In the winter of 1973, five musicians at the peak of their commercial success walked off a London stage and refused to speak to one another. This episode traces John McLaughlin from his tenure as a key architect of Miles Davis's electric period and his devotion to guru Sri Chinmoy, who gave him the name Mahavishnu, through a scrambled recruitment that yielded Billy Cobham, Rick Laird, Jan Hammer, and Jerry Goodman after Jean-Luc Ponty and Tony Levin were unavailable.

We cover the one-week rehearsal before opening for John Lee Hooker in July 1971, the music's blend of psychedelic volume, funk, jazz, and Indian-influenced time signatures like 11/8 and 13/8, the chart success of The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, and the abandoned Trident Studios sessions of June 1973. We then follow the second lineup's Apocalypse with the London Symp ...