Guitar.com has more Blackmore quotes from his Sirius XM broadcast in April. On the nascient band that Chris Curtis was trying to form in early 1968:

I was living in Hamburg and I got a telegram from Chris Curtis saying ‘Come on over, I need you. We’re making a band’. headed over to England. I met Chris, who was obviously on some sort of medication and he said, ‘Right. Are you ready?’ and I went ‘Well… who’s in the band?

He went ‘we have Jon Lord [on keys]’ […] and I went, ‘Well who’s on bass?’ and he went ‘Well, I am,’ so I said ‘Okay, who’s on drums?’ and Chris went ‘I am,’ and I said ‘oh, well that’s great’. [Curtis then] goes ‘I’m also playing first guitar… you’re playing second guitar’ and I went ‘okay, so I’m playing second guitar to you? Very good’ […] that’s how we started Deep Purple.

[I remember that Lord and myself] met the managers involved and they thought [Curtis] was a little bit crazy. [When we both] got together, I said to Jon Lord ‘Jon, this Chris Curtis… he’s a bit of a strange guy, right?” and he said ‘Yes’. […From then], Jon was probably my best friend in the band.

When [Jon] did pass away, it did affect me more than I thought it would, so I wrote the tune Carry On… Jon. It was very difficult to actually play that particular tune on stage without becoming emotional. This is for Jon.

Read more in Guitar.com

Deep Purple are resuming their touring in earnest today, May 22. The Jerusalem Post has a blurb ahead of the two shows in Israel welcoming the band to the country. Roger Glover was interviewed for the occasion:

Maturity may have something to do with longevity, but it all depends on the personalities in the band. Some bands are volatile, and others are calm. For us, Steve Morse brought an era of peace to the band. When he joined, we decided we weren’t going to be led by anyone. We were a band of five members, all of them equal leaders. So there’s no jealousy and no motives for any arguments.

It’s not like we haven’t been playing; we just haven’t been playing together. So we do have to actually rehearse together a couple times. It’s brushing off the cobwebs, but it always falls into place. It’s a bit like putting a comfortable glove back on.

Read more in Jerusalem Post.

Ritchie Blackmore was a guest host on SiriusXM’s Guitar Greats show last month (April 12) where he discussed some of his biggest guitar inspirations, and Jimi Hendrix in particular:

When [Hendrix] came to England, Jeff Beck came up to me and said ‘Ritchie, we’ve got to do something about this guy’,” Blackmore said. “And I said ‘who are you talking about?’ And he said ‘Jimi Hendrix, he’s killing everybody over here – he’s upsetting everybody!’

And I’m like ‘well Jeff if you can’t do it, nobody else is going to do it’ because I always thought of Jeff as being the best rock player.

I followed him because I thought the way he used riffs [and surrounded songs] in a riff – it had magical moments. Brilliant guitar player and he also looked like he was from the moon.

Really in a way he didn’t have to play the guitar, because he looked so strange and different to the typical English musician, and it worked and i’m so glad it did. Unfortunately it only worked for three years, but he certainly set the world alight.

I only met him once. It was in the Whiskey in Hollywood and I was going into the toilet and he was playing with his hair or something. I mean I always thought of Jimi Hendrix as the ‘Wild Man Of Borneo’ and there he is – fixing his hair in the mirror.

That was the only time I met him and we kind of nodded to each other and that was it. So I never really got to know him, yet he certainly set the world on fire.

Besides Hendrix, other guitar players mentioned as inspirational were Les Paul, Albert Lee, Eric Johnson, and Trevor Rabin.

Thanks to Guitar.com for the quotes.

Whitesnake legend Bernie Marsden hosted a special evening at Coles Book Shop in Bicester, England on Thursday, May 12, to celebrate the vinyl release of his recent albums of blues standards Kings and Chess. Continue Reading »

Ronnie James Dio passed away on May 16, 2010. Louder Sound is reprinting the tribute article that first appeared in Classic Rock magazine #147, June 2010.

Music was central to his life from an early age. Although he never received any formal vocal training, as a child he mastered French horn and trumpet, to which he later attributed the breathing control pivotal to his singing power. He played bass guitar in his first professional group, The Vegas Kings, a rockabilly outfit formed in 1957 and based in New York State. But it didn’t take him long to answer his true calling.

By the end of 1958, he was lead singer of a new-look band, Ronnie & The Red Caps, later renamed Ronnie Dio & The Prophets after Ronnie had adopted a stage name appropriated from mobster Johnny Dio. Success did not come quickly. As the rock era dawned in the 60s, Dio toiled in obscurity as leader of the Electric Elves, subsequently shortened to Elf. But in the early 70s came the break that he had longed for, when Deep Purple’s Roger Glover and Ian Paice saw potential in Elf and elected to produce the band’s self-titled debut album.

And from there, a strong connection was formed between the two bands – a connection that led Dio to the man who would transform his career and change his life…

Continue reading in Louder Sound.

The charismatic Elizabeth digs into Perfect Strangers off the infamous ’93 Birmingham gig.

I have been absolutely enthralled by Ian Gillan’s vocal prowess, and Richie Blackmore’s captivating guitar solos. So here we are with the next of your most recommended Deep Purple songs, this time without a solo for me to interrupt with a pause…

Thanks to Mike Whiteley for the heads up.

Another prolific musician professes his love for Deep Purple, and this time it’s Steve Vai. In his interview to My Planet Rocks he said:

Well, when I was a kid, I was a huge Deep Purple fan. I was so bummed when Ritchie Blackmore left the band, when those guys left and they weren’t in the band anymore. And they got this new guy, this new bass player (Glenn Hughes, who replaced Roger Glover), and singer – David Coverdale, and I just thought, ‘You don’t like him immediately,’ because he’s not your hero. But then I bought that record (1973’s ‘Burn’), and my God, I was stunned. He was such a great singer. He was inching up on number one. When I saw, I think it was the Us Festival, where David was really singing, I just became a fan, and was a fan of the Coverdale Deep Purple for all those records.

And then, I went into other things, but when the Whitesnake record came out in the ’80s, the Whitesnake record that had all that great, incredible music, and his voice – that’s a dedication to that seed of rock and roll that he expresses. It was so refreshing, and plus, these pipes, you know? I really enjoyed that record, and when the call came in to join the band, I just thought, ‘How could this be?’ I went from one crazy, incredible frontman David Lee Roth to another. I just knew that was an amazing opportunity, to sing with someone that I considered one of the greatest rock singers. Just the quality and the power in the voice.

Here is the interview. Purple bits start at around 13 minute mark.

Thanks to Raised On Radio for liberating the interview and to Ultimate Guitar for the transcription.

Guitar Player presents these bits of wisdom from Steve Morse.

In the early ’80s, during his Dixie Dregs years, the Deep Purple guitarist shared some fantastic tips that many electric guitar and acoustic guitar players will no doubt still find useful.

We’ve had a rummage through the Guitar Player vault to bring you five of his finest…

1. Warming Up

“The important part about warming up is not to do it too hard right at the beginning – do it slow and easy, then work up. You want to get your muscles warmed up, and then let them relax and loosen up. Then go and do it some more.

“In three to five minutes you can get warmed up enough to break for about 30 seconds or a minute. Then you can practice for as long as you want, as long as you mix it up. Don’t do too much of one thing.”

Continue reading at GuitarPlayer.com.

Whitesnake have announced US and Canadian dates for their farewell tour. The trek will start on August 17, 2022, in New Hampshire and wrap up on October 21 in Las Vegas. Most of the dates DC & Co will be supporting Scorpions, with a few gigs headlining on their own: New Hampshire, Providence RI, and Roanoke VA. The tour is scheduled at a rather leisurely pace, with breaks between shows as long as 6 days. Which leaves open the possibility of adding an odd gig here and there.

Tickets go on sale to the general public on May 13 at 10am local time. Presales start on May 10 at 10am local time. Presales password is farewell, albeit even the official site is not sure if it’s lower case or upper and advises to try both.

Full details in our calendar.

Joe Satriani gave an extended interview to Vintage Rock, where he explained how Deep Purple influenced his latest album called The Elephants Of Mars:

You do have these cinematic qualities in your music where certain visuals and shapes must be popping into your head when you’re writing and playing.

Yeah, it is important. As I mentioned many times in the social media interviews about that song, the title track, I’m listening to something that I played and it got me thinking: How am I going to be motivated to finish this song? And I realized I needed a backstory. And so I concocted this story about the scientists terraforming Mars, and by accident, they create a whole race of gigantic sentient elephants. And they can communicate telepathically to the colonists that are working on the newly terraform Mars. They can play crazy rock sounding music with their trunks and they get together with the guitar playing head of the revolutionary group to take back control of the planet from evil corporations — you know, a typical comic book kind of story.

That got me really excited because I thought that’s funny, it’s crazy science fiction, but it’s also kind of funny. So when I told the story to everybody else, everybody got in the right mood. Kenny’s drums are just really a celebration of fun, the way he plays, right from the beginning. I think it gave Brian the artistic license to just be really rude, to lay down a really rude bass part. All the way to the end where I think Rai was the last person to add the keyboards. He added a kind of a Jon Lord, a Deep Purple kind of distorted organ part. We had been talking years ago about how we love the vintage Deep Purple and how we love Jon Lord. When you tell that story to everybody, everyone gets in the mood and they go, “Now I’ve got this artistic license to really be crazy, to be a irreverent, to try some different things.”

The question of his stint in Purple also came up, and the answer was an interesting one. For a long time the canonical story have been that he could not become a permanent member of the band and record with them due to contractual obligations. He now reveals that there were also other motives.

You’ve had opportunities to join bands. You could have joined Deep Purple. But based on the fact that your solo career is your primary focus and you switch out players from one album to the next, would it be fair to say you enjoy the freedom of playing with a variety of other musicians as opposed to being in a set band?

I took my cue from those players that were laying the groundwork for the kind of stuff I do, like Jeff back. I saw the freedom that he had to play with interesting players that would inspire him, to do different things. I thought that’s really great. I love watching him live and I love his albums and he keeps you guessing and he’s always progressing as a guitarist. He just keeps going forward. I love that attitude of just moving forward all the time.

He’s not really hampered like a legacy band where they’re going to have to play their hits. Like when Aerosmith goes out, they’re just going to have to play those songs that are their hits. They got to play “Janie’s Got a Gun,” they got to “Dream On.” They can’t do a concert without it. But Jeff Beck really doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do (laughs). He can say, “No, this is where I’m at right now, check this out. No one else can do it. I can do it.” (Laughs) I love that attitude. It’s a dangerous move. You miss all that input from a band and you miss the chance that you can go mainstream. It’s very difficult for Jeff Beck to go mainstream like Aerosmith or any other pop band where you’re talking billions of streams and TV appearances and all the awards, that kind of stuff. However, everybody knows and respects Jeff Beck as a player, as a musician, as a composer, and they wouldn’t dream of him changing his attitude. We like him being the iconoclast that he is.

I had that choice to make when Roger Glover asked me to join Deep Purple. I just thought, I’m Joe from Long Island. I don’t belong in this British royalty metal band. I knew I just didn’t belong. I was a big fan of Ritchie Blackmore and I thought I’ll never be able to rectify it. I’ll always feel guilty that I have to copy Ritchie and I didn’t want to do that. I’ve had friends who’ve had successful turns replacing famous people in bands. But I remember what they would always say at the end of it. I remember Steve Vai telling me once, “Joe, if you can avoid it, don’t ever replace anybody famous in a band because the fans — they never let you forget it. You’re always compared to the first guy, the original guy.” So I thought I’m going to take the chance. I’ve got a good relationship with my fans, and we’ll stick together and try to just make better and better albums.

There’s a lot more in the interview, we just touched on the Purple related bits. You can check out the rest at Vintage Rock.

Photo credit: George Laoutaris CC BY-ND 2.0.