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For added grandeur
Louder Sound republishes online a Classic Rock feature on Rainbow Rising and subsequent tour. It originally appeared in the Classic Rock magazine issue #158, dated June 2011. The feature was written by Pete Makowski with input from Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Bain, Ronnie James Dio, Tony Carey, and Cozy Powell, all collected over the years.
Tokyo, December 16, 1976
In the dark, smoke-filled basement disco of the Tokyo Hilton, the night is in full swing. The music throbs with a mid-tempo pulse, as salary men with open collars, loosened ties and uncomfortable paunches knock back the sake. Refined-looking and impeccably dressed hostesses hover in the background, circling their prey with casual yet purposeful intent.
In one corner of the room, I can just about make out the blurry outline of someone who seems out of place in this den of iniquity. Ritchie Blackmore, guitarist and driving force with Rainbow, sits almost hidden in an anonymous alcove. Dressed in his trademark black, only the whites of his eyes and a half-pint glass of imported German beer are visible.
Continue reading in Louder Sound.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
I was hoping that Uwe’s favourite band and album would be posted here. Let the floodgates open, (again). Cheers.
September 5th, 2025 at 01:13I’m gonna sit this one out and let you boys get on with your fervent celebration in the heat and the rain, with whips and chains of this relic of quasi-religious devout worship and fervor. My agnostic view of it is well-known. It had eye-catching sleeve art and the first song (Tarot Woman) was promising, I’ll give it that.
Here is a cocky review of the album I came across that is not overawed, but doesn’t lack appreciation either:
https://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/graded-on-a-curve-rainbow-rising-2/
And here is a Dio/Bain US radio interview around the time the album was released:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlZX6AnjGLE
This 1976 promo is well-known, but worth a listen for Jimmy Bain’s trademark buzzsaw Telecaster Bass sound during Do You Close Your Eyes/the Strat smash-up, once the poor guitar has gone dead at 11:02, you can hear Jimmy real well! 😂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRlHQUtEpb4
I guess that punkish sounding, forward-driving bass is what initially got Jimmy the job with Rainbow (suitably wild in contrast to the much more collected and nuanced Craig Gruber) and also made him lose it again once Ritchie had grown tired of it and found it limiting.
September 5th, 2025 at 03:56I dont care what anybody says.. Rising is one of the best hard rock albums of the 70:s and the best Rainbow album and one of the best playing by Blackmore ever. As J Bain said..its a shame that line-up didnt stay together for a longer time.
September 5th, 2025 at 10:29These days my favourite track on the album is “A light in the black.”
I especially liked the part where it’s revealed that Ritchie took his band to 0the clubs at night to make them listen to the grooves the babes shook butts to.
September 5th, 2025 at 12:18Now that’s the man in black for you!
And boy did it work: next to maybe Sly and the Family Stone Blackmorw’s Rainbow is well known as one of the funkiest bands of the 70s…
Who hasn’t heard those babes begging ‘oh please Mr. DJ…put on that groovy sixteenth century song by the sexy Rainbows…’
I’ve always said side 2 of Rainbow Rising is the best album side ever! Only 2 songs but Stargazer and A Light In The Black, wow! it doesn’t get better than that.
September 5th, 2025 at 18:54Ritchie use to shake his booty back in the mid 1960’s, don’t forget that film clip of this young hips swaying. Play that funky music white boy……………well he isn’t that bad, not as bad some white boys attempting to do that. Cheers.
September 5th, 2025 at 21:57so much for Uwe’s “I’m gonna sit this one out”,,,,,,,,,,,,sheesh……..if that is sitting it out I don’t want to see him getting stuck into it. Well we ALL have been there with him………………Three links only in that post of him ‘sitting it out’ @ 2, not to mention him being unable to resist a dig or two, just to remind us of his penchant for Rainbow………….We have to have a good laugh don’t we…………Cheers.
September 5th, 2025 at 22:02I added the links to feed the nostalgia warmth of other people, not to support my own minority view of Rising, I know that the album has been influential for Euro fantasy melodic power metal whatchamacallit.
But I can’t help it if I didn’t like it all that much back then (I preferred both the debut and LLRnR) and still don’t like it all that much today:
1. Tarot Woman: brilliant number, highlight of the album;
2. Run With The Wolf: barely ok, filler;
3. Lady Starstruck: contrived attempt at writing a single which failed;
4. Do you Close Your Eyes: as awful as Sweet’s Turn It Down, hard rock like hard rock must sound to you if you don’t like hard rock, unerotic and to answer Ronnie’s plaintive question: with that kind of music I would not only close my eyes, but also hold my ears and hope for it to be over soon;
5. Stargazer: sounds like the promising demo to a song that could have been much greater had they devoted more time to it, underdeveloped;
6. A Light In The Black: too darn fast and at that too darn long as well, Fireball (the song) was at least mercifully short, moronic in its mindless repetition.
I don’t think Rising was a compositional masterstroke, no. More rushed job. “But the performance! you cry. You see that’s my point: The sound attraction that DP held in my ears was never just determined by Ritchie, but also by Jon Lord’s and Ian Paice’s groovy playing. Why should I like an album that has exactly those two for me key ingredients totally missing? That is like telling a Ritchie acolyte to state that Come Taste The Band is his favorite DP album. The singleminded minimalism of Dio era Rainbow never did anything for me, I found it a reduction from what DP had offered. Ritchie without Purple doing what he wants in unrestricted fashion is an environment that might boundlessly gratify his ego, but diminishes in my eyes and ears his maverick potential of coming up with the unexpected.
