Pilkington Deep Purple & Rainbow 1968-1979

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-499-4
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Few would deny that Deep Purple were one of the most influential and popular heavy rock bands to emerge from the melting pot of the late 1960s. They went through several line-up changes and stylistic shifts before splitting up for the first time in the mid-1970s. Talismanic guitarist Ritchie Blackmore carried the spirit on when he formed Rainbow after leaving Purple in 1975, particularly through his partnership with legendary singer Ronnie James Dio. Deep Purple reformed some years later, of course, but many consider this original, sometimes turbulent, decade to be their most significant.
In this updated new edition, Steve Pilkington puts his focus on the period from Shades Of Deep Purple in 1968 through to the first dissolution of the band after Come Taste The Band in 1976, via such classics as Machine Head and In Rock. He also discusses the first four Rainbow studio albums, including the classic Rainbow Rising and the hit-laden Down To Earth album in 1979, taking a look at every song from every album in detail. He also discusses live recordings, plus DVD and video releases. Critical! opinion rubs shoulders with facts, trivia and anecdotes, making this alternative history the most exhaustive guide to the two bands' music yet produced.

Steve Pilkington is a music journalist, editor and broadcaster. He was Editor in Chief for the Classic Rock Society Magazine Rock Society and is now co-administrator of the rock website Velvet Thunder as well as presenting a weekly internet radio show called A Saucerful Of Prog. He has recently published. His books include On Tracks on Iron Maiden, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, plus Supertramp - Crime Of The Century, Rock Classics, all for Sonicbond, and he has also written the official biography of legendary guitarist Gordon Giltrap. He lives in Wigan, Lancashire, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pilkington, Steve

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Shades Of Deep Purple

Personnel:

Rod Evans: vocals

Ritchie Blackmore: guitars

Jon Lord: keyboards

Nick Simper: bass guitar

Ian Paice: drums and percussion

Record label: Parlophone (UK), Tetragrammaton (US)

Recorded in May 1968, produced by Derek Lawrence.

UK release date: September 1968.

US release date: July 1968.

Highest chart places: UK: did not chart, USA: 24

Running time: 43:27

Album Facts

The album was recorded in May 1968, after the band returned from a Scandinavian tour under the name Roundabout. They changed their name to Deep Purple on the suggestion of Ritchie Blackmore, whose grandmother was reportedly very keen on the song of the same name – an easy-listening staple dating back to the 1930s. They completed the recording in a mere three days at Pye Studios in London, with production duties handled by Derek Lawrence, who went on to great success, with his stint as the man behind the production desk for the first three Wishbone Ash albums of particular note. The album gained immediate traction in the United States, largely on the back of the success of the first single ‘Hush’, but by contrast went largely unheralded in their native UK, where it was only finally granted a release in September of that year. The US record label was Tetragrammaton, whose intriguing name refers to the four-letter Hebrew biblical name of God, from which the words Yahweh and Jehovah are derived. The label was actually co-owned by the comedian Bill Cosby. In the UK, the album came out on the Parlophone label, the EMI subsidiary which had released the early Beatles work.

Containing a roughly equal mix of covers and original material, the album is an enjoyable yet tentative musical step. Unlike the debut releases of Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, which would offer fully realised blueprints for their musical direction, Shades Of Deep Purple showed a band taking the first move in the direction which they would perfect some time later. In this regard, their early work mirrors that of Yes, for example, whose first two albums likewise saw them hinting, albeit extremely well, at the template they would go on to make their own.

Album Cover

The album cover photograph is fairly typical of the time, with the band appearing rather stiffly in fashionable outfits purchased for them at the notable London boutique, the ‘Mr Fish Emporium’, where they did the photo shoot.

Incidentally, and possibly of coincidental naming, the owner and fashion designer, Michael Fish, was the man behind the infamous ‘kipper tie’! He did not, however, have any connection to the UK weatherman, famed for failing to spot an incoming disastrous hurricane in 1987. The same shot was used for both the American and British covers, but in different formats; while the US version had the shot repeated several times in squares on the front cover, both colour and monochrome, the UK release went for a much simpler design, with the one big shot for the whole cover against a purple background (naturally), with the title above. The band name was omitted from the UK cover, whereas in the American design, it was highlighted in a different colour in order to emphasise it.

‘And The Address’ (Blackmore, Lord)

The first track on the album was also the first piece written by Blackmore and Lord – before the group had formed around them, in fact – and also the first track to be recorded on the initial day in the studio (‘Hey Joe’, ‘Hush’ and ‘Help’ were the others to be completed on that first day). Interestingly, and somewhat amusingly, Nick Simper has claimed (in an interview with Purple devotee and author Jerry Bloom) that the unusual title comes from an exclamation made ‘after a gentleman had broken wind’ (‘...and the address...’), but this is unsubstantiated!

