[ Originally posted to What’s Rattlin’? Yahoo! Group on June 28, 2011 ]

The whole discussion of the Softs being able to add Billy Cobham cracks me up. As mentioned, the Softs saw Mahavishnu Orchestra on their first tour as they supported the release of “Inner Mounting Flame”. I had, as the drummer of Merz Pictures, the queasy honor of opening for Mahavishnu Orchestra and the monster Billy Cobham during that same tour at a concert at Grinnel College. At that point Mahavishnu was a very bare bones touring outfit – crappy trucks, faltering Fender Rhodes for Jan Hammer (no synthesizers yet to be found) very few roadies. After the concert the band actually had to argue to get the rental truck paid for which I witnessed. It was really at the America jazz group revenue level, meaning dicey at best.

But that changed very, very quickly. The record took off and they started to be the premier fusion band in the U.S. just as fusion was turning into a commercial engine and before the form completely degraded and sucked out loud. They were on magazine covers and started to make very significant money. This is my point – regardless of whether Billy Cobham, the premier drummer in all of modern jazz / fusion for that season would have been a “good fit” the Softs could never have afforded him in a million years.

We also recall the reaction of John Marshall as described in “Out-Bloody-Rageous” where he thought it would be “all limousines” and was shocked when the finances were revealed to be as dire as they were. Billy would have just called a cab.

Finally, we all love the Soft Machine and have held them to a standard these long years independent of their true popularity at the time, which was very limited. That was in fact part of the appeal. But perhaps other than Ornette Coleman you never heard a lot of praise coming from the American jazz scene. To that point a final vignette: in 1973 I saw the very happening Weather Report in Chicago at the Quiet Knight. I talked to Joe Zawinul, keyboard master and co-founder who also played with God Jr., Miles Davis. I asked him if he had listened to Soft Machine, primarily Mike Ratledge as he was also a great progressive keyboard player playing “new music.” I crumbled a little bit when Joe told me that he had never heard of him. Unfortunately that was their stature in American Jazz circles, which definitely and sadly included Billy Cobham.

[Actually, when the Softs saw the Mahavishnu Orchestra, they hadn’t *even* recorded their first album. The Gaslight residency were their very first gigs. I guess it was difficult to guess they would make it big at such an early stage – A.]