They Eat Horses

A household name since the early '70s, John McLaughlin was an innovative fusion guitarist when he led the Mahavishnu Orchestra and continued living up to his reputation as a phenomenal and consistently inquisitive player through the years. He started on guitar when he was 11 and was initially inspired by blues and swing players. John McLaughlin worked with David Bowie, Alexis Korner, Graham Bond, Ginger Baker, and others in the 1960s and played free jazz with Gunter Hampel for six months. His first album was a classic (1969's Extrapolation) and was followed by an obscurity for the Dawns label with John Surman, a quintet set with Larry Young (Devotion), and My Goals Beyond in 1970 which was half acoustic solos and half jams involving Indian musicians.

Joni Mitchell has had one of the most peculiar career arcs in the history of popular music. Since her first stint as a superstar in the making – from about 1967 to 1975 – her overall creative catalog of complex, challenging, ever-changing music has gone more or less unnoticed by the masses. Of course, this has been done by mutual agreement between artist and audience. Mitchell has no desire to pander (when she's slipped and tried, the results have been very mixed – 1985's poorly received Dog Eat Dog, for example) and the vast majority of the pop music buying public don't want to think when they listen to favored acts.