An instrumental, it is, in fact, an extremely effective way to kick off the album, with a minute or so of free-form organ fading in gradually only to give way to a series of dramatic power chords introducing Blackmore’s guitar carrying the melody. The sound is very much of its time, in a slightly psychedelic, ‘proto-prog’ way, but moves along at an energetic tempo, introducing Lord and Blackmore as the clear musical leaders via some fairly impressive soloing. The track was used to open all of their shows up until the release of the next album, but was somewhat disappointingly dropped thereafter. Deep Purple had made their presence felt, though it would take some time for their homeland to join the party...

‘Hush’ (South)

It is quite an unusual phenomenon for a cover version to effectively launch a band’s career single-handedly, not to mention defining them (in the American market at least) for some time, but Hush did that in spectacular fashion for Deep Purple. Released as a single in July 1968, it reached number four on the US chart and number two in Canada, despite barely making a ripple in the UK. The success of the single more or less dragged the album up with it to become a sizeable American hit (peaking at number 24), and to this day, there are many fans in the US who cite this first lineup as their favourite Purple era. The track was originally written by Joe South – based partly on a traditional Gospel song – and first recorded by Billy Joe Royal in 1967, for whom it became a minor hit.

The Purple recording follows the arrangement of the Royal version quite faithfully, although much more dramatically. Opening with a slightly incongruous crashing intro, it gives way to Lord’s churning, funky organ underpinning Blackmore’s fiery lead lines. Evans delivers the song well, though it is somewhat amusing to hear this Eton-born, very English singer delivering the line ‘I can’t eat, y’all, and I can’t sleep’! A hilarious promo film was made of the band clearly debunking the whole lip-synching culture as they looned about in an open-air poolside location, complete with a large open fire. Evans sings alternately in swimming trunks and a towel and lounging in a deckchair, while Lord, clad in a black leather trenchcoat, attacks such ‘instruments’ as garden furniture and a fishing net, with which he rescues a stricken Evans from the pool. Simper, meanwhile, temporarily abandons his bass to run around with a tiny wheelbarrow. Showing an early example of the band’s oft-demonstrated sense of humour, it is well worth seeking out online.

‘One More Rainy Day’ (Lord, Evans)

An original composition by Lord and Evans, and the B-Side of the ‘Hush’ single, this was the final song to be recorded for the album, on the third day in the studio. Opening with the sound of thundery weather (taken from a BBC sound effects record, as were all of the similar bridging elements between songs on the album), Lord’s organ leads us into the song in strident fashion, but it soon settles into a pleasant if unremarkable song, treading the slightly psychedelic pop road which was infested with identikit would-be pop stars in those late-‘60s days. It’s a mildly diverting song to listen to, but far from a classic – and certainly a long way from being representative of where Purple would travel later.

‘Prelude: Happiness/I’m So Glad’ (Blackmore, Evans, Lord, Paice, Simper/James)

A two-part piece here, as the band preface a cover of the Skip James song ‘I’m So Glad’, popularised by Cream shortly beforehand, with an instrumental introduction of their own. Titled ‘Prelude: Happiness’, and taking up almost three minutes of the seven-and-a-half-minute track, this is actually the more interesting section of the medley by some distance. Clearly the brainchild of Lord – despite the somewhat unlikely credit to all five members, including Evans – it is a dextrous keyboard-led workout, incorporating themes from the Rimsky-Korsakov work Scheherazade. Indeed, it proves something of an anti-climax when the band transition into a rather uninspired arrangement of ‘I’m So Glad’.

Once again, there is some nice organ work from Lord, and brief flashes from Blackmore, but it becomes very repetitive, with Evans’ decidedly non-joyful intonation not helping matters. Clearly, the band already had some aptitude for stretching themselves beyond conventional ‘pop’ songwriting limits, and an extended version of the prelude would arguably have constituted a stronger track. In fact,’ I’m So Glad’ was suggested by Evans and Paice, who had played it in their previous band, The Maze, but the timing of the recording, so soon after Cream’s version brought it into the public eye, made it appear somewhat unimaginative.

‘Mandrake Root’ (Blackmore, Lord, Evans)

The opening track on the second side of the album is another that was intended to be an instrumental, but rather than have two instrumental tracks on the album, along with ‘Prelude: Happiness’, some cursory (and mildly suggestive) lyrics were added by Evans before the recording. The track takes its name from the hallucinatory plant, which was said to scream when pulled from the ground, but it is more directly taken from the name of a band which Blackmore was in the process of...