In the middle of May 1973, Billy Cobham walked into Electric Lady Studios in New York to make his first album as a leader. He had three days, a band that had never rehearsed together, and an engineer, Ken Scott, who planned to record it like a rock session.
Halfway through “Taurian Matador”, the 21-year-old guitarist Tommy Bolin bent a note on his top string and it snapped. He didn’t stop. The band played on to the end of the take.
“You can hear it on the record,” the bassist Lee Sklar remembered in a 2013 interview for Bolin’s official site. “They kept it and went on.”
That take is the one on Spectrum, the album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard jazz chart a few months later. It also had two lives nobody in the room could have planned. One of them put Bolin in Deep Purple. The other came 18 years later, in Bristol.
The Mahavishnu drummer steps out on his own
By 1973 Cobham had played on Miles Davis sessions that ended up on A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Live-Evil, then spent two years powering John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, playing a kit with two bass drums.
Ken Scott, who had worked with David Bowie and Elton John, had engineered Mahavishnu’s Birds of Fire. When Cobham came to make his own record, Scott was asked to engineer it. The sessions ran across Cobham’s 29th birthday on 16 May.
A band built for three days
Cobham wrote every tune and put the band together around himself and the keyboard player Jan Hammer, his Mahavishnu bandmate. For the rock-leaning tracks he added Bolin, a flamboyant young guitarist from Iowa he knew from the Colorado band Zephyr, and Sklar, a Los Angeles session bassist who brought a 1962 Fender Jazz bass and a small Univox amp.
On other tracks he used a jazz line-up: Joe Farrell on saxophones and flute, Jimmy Owens on flugelhorn and trumpet, Ron Carter on acoustic bass and Ray Barretto on congas, with John Tropea on guitar on one track.
There was no rehearsal. Sklar recalled that Bolin arrived a day early to go through the tunes with Hammer, and that was all the preparation anyone got.
Two takes at most, and no fixes
According to HiFi News, which pieced together the sessions from Scott’s recollections, several of the takes on the album were firsts or seconds. Scott was after the moment, not polish, and he remembered Bolin as a joy to work with: “No egos, just great playing.”
Sklar remembered it the same way. “Totally LIVE. No fixes,” he said, and he called it “a magical couple of days”. The solos by Bolin and Hammer were made up on the spot, with the tape running.
Cobham himself told HiFi News that “Everybody was very supportive.” That was not always true in his day job.
A few weeks later, in June 1973, Mahavishnu went into Trident Studios in London with Scott to make their third studio album, and the atmosphere in the band had turned so sour that the record was shelved. It finally came out in 1999 as The Lost Trident Sessions.
Spectrum went to Trident too, but only to be mixed, which took Scott about a week.
To hear the broken string, put on the medley “Anxiety / Taurian Matador”. “Anxiety” is a short, eerie Moog introduction from Hammer; then Cobham kicks the band into “Taurian Matador”, and the snap comes in the middle of Bolin’s solo, on a bend. Listen too for the opening “Quadrant 4”, where Bolin runs his Stratocaster through an Echoplex so that parts of his solo sound almost like a synthesiser.
Start with: Billy Cobham, Spectrum (1973). Thirty-seven minutes, and the energy never drops: Cobham’s double bass drums on “Quadrant 4”, the broken string, and the long groove of “Stratus”.
Number one, and a phone call from Deep Purple
Atlantic released Spectrum on 1 October 1973. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s jazz albums chart and climbed to No. 26 on the Billboard 200. HiFi News calls it the first drummer-led album to top the Billboard jazz chart.
Bolin had already joined the James Gang that year, replacing Domenic Troiano, and went back to them after the sessions. But the record kept working for him. Deep Purple’s bassist Glenn Hughes later told the writer Greg Prato that their drummer Ian Paice had heard Spectrum, brought it round to Hughes’s house and played it to him, and that singer David Coverdale had heard it too.
When Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1975, Bolin got the call. He played on Come Taste the Band that year and released his solo album Teaser in November, with Hammer playing on it.
Then try: Tommy Bolin, Teaser (1975). Hear how much of the Spectrum guitarist survived into his rock record, especially on the instrumental tracks.
Bolin died in Miami on 4 December 1976 of a heroin overdose. He was 25.
How “Stratus” ended up in Bristol
The longest track on Spectrum is “Stratus”, nearly ten minutes of Sklar’s bass riff, Cobham’s drums and Bolin’s guitar over a loping groove.
In 1991 Massive Attack opened their debut album, Blue Lines, with “Safe from Harm”, released as a single that May. Its bass, guitar and drums are sampled from “Stratus”, looped under the vocals of Shara Nelson and Robert Del Naja. Sklar’s riff from that loose couple of days in New York became the backbone of a UK Top 30 single.
For something different: Massive Attack, Blue Lines (1991). Play “Safe from Harm” straight after “Stratus” and you’ll hear the 1973 band underneath it.
For the story: Mahavishnu Orchestra, Birds of Fire (1973). Cobham and Hammer with McLaughlin, engineered by Scott, months before Spectrum.
Three days, one broken string
Billy Cobham made Spectrum in three days at Electric Lady in May 1973, with no rehearsal and few takes. Tommy Bolin broke a string in his solo on “Taurian Matador”, and the take stayed on the album. The record topped the Billboard jazz chart, helped get Bolin into Deep Purple, and in 1991 gave Massive Attack the sound of “Safe from Harm”.
Cobham is on our list of the greatest fusion drummers of all time, and Spectrum is one of our picks in jazz fusion for beginners. For more from the era, try the best jazz fusion albums of all time and the greatest fusion guitarists.
Note: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Did you hear “Stratus” first, or “Safe from Harm”? Tell us in the comments.
