Did Mayall Fire John and Mick?

[michelej1]

June 9, 1990, Times UK

HEADLINE: Blues from the wilderness

BYLINE: David Sinclair

BODY:
The revitalized John Mayall is again a force on the rock music scene, says David Sinclair

The patron saint of British blues, John Mayall, is rock music's matchmaker supreme. During the Sixties, his band, Bluesbreakers, nurtured a small army of musicians, who went on to form an elite corps within the rock fraternity.

Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce of Cream; Peter Green, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood (and more recently Rick Vito) of Fleetwood Mac; Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones; Jon Hiseman, Tony Reeves and Dick Heckstall-Smith of Colosseum; Andy Fraser of Free; Aynsley Dunbar of the Mothers Of Invention, Journey and Whitesnake: all passed through the Bluesbreakers' ranks between 1965 and 1968.

Mayall ploughed a charismatic and influential furrow, singing, sometimes writing, and playing piano, organ, harmonica and guitar. But he remained conspicuously unrewarded by anything like the critical acclaim or subsequent commercial success that his employees attracted.

Now a new blues boom is in full swing. Bonnie Raitt recently headed the US charts, John Lee Hooker picked up a Grammy award for ''In the Mood'' from the album The Healer, Larry McCray made the first concerted attempt to snatch the baton from Robert Cray, Eric Clapton slipped in three blues nights during his Albert Hall residency, and old-timers Albert King and Albert have been pressed into active service to support Gary Moore's unconvincing attempt to claim a set of blues credentials.

John Mayall returns to this favourable climate, after a long period in the wilderness, with a superb new album released on Monday. A Sense of Place features the honeyed slide guitar of Sonny Landreth (from John Hiatt's band) and the more conventional fretboard chops of Coco Montoya, now Mayall's longest-serving guitarist. It is as good a collection of ancient and modern blues tunes as anything Mayall has recorded since his Sixties' heyday.

By far his most significant legacy from that era was the 1966 Bluesbreakers album with Eric Clapton, a landmark recording which injected a searing dose of virtuoso blues guitar into the arteries of the beat generation. As Mayall puts it:''Eric was the first person that I'd found who knew anything about the blues or who had that gift for playing it. He is without doubt the greatest blues guitarist I've ever heard.''

Now 56, Mayall has a full head of grey hair tied back in a neat pony-tail. His neck, hands and one ear are adorned with turquoise jewellery wrought by the Navajo and Suni Indian tribes of Arizona. He has a straightforward, good-humoured manner, the calloused fingers of an artisan and the mental acuity of a natural organizer. Perhaps his greatest talent is his ability as a band leader.

''You have to have a musical concept; to have the ears to know what you want from a player; to choose players who are compatible on a social level. You have to be a good organizer.''

Yet, over the years, Mayall has gained a reputation for being difficult to work for, an impression he seems at a loss to understand. ''I really wonder where that came from. My philosophy for putting a band together is that you must really enjoy what you're doing and express yourself and have lots of room for experimentation and development for your own musical talent. A blues band is very much like a jazz band. People come and go.''

What about the legendary firing of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood? ''No. I didn't fire Mick Fleetwood. He left. The gig was too jazzy for his taste. McVie became unmanageable. He was in a rough state a couple of times, so he was fired.''

Mayall's sense of discipline was doubtless honed by a spell of National Service in the British army, 18 months of which was spent in Korea. While on leave in Tokyo in 1954, he bought his first guitar. He had already taught himself the rudiments of boogie-woogie piano while at art school.

Born in Macclesfield and brought up in Cheshire, Mayall graduated from college in Manchester with a degree in graphics. He started working as a designer with an advertising agency, running a band called Blues Syndicate in his spare time. The Bluesbreakers emerged after several years of work on the London and South-east club circuit, most of it undertaken with no thought of landing a recording contract.

Following the success of the Clapton album and subsequent releases including A Hard Road, Crusade, and Bare Wires, Mayall moved to Laurel Canyon in California in 1969, where he still lives today. ''We worked steadily through the Seventies,'' he says, philosophically. ''But it wasn't a blues period in the popular music business. I wanted to fool around, particularly with jazz.''

It was a period when Mayall found himself increasingly dependent on alcohol. ''I've been sober for six years now. My drinking years were not very fruitful as regards making judgements about record companies, managements and various things like that.''

Following a Bluesbreakers reunion tour in 1982, with Mick Taylor and John McVie, Mayall decided to reconvene the band on a permanent basis in 1984. ''As far as I'm concerned it starts right there, because the audience we've built up since 1984 is a new audience; a new set of teenagers. For me that's the beginning of a new chapter.''

John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers' album A Sense of Place is released on June 11.

[sharksfan2000]

Originally Posted by michelej1

What about the legendary firing of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood? ''No. I didn't fire Mick Fleetwood. He left. The gig was too jazzy for his taste. McVie became unmanageable. He was in a rough state a couple of times, so he was fired.''

From everything I've read about this, it was the other way around - Mayall fired Fleetwood (for being drunk during gigs) and McVie left on his own, supposedly because Mayall was getting "too jazzy". Though it's true that before McVie left for good, Mayall did fire him (more than once IIRC, and for the same reason as why Fleetwood was sacked) but then rehired him. That's what I've read anyway, from a number of sources (including Mick Fleetwood's book). Don't know why Mayall would have gotten them mixed up when he replied to that question, but that's what it seems like.

[SteveMacD]

Mayall must have been confused. Mick was fired for his drinking, and John quit because it had become too jazzy. However, Mayall DID fire McVie once or twice for his drinking (when Jack Bruce replaced him), so those comments aren't necessarily wrong, but weren't right in the context of their final exit from the Bluesbreakers.