![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/morse1.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/airey2.jpg)
One on one with Roger
Roger Glover was a guest of a recent episode of One On One With Mitch Lafon. The show starts with a chat with Alice Cooper guitarist Tommy Henriksen; Roger’s segment starts shortly after the 10 minute mark and although he sounds pretty tired, he soldiers for 30 minutes, talking about many things, from what he learned from Bob Ezrin, to waking up in a small town up in the Swiss Alps one day.
Thanks to BraveWords for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Great stuff. Great interview by Mitch. He definitely knows his subject. Nice job Roger. Tired?……probably more likely a few glasses of wine. CHEERS!
August 11th, 2015 at 05:57The announcer asked a lot of good questions, even if his knowledge of DP is, perhaps, somewhat lacking (for example, any Purple-phyte knows “Smoke” was viewed as almost an afterthought by the band at the time it was recorded). But I felt the interviewer asked a variety of good questions. I’m focusing on that, because Glover always is thoughtful and well-spoken. But you never know if the questions he’s asked are going to be intelligent.
I’ve met Roger before, and he’s very nice. He has a great treasure chest of historical anecdotes, having spent so many years in the rock world, not only as a guitarist with some famous bands, but as a well-known producer back in the day. The one thing I wish Roger could’ve impressed upon Bob Ezrin in making the “Now What?!” album was to have let Don Airey’s keyboard solo go longer on “A Simple Song.” Airey was jamming like something you would’ve heard by Jon Lord off “Made In Japan” back in the day, but the brilliant solo seemed to have been cut short. Similarly, while playing “Smoke on the Water” on the NBC network-TV program “The Today Show” Airey’s solo toward the end of the song was cut short. Perhaps for TV-scheduling purposes, that had to be the case. But the heavy soloing on keyboard/organ needs to DPbe a more prominent part of the band, in my view. That’s always been a huge part of the Purple sound, so if you’re going to record the albums like you would play them in concert, please don’t cut back on the organ solos.
In reference to the Machine Head album, what made that LP great was the atmosphere surrounding the whole project. The urgency and time pressure, the proper accoustics inside the hotel to make it sound like it was live and off the cuff. If I were Purple, I wouldn’t spend all this time hashing over “ideas” all the time, procrastinating to put the next album out because of the perfectionism and false belief that the group needs to work up a lot of grand ideas. Rather, do it more off the cuff. See what you can put together on the fly, right off the cuff. Have the trust in yourselves and each other that you can make a great album this way. Because you can. And that’s where the brilliance of the music will best manifest itself: not in over-analyzing, over-writing, over-thinking. -James /Aug. 2015
August 11th, 2015 at 06:58@2 James Gemmell… I don’t believe that DP’s best know songs came out of Jams per se. The main creative writing force in the most successful era of DP was Blackmore and I believe most of his ideas were brought to the “table” pre written and then developed by the band in their writing sessions. Jon Lord was a genius developer of ideas. You can hear the chord inversions that he brought in and added around Ritchie’s simple ideas.
I think the only one that had no idea what he was going to do melodically prior to recording was Gillan.
August 13th, 2015 at 15:40