Following up to the Captain Beyond post the other day, it turns out that Cleopatra Records imprint Purple Pyramid has reissued their first two albums (the ones with Rod Evans) — self titled from 1972 and Sufficiently Breathless from 1973 — last year on vinyl. They are accompanied by Live In Texas – October 6, 1973 on CD and vinyl, originally issued in 2002 via fan club as Far Beyond a Distant Sun – Live Arlington, Texas, and a 2CD Live Anthology containing material from Montreux, September 18, 1971, Miami, August 19, 1972, New York, July 17, 1972, and Los Angeles, May 26, 1977 (sans Evans). Caveat: from what we can ascertain, sound quality of the live releases is less then stellar.

These releases can be ordered via Cleopatra’s online store. They also pop up in different Amazon stores around the world from time to time.

This went under our radar at the time, so we are reporting it now.

Thanks to Axel for the info.

Fancy yourself a Deep Purple show on a New Year’s Eve? You’d have to buy yourself a time machine first, because (to our knowledge) the only time the band did such a thing was on December 31, 1968, at the Electric Circus in New York City, a legendary nightclub that at one point had The Velvet Underground as their house band. It’s All In The Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago, a blog dedicated to rock’n’roll landmarks of the city, has reproduction of an ad that appeared in Village Voice issue dated January 2, 1969 (which probably hit the streets a week before that):

Let’s spend the night together.
New Year’s Eve at The Electric Circus.

23 St. Marks Place (Bet. 2nd and 3rd) East Village, from 9 P.M. till 6 A.M. DEEP PURPLE, Sirocco, The Mighty Tornados and You ($7.50). For information 777-7080. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Thanks to Yvonne Osthausen for the info.

Get Ready To Rock radio has an early review of Don Airey’s solo album Keyed Up. Don himself will appear on the air on Sunday, February 2, at 18:00 BST to talk to the host David Randall, while later on, at 20:00 Stuart Hamilton will profile him in his Purple People series.

Get Ready to Rock broadcasts online and worldwide in a variety of formats and without any silly geographical restrictions.

Thanks to Chris Hewlett for the info.

Mickey Lee Soule, who not only was the keyboard player in Elf and Rainbow, and not only worked as a keyboard and guitar tech for Purple for years, but also was on a very short list to stand in for Jon Lord when the latter injured his knee back in 2001, has a new project going — self-deprecatingly called Steaming Pile of Mick.

Steaming Pile of Mick is basically Dave Salce playing drums, plus Mick himself playing everything else and singing. Last year they’ve quietly put out a 5-track EP called Pet Wounds. You can check it out on YouTube and/or purchase it via cdbaby.

Thanks to deep-purple.ru for the info.

Classic Rock has a feature story on Captain Beyond, based on two interviews with the band’s guitar player Larry ‘Rhino’ Reinhardt and drummer Bobby Caldwell, who kept remembering things slightly differently from each other:

Looking for bright new horizons, Evans moved to Los Angeles. He soon found himself jamming with Captain Beyond. The results, according to Reinhardt, were both magical and miserable.

“Rod had a great voice and a great singing style,” he remembers. “Unfortunately he also had mental problems. He quit the band four times before we ever even hit the road.” Although Caldwell confirms Evans’ fight-or-flight behaviour, he doesn’t agree with Rhino’s assessment of his old singer’s mental status.

“Rhino’s right, he did quit a few times,” Caldwell says, “but I don’t think his behaviour had anything to do with mental problems. Rod was very insecure about his abilities, so any little thing would make him feel like maybe he wasn’t up to the job. That’s not very uncommon for people in the arts. As to what his insecurities were attributed to, I couldn’t tell you. All I can say is he was a great singer.”

From Captain Beyond’s performance in Montreux on September 18, 1971:

The feature is now available for your reading pleasure online. It had originally appeared in print in Classic Rock issue No.162 (cover date September 2011). Since that date, Larry Reinhardt and the bass player Lee Dorman have both passed away. Rod Evans still remains in self-imposed incommunicado.

Another Rainbow video from 1979 Passaic show was uploaded.

Man on the Silver Mountain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5tY7ORPHMk

Thanks to Anastasis Kalymnos for the upload.

[Update Jan 16] More footage from the show is available at vk.com.

Rainbow performing Eyes of the World at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ, on December 1, 1979. The sound is rough around the edges as the mix is still being “finalized”, but the performance is smokin’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmYNu4J2Pk8

Thanks to anastasisK1982gr for uploading the video and to Kostya for the heads up.

Ian Gillan gave an interview to Classic Rock on the occasion of, ahem, 27th anniversary of The House of Blue Light release. He spoke about doing crosswords, cooking breakfast, fixing his roof (and he did’t mean a hair transplant), and the importance of always ending up at the pub. And what’s a good interview without some amusing anecdotage?

I remember when we did Perfect Strangers I was still signed individually to Virgin, and I went to London to play Richard Branson my new solo album. I went in and he and his team were all there in a playback room. I gave him this cassette with all the tracklisting on it and he put it in the deck. There was all this feedback, and then you heard ‘Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat…’! My daughter had recorded over the thing. Un-bloody-believable!

Read more in Classic Rock.

Jeb Wright interviewed Roger Glover for the Goldmine magazine. They started with Now what?!, but quickly switched to topics not covered in recent interviews. Roger touched upon a couple of things that to say always cause heated debates on this site would be an understatement of the millenium:

GM: How do Steve Morse and Don Airey compare to Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord?

RG: In a word, they don’t. If we had replaced Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord with look-alikes, or sound-alikes, or anything-alikes, then it would have been a shame. It would have been hanging on to past lulls too much.

You have to change. When someone else comes into the band, you can’t expect them to be anything but themselves. Our band really works together when we are all 100 percent ourselves, as then there is nothing pretentious going on.

Steve and Don bring different colors to the palette. I love the early stuff that we did; don’t get me wrong. I am very proud of it, but we are who we are now, and that is really all we can be.

GM: “Now What?!” has a lot of songs that would sound great in concert, but how can you put these songs in a live set when the set is already filled with such classic songs?

RG: That is going to be a battle, isn’t it? We are looking at playing at least four or five of the new songs in concert. We suffer a little bit from the fact that we don’t change the setlist enough for most hard-core fans.

The truth of the matter is that people want to see and hear songs that they know. It is difficult to not recognize that people want to hear “Lazy,” “Highway Star” or “Black Night.” Although, most people around the world, most audiences we go to, in Eastern Europe especially, are teenagers and young people. We get to relive it all through them, which is a great experience.

To be honest, after so many decades of playing “Highway Star” every night, we dropped it this last tour. You can’t please everyone, so we will just have to continue to please ourselves.

Read more in Goldmine. As it is often with Roger’s interviews, there’s quite a bit more stuff in there that is quite interesting.

Thanks to Andrey Gusenkov for the info.

David Coverdale has contributed guest vocals to his former guitarist Andrian Vanderberg’s new band MoonKings. He recorded Sailing Ships which will appear on their debut self titled album due on February 24 via Mascot Records.

Thansk to Classic Rock for the info.