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Classic Rock magazine rehashes the story we’ve heard a million times by now — how Smoke came to being. This includes an undated quote from Blackmore (that was at some point subjected to a rather poor OCR, and had to be corrected by us): I was jamming with Ian Paice at a soundcheck, because we […]
Read more »Guitar World has a story how Steve Morse’s faulty pedal lead to his 40 years long collaboration with Ernie Ball: “The gear stripped out, and there was no way to fix it. So I went looking for a volume pedal, and the Ernie Ball booth was nearby. I saw they had this really cool pedal […]
Read more »Bass Player magazine has an online feature on the Elf/RBR bassist Craig Gruber. There are no quotes from the man himself (he passed in 2015), but some input from the last Rainbow bass player Bob Curiano (a.k.a. Bob Nouveau and Sir Robert of Normandie). And it turns pretty technical pretty quickly. [Snake Charmer] begins with […]
Read more »Our recent foray into the trainspotting territory prompted another trip down the memory lane. Better Call Saul is a prequel/offshoot of the hit TV drama series Breaking Bad, and it has run between 2015 and 2020. Somebody in the writers’ pen of the show was obviously a fan.
Read more »There is a new interview with Gillan and Paice in the Uncut magazine, and the two Ians are adamant to continue making music into the foreseeable future. The online version is dated June 1, 2026, so which issue it appears in the printed version — your guess is as good as ours, and probably better. […]
Read more »After a couple of teasers, Ultimate Classic Rock has posted, apparently in full, the interview they’ve recently done with Ritchie Blackmore. Release of the Rainbow 75/76 box set was the occasion, so the bulk of the conversation was actually devoted to that time period.
Read more »Since nobody bothered to make a documentary about Captain Beyond, it was left to our robotic overlords to create one. It is done on the cheap, with no music licensed to use, still — the facts are there, so here it is.
Read more »Wikimetal celebrates 50th anniversary of Rainbow Rising with a short compendium of 6 interesting facts about the album. Which are in no way a surprise to anybody who’s been paying attention. Rainbow Mk1 was short lived and gutted way before work started on the second album. The artwork for the album has become iconic. Munich […]
Read more »Ultimate Classic Rock publishes the next part of The interview they recently did with Ritchie Blackmore. They call it the first part, so apparently the Christopher Cross story that appeared a few days ago, was part zero. Ritchie talks about hi recent heals problems, prospects for touring (spoiler: very little), and also motivation for leaving […]
Read more »In a new interview to the Ultimate Classic Rock, Ritchie Blackmore confirms the story that in 1970 Christopher Cross has played a gig with Deep Purple in his place. This episode became a minor controversy in the Purple lore as over the years Cross himself claimed it, with further corroboration by Eric Johnson, who opened […]
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing