David Stone talks to the Metal Express Radio about his current projects, his career, and of course, his stint with Rainbow:
Not long after the [Symphonic Slam] album was released you had joined Rainbow. How did you get the call to join Rainbow?
I was still signed to A&M Records and was still involved with Symphonic Slam. That album had only been out a few months and it was only just rolling. I was getting a lot of session work in Toronto because of Symphonic Slam. I got offers to work with Gino Vannelli and lots of other people and I was doing a lot of demo work too. I was at home and I got a call from the studio where I was doing a lot of work at the time from Bob Segarini, who had a hit called Goodbye LA and he called me to tell me that the manager for Ritchie Blackmore was trying to get a hold of me. He told me that there was a first-class ticket waiting for me at the studio to fly out to LA. I flew out the next day and got picked up in the evening by Colin Hart, Rainbow’s manager. He took me up to Hollywood Hills and I get out to one of those million-dollar places and there in the kitchen is Ritchie Blackmore, Cozy Powell and Ronnie James Dio and here I am, this 24-year-old kid from Toronto, shitting large bricks. I was the youngest in the band by about 10 years.
Blackmore was known to improvise a lot on stage. How was it playing a live show with him?
It was ridiculous, he was absolutely ridiculous. Back then we played insanely loud on stage. We had so much equipment that ran eight feet high right across the stage. All of the road crew could go back and forth behind our equipment without being seen. Ritchie would send his roadie right across the back of the stage to my roadie who’d then come to me when the lights were off me, to say that Ritchie wanted me to take a 10-minute solo at the end of the song. That’s all the notice I’d get. I didn’t even know what theme I should adopt. Was I doing an intro to a ballad, should I end up in a certain key? Nothing, no clues whatsoever. I did get used to it quite quickly though as I expected it after the first couple of shows.
A German band called Baroque in Blue lists Jon Lord Tribute among their projects. Their repertoire consists of Purple staples with some Whitesnake and rarities from Jon’s solo output thrown in.
The Jon Lord Tribute Project are:
Hans Peter Herkenhöhner – Hammond B3, keyboards
Karen Fälker-Herkenhöhner – flute
Holger Strässer – guitar
Wendel Biskup – bass
Uli Poth – drums
Some time earlier this month Ian Gillan was a guest on his local Lyme Bay Radio discussing all things from cricket to cosmology (don’t trust his expertise on the latter too much though). The hour long chat can be replayed via the radio station’s facebook account.
Ian and Ian give a track by track overview of the new album. It’s a 17-minute crash course into the lyrical universe of Whoosh for those who do not follow Caramba’s wordography. Continue Reading »
Ian Gillan answers to Loudwire‘s Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction. This was published 3 years ago, but somehow slipped under our radar all that time. Big Ian not as much as providing rebuttals, as goes on a tangent telling anecdotes from his career. Continue Reading »
Speaking of Planet Rock, they also have a collection of semi-random factoids titled 42 facts about Deep Purple’s album covers — that’s two for each studio album. As we all know, 42 is also the answer to the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything. To top it off, truly yours website gets a namecheck. Apparently this collection is a part of their Deep Purple month celebrations that should last throughout September.
From the incredible sleeves of ‘Deep Purple In Rock’ and ‘Whoosh!’ through to the downright bizarre artwork of ‘Bananas’ and ‘Purpendicular’, take a look at all the Deep Purple album cover facts below.
Blabbermouth has a few quotes from Roger’s recent interview with Planet Rock radio regarding “turbulent time” caused by Blackmore’s departure from the band.
It was surprise to me when Ritchie handed in his notice and said he didn’t wanna play any more gigs after Helsinki. And we were on tour at the time. It was so difficult to take in. Somehow we were determined to carry on, if he was gonna do that. Joe Satriani was a temporary replacement, which did show us the way that we could exist without Ritchie. But I felt very strongly that you can’t replace Ritchie. He is who he is, and there’s no way you can replace him.
If you get someone to play like him or similar or something like that, it would have been a horrible comparison. We needed something different. And to me, the character of PURPLE always was Ritchie and Jon as instrumentalists, and they’re both virtuosos. So you’ve gotta have a virtuoso. There’s thousands of guitarists who can play, but there’s very few who stand out as being very individual and different to everyone else. And I felt Steve presented that. He asked me when we first met, he said, ‘What do you want from me?’ I said, ‘I want you to be yourself. You can’t be in the band unless you’re yourself, a hundred percent.’ And he said, ‘So I can play anything?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Anything will do. We’ll let you know if we want it or not.’
‘Purpendicular’ was one of the happiest albums I’ve ever made, because suddenly we found ourselves writing songs we could never have written before.
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing