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Love that burns brightly
In the anticipation of the Birmingham and London dates, Times Online has published a brilliantly eloquent piece on Deep Purple that surely will resonate in one a many hearts:
The exact date has long been wiped from the memory’s hard drive, but I can say with absolute certainty that it was a February evening in 1977. I was coming to the entirely amicable end of a three-year relationship and was on the lookout for a new romance.
It was my best mate Rob who introduced us and it was in his house that night that I found lasting love. It was a passion that was to burn brightly through the next six years and then, when I was older and thought we had both moved on, to reignite when fate threw us together again in the early 1990s. And even today the memory of the relationship still brings a nostalgic smile to my nearly 50-year-old features. It was the night I first heard Deep Purple.
Is there any love that burns more brightly than that between a teenage boy and his favourite rock group? From the moment that Ian Paice’s deceptively funky cymbals counted in Ritchie Blackmore’s ear-syringing guitar riff and Woman from Tokyo thundered out of the speakers, I was completely smitten. There was no way I was going to slink back to the doomed thing with Emerson Lake and Palmer.
Read more at Times Online.
Thanks to Stathis Panagiotopoulos for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
I could have written this piece too, it’s very close to what happened to me. Rediscovering them in the 1990s and all.
November 18th, 2009 at 17:47Lovely story. For me, it was “Made in Japan,” when I was 15 years old (back in 1975). it was played for me by my sister’s boyfriend and I thought it was the most exciting thing I had ever heard (I still feel that way). Even the album cover and photos left an impression. They even “looked” exciting!
November 18th, 2009 at 18:44For me it was my big sister (Jane) bringing home Machine Head & I heard “Highway Star”. That was it, Purple were & always will be my 1st love. Jane saw them in Amsterdam (17/11/09) last night & is still on planet Purple, still buzzing & I’m so pleased for her.
November 18th, 2009 at 19:51Where were you when you first listened to Deep Purple? How did you feel? I was about 12 when I listened to one of my sister’s records. It was “Shades of Deep Purple” and at that time I wasn’t sure if the first ELP album was better … I liked both. The first Deep-Purple-album I bought was “Stormbringer”, maybe a bad choice, but it was cheap at the local record store. And I liked the cover …
November 18th, 2009 at 23:58…wonderfully written, it brings back fond memories..I had a slightly different introduction to DP. It was in late 1973 I got a cassette from a friend of my brothers with “Uriah Heep” printed on one side and “Deep Purple” printed on the other. That was all. I was immediately hooked on to “Uriah Heep” and I wanted their latest album (cassette)for christmas. I still remember the surprise when putting the cassette into my Phillips mono cassette player – and it sounded like “Deep Purple” ??!! – Yep, you got it, the labels had been misprinted…so what I thought was something by Uriah Heep was actually Deep Purple’s Made in Japan.. I still listen to it to this day, it’s number one in the CD changer stack in my car…nothing beats the feeling I get when I enter the highway friday afternoon, the whole weekend ahead, and Paicey starts up the Highway Star intro… goosebump factor: 10
November 19th, 2009 at 09:00# 2 Made in Japan was my intro on Purple too and also in 1975.Things would never be same.And still…Burn!
November 19th, 2009 at 10:23For me it was my Mum. She had bought Jesus Christ Superstar, loved Gillan singing Christ and so bought In Rock, in 1970. I still have the original LP and she had marked out Child In Time. You have to understand, this is no 60’s flower power woman. This is a classically trained pianist who listens mostly to classical music!
I was 9 back then. Thanks Mum!
I have stayed with them all the way through (the IG lineups) and love their new stuff too. It is different without the 2 maestros, but now they have 2 new ones, and the original soul is still there.
November 19th, 2009 at 13:52For me it was the first time I put a number of my brother’s 45 singles onto the Garrard autochanger and ‘Speed King’ came belting out of of the little valve driven mono record player. I was 13 and I had never heard guitar played the way Ritchie Blackmore played it, he blazed away with that wonderful Strat/Marshall tone and I was smitten…totally. But what also amazed me was the way the whole band totally commanded their instruments – nothing at the time came close and probably never will. I still love em and even my 7 year old son who is learning drums wants to play like Ian Paice. Their legacy lives on!!
November 19th, 2009 at 13:59I remember well, it was 1973, and I was a mere 11 yr. old boy. I had been into Black Oak Arkansas at the time. Into the Record shop and out with Black Oak’s Raunch & Roll live and Deep Purple’s Machinehead and I was forever changed by that Dynamic Hammond and Blackmores Stratocaster, along with big Ian’s notorious voice, then around a year later, playing basketball with my older friends, when Dean Glover popped in a cassete of a band, the title was Burn, Dean tells me this is the new Purple tunes, when I heard Sailaway, with Coverdales voice and I was hooked all over again, and I still am to this day, I try to follow all the Purple people as much as possible, but Coverdale and Ian Gillan I have huge respect for both!!! cheers Bill
November 19th, 2009 at 16:49My brother and his best mate were into Purple in the early 70’s. He bought When We Rock circa 1978, which I inherited and played the heck out of. I still have that album and the cover is still in decent condition.
When my friend and I wanted to start a band, I lent him When We Rock and told him to listen to “Woman From Tokyo”. “This is how piano should be played,” I told him. It blew him away.
The next day, my buddy ended up buying all the DP he could find–in this case, In Rock, Who Do We Think We Are, Stormbringer and Made in Europe along with the omnibus Purple Passages from the Tetragrammaton years.
He called me on the phone and said, laughing, that In Rock was literally “in rock”–that is, that their heads were carved into Mount Rushmore (or Mount Blackmore, as we used to refer to it) and that there was this song called “Child in Time” that I just had to hear. He literally blew out a couple of speakers listening to it at high volume. I ended up using this song as my presentation for my music appreciation class in high school (or, as I called it, “music de-preciation” because of all the stoners in there who had no interest in music but took the class for an easy fine art credit).
It was Jon’s Concerto that got me interested in orchestral music, both collecting recordings and writing. His music opened up a whole other musical world from William Russo to Saint-Saëns. I couldn’t imagine my musical life without Beethoven (I have a picture of a young Ludwig. He looks just like a guitarist we’ve all heard of. It’s amazing).
Not a day goes by that I don’t listen to something Purple-related, and it’s been that way since 1978.
It’s all my brother’s fault.
November 20th, 2009 at 00:17I was about five years (1975)old, my older cousing playing child in time. But not until I was 14 when perfect strangers was released that I became a fan until now. I have traveled to many US cities for concerts and have had to pleasure to meet all of them, except for Ritchie. Not a day goes by that I dont play their music.
November 20th, 2009 at 06:43being a little fat kid hearing “king of dreams” when it first came out on dads speakers … been a fan ever since
November 21st, 2009 at 16:52My introduction to Deep Purple was like this; going to a catholic high school in 1973 we had a religion class. On that particular day, the teacher was ill and could not make it. Our substitute teacher said “do what ever you like just keep it quiet.” So there was this record player with built in speaker (remember those)and my friend had Made in Japan with him. I had no idea who or what this was. Everyone agreed that he should put it on and with the substitutes` permission we did. Most suggested SOTW, but ( as I found out later) a true fan, said, “No way – LAZY!!!”. I was hooked from the moment Lord started to that last bluesy ending and have been to this day!!
November 24th, 2009 at 18:14