If I was asked why I like DP over Led Zep and Sabbath, I would give you two names: Jon Lord and Ian Paice. Now explain to me why I should have preferred Tony Carey’s and Cozy Powell’s contribution to Ritchie’s music over theirs? I was always more a fan of “DP the collective” than of “Ritchie the guitar master”. Or put differently, my love for Purple was always too deep (pun not intended) for Rainbows rising (pun forced!) anywhere near. If you’ve been exposed to the revolutionary underground energy of In Rock, the proggy experimentalism of Fireball, the sheer craftsmanship of MH and WDWTWA, the improvisational ease of MiJ + dug the blues and funk influences of Burn and the slightly decadent compositional and stylistic diversity of Stormbringer, then Rising is at best a piece of genre rock to you. But I was approaching 16 when I first heard it at a friend’s house (who had the album already), not 12. Figuratively speaking, my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles days were already behind me, I was listening to stuff like David Bowie’s Station To Station and Roxy Music back then too not to mention bands like IGB and PAL or the Glenn Hughes debut. If Purple was “2001: A Space Odyssey”, then Rising was STAR WARS. And I always thought STAR WARS an unpleasant mix of the reactionary and the bit silly.
But for all of those to whom Rising means the world: I’m happy for you. It’s not like I can listen to Tarot Woman or Stargazer and not draw a guilty pleasure idiot smile on my face.
And a remix from the ground up – if the masters are available – might do wonders for that album. I also would really like to hear Fritz Sonnleitner’s
https://iiif.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/image/2/373fa2c1-d8db-4e5a-8e01-a8cd09b12599/full/!511,430/0/default.jpg
original score to Stargazer which Ritchie deemed too flowery/ornamental – what you hear of the strings on the song I always found strangely underwhelming and only a rough sketch of what could have been. I think they lacked time for something greater.
September 6th, 2025 at 01:46#8 Uwe:
I think your criticisms towards Rising are very unfair, as they contain milestones of the genre that will become heavy metal/power metal in the following years.
according to your criticisms within Purple, then S&M and TBRO and everything Purple did after Bananas is irrelevant stuff that shouldn’t exist.
Blackmore himself from the third or fourth album onwards, Glenn himself from The Way It Is onwards.
Gillan himself from dream catcher to forward.
the same Lord from pictured whitin (for many it would already be indigestible even if it is pure poetry) onwards
Rising as a whole is not a homogeneous album, and this is its biggest flaw, but it was written according to the inspirations of the moment and it was genuine.
If even Rising is no longer good then we can say that hard rock is dead after Made in Japan, but fortunately I think that is not the case!
September 6th, 2025 at 11:52Thinking about it, what I liked about classic Purple was that mix of 40% Ritchie + 30% Jon + 30% Paicey (I am simplifying of course) that permeated most songs. I did not find hearing all of the sudden 80% Ritchie in Rainbow a strengthening of the original recipe, (Black)More isn’t always better. Rainbow – especially the Dio years – was like a strictly organized military campaign, but it lacked elements of surprise, spontaneity and cross-insemination, things that had made DP so special.
It is telling that Tony Carey, Bob Daisley and David Stone have all said that even the portions of Rainbow’s live set that were made to look improvisational were meticulously worked out beforehand and well-rehearsed. I’m not saying that DP had none of that, but there was a palpable telepathic quality to Ritchie’s, Jon’s and Paicey’s band interplay I never heard with any Rainbow line-up. I missed that.
September 6th, 2025 at 12:17I DEMAND all japanese concerts released.
September 6th, 2025 at 19:24Hello.
September 7th, 2025 at 00:50I’m new here 🙂
“…according to your criticisms within Purple, then S&M and TBRO and everything Purple did after Bananas is irrelevant stuff that shouldn’t exist …”
Huh? I can’t follow your argument, Fla76, care to explain? I don’t think Slaves & Masters is a horrible record at all and Rainbow released albums following Rising that actually attained a higher overall songwriting quality.
I believe Rising suffered mainly from being made under great time pressure and because it was such a narrow concept plus the flawed production/mix. It was also the first time in a big budget studio for Tony and Jimmy, they didn’t have much recording experience. Even Cozy Powell didn’t have the recording experience of Ian Paice. Cozy’s work with the Jeff Beck Group, Bedlam and RAK/Mickie Most hadn’t seen him confronted with state-of-the-art productions like MH, WDWTWA, Burn and Stormbringer. Stormbringer as an album sounds twice as cool, collected and sophisticated as Rising – you can hear that by that point Mk III were relaxed in the studio and used technology to its best effect. It is no doubt the more professionally made record – “shoeshine music” or not.
Calling Rising “uneven” (to the point of disparate) is actually a good way of putting it. With more time, lots of things could have been improved on that album and what good ideas there were developed to full bloom. Let’s not even talk about how Stargazer would have been turned into a magnus opus had someone like Bob Ezrin with his sense for grand arrangements gotten his hands on it.
September 7th, 2025 at 00:55