Return-Path: Date: Thu, 3 Dec 92 17:16:01 GMT Message-Id: <9212031716 dot AA02532 at rdl036 dot cs dot man dot ac dot uk> Errors-To: thoward@r9 Reply-To: toby at cs dot man dot ac dot uk Sender: toby at cs dot man dot ac dot uk Precedence: bulk From: toby at cs dot man dot ac dot uk To: toby at cs dot man dot ac dot uk Subject: Discipline #68 Discipline, Number 68 Thursday, 3 December 1992 Today's Topics: Bill Bruford playing with an Icelandic band. Fripp Comments from "The Mince" new 4-CD boxed set Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars, Part II [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] From: sigh at rhi dot hi dot is (Sighvatur Palsson) Subject: Bill Bruford playing with an Icelandic band. Date: Sat, 28 Nov 92 17:13:34 GMT Subject: In the sommer 1975 a record of the band "STUDMENN" (The happy men) was released here and was an instant succes. This record is now a classic and played in every party always. What makes this record special for Discipline readers is that Bill Bruford drums on one song. It is the last song on the album, a phsycadelic song ("is spirit in the cup ?"). Just had to mention regards Orn Orrason [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] Date: Sun, 29 Nov 92 17:41:12 -0700 From: dalton at isidis dot colorado dot edu (lizard man) Subject: Fripp Comments from "The Mince" About a week after the review of "The Mince" was posted, I happened to spot it in one of my favorite stores, so I snatched it up. I took it to the listening station and went straight to "Easy Money." Sold! The other day I was listening to a section where Fripp reads some newspaper reviews of Crimson to the audience, and the reviewer talks about "bassist Rick Laird." Now, this confuses me because I could SWEAR Wetton is the bassist on this recording...his voice is pretty distinctive. So who is Rick Laird? I've heard the name, but don't recall him being a Crimso member. Was the reviewer just confused (well, it was clear that the reviewer was confused, but...) (boisterous drunk yelling from audience) Fripp: I gather from your polite enthusiasm that you might be vaguely interested in hearing some reviews of our prior shows.... (more raucous screaming and yelling) Fripp: Very well, then...(begins to read clippings) --brad (aka lizard man) [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] Date: Mon, 30 Nov 92 13:31:07 CST From: tmadson at pnet51 dot orb dot mn dot org (Todd Madson) Subject: new 4-CD boxed set I grabbed the new 4-CD boxed set and must say that I was utterly amazed atg the clarity of sound throughout. Considering how old the recordings were, everything sounded like very good quality mix-board tapes. The energy really kicks you in the arse, it does. Eagerly awaiting the next set from Messrs. Fripp and Co. Since I didn't have any bootlegs, this certainly fills my desire for 1974 era Crimson. UUCP: {amdahl!bungia, crash}!orbit!pnet51!tmadson ARPA: crash!orbit!pnet51!tmadson at nosc dot mil INET: tmadson at pnet51 dot orb dot mn dot org [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] From: ee152fcy at sdcc15 dot UCSD dot EDU (Paolo Valladolid) Subject: Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars, Part II Date: Wed, 2 Dec 92 9:00:35 PST This is the McLaughlin interview proper, as conducted by Robert Fripp. The interview appeared in Musician, No.45, July, 1982 Part One was just the introductory piece where Fripp tells of his trip to Paris to meet *his* idol. This interview took much longer than expected to copy! One of the many topics touched upon in this interview is the issue of live vs. recorded music (e.g. bootlegs), on which Fripp and McLaughlin disagree. At any rate, happy reading! [ Because of the length, I'll split this across the next issue of Discipline, which will have the third and final part. Many thanks to Paolo for his work. ---Toby ] 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 sstay 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). Paolo Valladolid pvallado at sdcc13 dot ucsd dot edu "...some of you all in such a bad luck right now you couldn't hit a barn with a baseball bat..." - The Prophet Omega "...He taught us drawing, stretching, and fainting in coils..." - Bill Bruford as the Mock Turtle [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] To join this mailing list or have your thoughts in the next issue, please send electronic mail to Toby Howard at the following address: toby at cs dot man dot ac dot uk The Discipline archives are available on ftp.uwp.edu, in /pub/music/lists/discipline. The views expressed in Discipline are those of the individual authors only.