Maybe this was why it was faded out:

"Then they asked me to come down - they were playing Winterland. I sat in with them on the encore and everything that could've gone wrong went wrong. I mean, I broke a string. I hardly ever break strings. And the PA went out, and one of the amplifiers blew, I think. And it was really cool, because the band held it together. Finally, whan the PA went off, the drummer just took it and did a solo.

So at the end of the show they came over and they started to apologize. They said, "Gee, we wanted to ask you if you'd come to England with us, but you probably won't because everything fell apart." And I thought about it. I didn't know them, but I figured that anybody that could hold it together under that kind of adversity was adult enough and professional enough, sure, I'd do it. So I went over without knowing anything about them and we ended up doing the album. [Maximum Darkness, 1975]"

from "The John Cipollina Story, Part 4: Guitarist Without Portfolio", by Walter Ruhlmann, Relix Vol. 15 #3  -  http://michaelcross.me.uk/jc/r-jcs4.htm