, what were you doing in so lofty and rarefied a place if not as some continental dowager's 'walker'?

      I love the folk/trad musics (and some of the prog-jazz) and the landscapes but get the impression it's a rather, ahem, reserved and insular society.

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    5. If you read City Of Starless Night you'll get a pretty clear answer to your question.

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  2. Were these guys prescient? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

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  3. Now we're talking. Intellectual widdle that separates the 4:4 12-bar cultural conservatives from the polyrhythmic sophisticates. I lost several girlfriends BITD playing this sort of thing. I recall a great story about a "friend" of Danny Baker's (does this mean DB himself?) who, aged 14, took a girl on a first date to see them. All was going well, and the band came on. He was loving it. After 10 minutes, she got up and left, and never spoke to him again.

    I was not that youth, but i could have been.

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    1. The MO used time signatures naturally - they never sounded like the clunky truck driver gearchanges in prog. Zappa's time changes went mostly unnoticed, too, until you tried to clap along. The DB story ... hmmm ... I think the MO gigged in the UK in 72 (I saw them at Knebworth '74), so can't be DB at 14 years old?

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    2. DB was born in 1957, and as a hip n' happening kid (albeit one who claimed to be more into Marc Bolan), might have sought to go. the MO also played London in 1973 and 1975. He's old enough. I have a friend who saw separate gigs by Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, Captain Beefheart, and and Soft Machine at Hove Town Hall when 12 years old. He was in the year below me at school. Life used to be like that.

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    3. I saw The Beatles when I was ten or so - my Mum took me. Hendrix at thirteen (with the Syd Pink Floyd and I think The Move), which sounds pretty impressive, but it's not like I can sit back and replay it all. Most of it is memory of memory, scattered to the four winds like dandruff off the shoulders of an undertaker on a blowy day. That's why records are great. It's all still there, as immediate and new as it ever was.

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    4. I must have been fourteen at the Hendrix gig. No longer a kid! I knew everything, like we all do at that age.

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    5. Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and Supertramp at 14. All life-defining.

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    6. And kids today? KIDS TODAY??? Don't get me started. *loogies into spitoon*

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    7. I saw Alice do a TV gig when I was maybe 9 or 10. I knew then that the grown-ups weren't interested in safeguarding kids.

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  4. caught John McLaughlin Mahavishnu Orchestra Tony Williams Weather Report Coryell often as I was a brooklyn boy that worked and played in the five boros I also worked record stores in downtown brooklyn then and also had their stuff on vinyl ...self confessed fusion freak it was a great time Miles was great then too

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    1. Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, Herbert Hancock, Weather Report - what a time to be alive!

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  5. What a crap, Scientology Shit. Where were you when Brian James died. One of the best guitarists and you come up with John BigMac Coughling. It's a perfect ten on a scale of one to hundred. No imagination, pure masturbation.

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    1. Hey, Richard. I park my motorcycle under the eaves of the house, which are deep and give shelter against the torrential rain and merciless sunlight out here in the Tropics. The only downside is that geckos (big lizards, Richard), up in the eaves, shit on it. I want you to ask yourself why I don't leave their shit on my bike for everyone else to see. It's not because they don't have a right to shit on my bike. I don't have an ethical problem with their behaviour. So why do I clean it off every day?
      If you can answer this question, you'll understand why I'll be cleaning your comments off, going forward.

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    2. What's wrong with masturbation?

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  6. Any recommed-nations for unofficial live stuff by MO. There's a ton from what I can see - so much I've balked at it (bit like what kept me from digging into Sun Ra).

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    1. I have some, but always play "Between Nothingness ..." (in its extended form), which is as great as they get. Which is pretty great.

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  7. got in H S from Record Club of America :)
    You Know You Know my fave tune from ur. unclassifiable genre.
    71 now that part about u said about forgetting what u went 4 in other room takes up 20%. of my. waking day!

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    1. Forgetting where your keys are = forgetfulness. Forgetting what keys are = Alzheimer's. The most useful (and comforting) bit of medical advice I iever had.

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    2. Sticking a key in your ear to turn on your mind - priceless.

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    3. Good old Jimi..."Have you ever been...to electric locksmith land?" Those tradesmen on the cover still look hot. Shame about his attempt to become the Houdini of the guitar.

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