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.

Vincent Price took 3rd place in Classic Rock’s Song Of the Year 2013 poll.

The top 10 is:

1. Dream Theater – The Enemy Inside
2. Stone Sour – The Uncanny Valley
3. Deep Purple – Vincent Price
4. Black Star Riders – Bound For Glory
5. The Temperance Movement – Only Friend
6. Fish – The High Wood
7. Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa – Strange Fruit
8. Michael Monroe – The Ballad Of The Lower East Side
9. Motörhead – Lost Woman Blues
10. The Answer – Spectacular

See the full list on Classic Rock site.

Polls like this can be more accurately characrerised as a test of online fandom coherence rather than popularity. Not that there’s anything wrong with other entries on the list. Pretty much any track there is worth checking out, you never know if you might (re)discover another band that you like.

Happy New Year everyone!

The Schubert in Rock project, led by Austrian musician Klaus Schubert, performed in Innsbruck on December 6. It and featured quite a few members of the Purple family with Don Airey on keyboards, Neil Murray on bass, Klaus Schubert himself on guitars, and Bernhard Welz on drums; with vocal duties shared between Tony Martin, Joe Lynn Turner and Doogie White.

Austrian public broadcaster ORF has a report about the project. You can view it online at orf.at (the report starts around 1 hour mark into the show and lasts for 3 minutes).

Thanks to Andrey Gusenkov for the info.

Glenn Hughes has just finished working on a new album in Nashville, and Julian Lennon (son of John) contributed guest vocals to it:

Jules is the ONE who helped me put our new band together. We all love you Jules. Yes. Jules and I are singing together on the new Nashville album. He is in Monaco. We sent him the files last night ~ which he recorded in record time. We received them back 4 hours ago! Trust me. Jules is the real dang deal…

Julian wrote:

The One & Only Glenn Hughes et Moi, singing together for the first time ever last night. Even if we are 4746 Miles apart… Technology Today… Who would have thought…

Thanks to GlennHughes.com for the info.

Cameron Crowe’s official site The Uncool has a reprint of his article in Rolling Stone #184 from 1975, based on an interview he did with Ritchie Blackmore just a couple of days after the first Rainbow single was penned in the studio.

Jacksonville, Florida – Ritchie Blackmore’s face fell into a tortured grimace. “Fucking hell,” he growled through a mouthful of steak. “This tastes like burnt rubber!” Fuming, he sank a fork into the meat and flung it across the dining room of the high-rent restaurant. The maitre d’ hustled up to the Deep Purple guitarist.

“Is something wrong with your steak, sir?”

Blackmore looked down at his now meatless plate. “What steak?”

“The steak you’ve just thrown across the room.”

“Oh yes, of course.” Blackmore smiled innocently. “The steak was fine. It’s the baked potato that’s a bit… well, overcooked.”

“Very well, sir. I’ll find you a new one.”

“No, no. Don’t worry about it.” Blackmore picked up the potato and chucked it into the kitchen door. “Could I have my check please?”

Continue reading on The Uncool.

On a side note, this is how none other but Rolling Stone itself described Deep Purple in 1975:

Throughout Europe, the Far East, Scandinavia and Australia, Purple’s relentless power riffing has held a massive following ever since their first 1968 hit, “Hush.” In America, where the band soared to supergroup status two years ago with the success of “Smoke on the Water,” their newest album – Stormbringer – is already a gold addition to their nine-LP catalog on Warner Bros. According to a company spokesman, no one, not even Elton John, the Allman Brothers Band or Led Zeppelin, sells more records worldwide. […] After a turbulent seven-year existence, Deep Purple have made their home at the top of the heavy-metal heap.

‘One hit wonder’, my ass…

Thanks to Andrey Gusenkov for the info.