Rick Laird – A Portrait Of The Artist
In 2019 the late bassist of Mahavishnu Orchestra recalled to Prog the making of The Inner Mounting Flame, and the agony he was in at the time.
Rick Laird, bassist with the original Mahavishnu Orchestra, died in July 2021 from cancer, aged 80. In 2019 Prog’s Sid Smith talked to Rick about his life and music. In this excerpt from an unpublished article, Laird discusses the early days of the band and the recording of their incendiary debut album, The Inner Mounting Flame:
“I was in London in 1971 and I got a call from John. We knew each other from our time playing with Brian Auger in the 60s. He said he wanted me to come out and join a band he was forming. He sent me a couple of plane tickets for me and my wife and off I went. We rehearsed for probably two months, three or four days a week in New York. It was very challenging because it was all strange time signatures, very loud, very fast.
“We only had two days in the studio but the first engineer quit because he couldn’t handle the volume we were playing at. That whole day was basically about getting a sound for Billy Cobham, who played a huge drum kit. We were also trying to get the sound right on John, who played with a stack of Marshall amps, and there was Jan Hammer with his keyboards also cranked up to 10. Honestly, I never really got comfortable with how loud we were and I used to wear earplugs all the time. They found another engineer who came in around noon on the second day and we recorded the entire album in about 12 hours. Pretty much all of it was one take for each song. It was very challenging to do it like that but it was a legendary album nonetheless.
“The thing most people don’t know is that the night before the first recording date, John drove me home to my flat in Queens, near where he lived, and when I got out of the car I accidentally slammed the door on the thumb of my left hand. It came up the size of a freaking football. My wife put ice on it and thought I should go to hospital. Of course, I showed up the next day in the studio and didn’t tell anybody because we didn’t have a budget to reschedule the sessions. So that first day, although I could just about move my hand and play, it hurt like hell. One of John’s friends was in the studio taking photographs of us all and there’s a photo of me that was used on the back of the LP cover where I’m gazing directly into the camera. When I look at that photo now I see the portrait of a man in a lot of pain.”