On the identical time, he was brimming with contemporary musical inspiration, drawn partially from voracious listening. In Herbie Hancock’s memoir, Prospects, the pianist credit Williams as a continuing supply of recent and difficult sounds through the ’60s, turning him on to radical composers together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. “I used to be all the time asking him, ‘What are you listening to?’ as a result of I knew I’d be taught one thing,” Hancock wrote.
Whereas maintaining with the most recent avant-garde developments, Williams additionally soaked within the pop music of the day. He’d grown up on doo-wop within the ’50s, even singing lead in a bunch known as the Monticellos, and within the ’60s, to the dismay of a few of his jazz friends, he grew to become a proud Beatlemaniac, an enthusiasm that will endure for the remaining of his life. As rock obtained progressively wilder, and louder, all through the last decade, the drummer was paying shut consideration. He would later characterize Flip It Over, the second Lifetime album, as “my model of Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5. For Emergency!, different rock luminaries like Cream, the Who, and the Jimi Hendrix Expertise lit the spark.
In interviews performed within the early Lifetime period, Williams spoke of amplified, overdriven rock as if it had been a tractor beam, drawing him in. “I began listening to plenty of electrical energy,” he instructed Down Beat in 1970, citing Hendrix’s Are You Skilled as a touchstone, “…and that began to excite me, and I needed to listen to extra of that.”
If Lifetime’s rock trappings had been staunchly modern, the group’s fundamental make-up pointed backward roughly a decade, to Williams’ early days working alongside Johnny “Hammond” Smith. In that earlier period, the organ trio was seen as the top of swinging soulfulness, the instrument itself performing as a direct hyperlink between fashionable jazz and conventional gospel and blues. “I needed an electrical group, to have an organ trio which might return to my roots in Boston, once I performed within the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he later mirrored. “I figured why not do this however make it extra aggressive, extra rock-oriented than blues-oriented? That was the premise. There’s nothing new, it’s simply how you employ it and the way you place it collectively.”
The format could have been retro, however the personnel was state-of-the-art, with two virtuosos that Williams handpicked from very completely different backgrounds. Within the early-to-mid-’60s, Newark-born Larry Younger had progressed from soul jazz—generally working within the traditional organ/guitar/drums format that Williams revived with Lifetime—to forward-looking post-bop. McLaughlin had spent the prior decade as a guitarist for rent on the London scene, enjoying jazz, blues, and R&B with future members of Cream and Led Zeppelin, amongst many others, whereas maintaining shut tabs on the improvements of Miles and John Coltrane. Listening to a tape of McLaughlin enjoying at London jazz mecca Ronnie Scott’s, Willliams appreciated that the guitarist was enjoying, because the drummer later stated, in “a really aggressive manner, not so politely,” and shortly known as and invited him to New York.
