I was at this show with my good friend Simon Salz. Ah, Buffalo, what a night of snow and ice. This was actually the first time seeing any member of the Dead, and it would be yet another fourteen months before seeing the actual Grateful Dead, and so I was eager to go and hear for myself what I’d been picking up from records, including Hooteroll. I knew little about the band opening, however. But that was about to change.
My friend Simon had already been listening to Miles Davis, and knew of John McLaughlin’s work with him, but at sixteen I had still yet to discover Miles. Still, even Simon wasn’t quite prepared for the sonic intensity that assaulted our ears when we encountered Mahavishnu Orchestra for the first time. Holy double-neck Gibson! The Nepalese fingerhash beforehand didn’t help, I’m sure, but what an incredible wall of sound those guys out out: McLaughlin, Billy Cobham (later of Bobby’s Midnights), Jan Hammer (of later Miami Vice soundtrack fame), Jerry Goodman on violin, and Rick Laird, formerly of Family and Blind Faith, on bass. Indian Celtic Jazz Rock fusion on eleven melted me in my chair, and by the time Garcia and Wales came out I could barely function. The music, unfortunately, made no impression beyond the fact that I heard echos of that Hooteroll work, and Howard Wales seemed a really animated player, really working that B3 with a lot of passion. But In couldn’t keep going back in my mind to whole sensory gestalt of the Mahavishnu, waves of thunderous, apocalyptic sound ripping from McLaughlin’s mysterious, undulating figure at the center of it all, hair cut short, wearing all white. Man that guy can play. Even after going back and listening to Bitches Brew I don’t see how that could have prepared anyone for what he cooked up with the Orchestra.
Anyway, finally in March 1973 the Dead came to Buffalo, and I got firmly on the bus.