Mahavishnu Orchestra
Ludwig-Jahn-Stadion,
A Golden Summer Night Concert
Ludwigsburg, Germany
1975-08-16

John McLaughlin - guitar
Stu Goldberg - keyboards
Narada Michael Walden - drums
Ralphe Armstrong - bass

source/lineage-Dime flac share of VG+ aud captured on unknown equipment> EAC> Audacity> TLH> DIME

01 JMcL intro 0:53
02 Meeting Of The Spirits 8:24
03 You Know You Know 4:16
04 Cosmic Strut 2:20
05 Open Country Joy 8:25
06 Band intros Jam 5:28
07 One Word 15:06

I had this on disc from an earlier share here on DIME. The dimebot archive only shows 2 of those, one in 2009 from mr.mags and another in 2020 from kurzrefe. I wasn't still burning shows to disc in 2020, so short of the dimebot being inaccurate, I'll have to assume that for me this originated with mags. Thanks to him and to whoever recorded this as well as they did 50 years ago. That 50th anniversary, and a desire to clear out my discs is the motivation behind this new share.
This Mahavishnu quartet, sometimes referred to as MO3 emerged after MO2 mk2 (with and without Jean Luc Ponty) had released and toured the excellent Visions of the Emerald Beyond album. John recorded the first Shakti album live at Southampton College on July 5th of 1975, and then headed to France to record the final MO album, Inner Worlds with the 3 musicians accompanying him here. His own personal life was changing a lot at this point as his marriage fell apart, and he left his guru from the early 70's, Sri Chinmoy. This show, and several other recordings from this time, came from a festival tour that this 4 piece Mahavishnu found itself on when the Inner Worlds sessions ended.
There's some detailed info and quotes from many of the involved parties in Colin Harper's excellent MO book, Bathed in Lightning's, appendices. Those stories go into descriptions of this brief tour. MO was was part of a traveling festival package called "Star Truckin' 75". It was put together by Miles Copeland and included Wishbone Ash, Ike and Tina Turner, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, and Mahavishnu. They did 14 dates, and there are recordings from about half of them. That said, it seems to have been a shambles, and Renaissance and Lou Reed were also originally supposed to be part of it but had each bowed out. Soft Machine and others popped in and out at some of the tour stops too. The overall descriptions of the shows and tour are reminiscent in parts of sections from the Spinal Tap film.
As for this recording, it's generally clear, and considerably better than a few others from the tour, like Reading, but it's not quite at the level of the best ones (Orange or Vienna). The material was generally skewed heavily towards the first MO, and Stu Goldberg mentioned never even really rehearsing that material beyond playing through a few things in soundchecks. This show includes a snippet of Cosmic Strut from Visions, and somebody suggested the band intros jam might be related to Vision's Be Happy. I don't really hear Be Happy in that, but it does feature each introduced musician "blowing" over a fast and funky vamp.
I've newly tracked the show into the form you'll get it here. I've seen Sanctuary listed after One Word, but it wasn't on the copy I had. A bit of dead air (actually tape generation noise) was trimmed before Cosmic Strut and at the end of One Word. That, and the new tracking, was done in Audacity, where some sonic tools were utilized to try sprucing up the audio a bit for this new share (check the samples).
Thanks again to those who'd taped and shared this before, along with the other shows from this short tour. If anyone has a better version of this (kurzrefe, perhaps?), please consider sharing that, and I'll have this pulled. Meanwhile, this'll take you back a half century (!) to just about the end of one of the most amazing bands of that era, and a time when John was going through some major life and directional changes.