The Larry Coryell Interview

“When I moved to New York I lived on the lower east side. I started finding people who were like me. We were all living on brown rice and vegetables because that’s all anyone could afford. They were unknown musicians who wanted to start a career. There were a lot of avant garde jam sessions where there was not a normal tune being played, it was all free, and they would last all night. In the “Free Spirits” we were just jammin’ we wanted to really stretch outs, play in a very raw and primitive direction. You didn’t want to fix your stuff, leave it the way it is. We were trying to realize our true selves through music. Some of the people who didn’t care for that kind of experimentation mockingly called it “doing your own thing.” There was a little polarization even back then. It was what we wanted to do, we came from it that way. A lot of people were taking LSD and playing. Looking back on it, one acid trip would have been enough. It opened doors to perceiving music from that standpoint, all the other acid trips are just a waste of time. As far as I'm concerned I think it's a very dangerous drug. I did what I did and I'm glad it's over. A lot of my experiences were positive but it's still a drug, it's still artificial. It's not really real. I had a loft in NYC. If people could walk up four flights of stairs we would jam. At that time I don't even remember talking to anyone about money for the first ten or fifteen years of my career. That's right around the time Charlie Mariano was moving from New York to Cologne Germany. Chico had just moved to NYC from LA so there was a lot of transition going on. Chico needed a guitar player and I happened to be right there. The first gig I ever did with Chico it was two guitars, me and Gabor Szabo. Gabor was my mentor in that context.”