Glenn Hughes’ new band, California Breed, has announced 5 dates in the UK in late November / early December. It appears that they will be opening for Slash, and thus playing bigger venues. Tickets are already on sale. Full details in our calendar.

Ian Gillan, Steve Morse, Joe Lynn Turner, and Graham Bonnet, along with extravaganza of classic rock luminaries, contributed to the Light My Fire – A Classic Rock Salute To The Doors CD which is due out on July June 24 via Cleopatra imprint Purple Pyramid Records.

Steve Morse says:

[The Doors were] a soundtrack, literally, for some of the most memorable times, good and bad, that I experienced as a young teen. Like many of my favorites, they were adventurous, improvising, unafraid of what the media might say, and all with a sort of lyrical freedom that still stands up today.

Gillan sang Light My Fire, accompanied by none other but Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe from Yes. His “trackmates” add to the praise. Wakeman:

[Light My Fire] has always been one of those iconic tracks that keyboard players listen to because of the fact that there are so few tracks with keyboard/organ solos on them compared to our six-stringed buddies. It’s also a solo area that is totally open to interpretation so whatever you do is not comparable to the original, so it was an absolute joy to do.

Howe:

I was delighted to play on this album as The Doors were a band I heard a lot as everywhere I went in the late ‘60s their music was playing, at friend’s, in restaurants, gigs and bars throughout London. I’m sure I saw them play at Middle Earth, a then hip club. Then, when the reissue more recently came out, I got totally back into their music, especially Light My Fire.

Track listing:

1. L.A. Woman — Jimi Jamison (Survivor), Ted Turner (Wishbone Ash) and Patrick Moraz (Moody Blues)
2. Love Me Two Times — Lou Gramm (Foreigner), Thijs van Leer (Focus) and Larry Coryell
3. Roadhouse Blues — Leslie West (Mountain), Brian Auger and Rod Piazza
4. Love Her Madly — Mark Stein (Vanilla Fudge) and Mick Box (Uriah Heep)
5. Riders On The Storm — Joe Lynn Turner, Tony Kaye (Yes), and Steve Cropper (Booker T. & The M.G.’s)
6. The Crystal Ship — Edgar Winter and Chris Spedding
7. Intro (People Are Strange) — Keith Emerson, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Joel
   Druckman (John Fahey)
8. People Are Strange” — David Johansen (NY Dolls) and Billy Sherwood (Yes)
9. Touch Me — Robert Gordon, Jordan Rudess (Dream Theater), Steve Morse and Nik Turner (Hawkwind)
10. The Soft Parade — Graham Bonnet, Christopher North (Ambrosia) and Steve Hillage (Gong)
11. Hello, I Love You — Ken Hensley (Uriah Heep) and Roye Albrighton (Nektar)
12. Spanish Caravan — Eric Martin (Mr. Big) and Elliot Easton (The Cars)
13. Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar) — Todd Rundgren and Geoff Downes (Yes / Asia) and Zoot Horn Rollo (Captain Beefheart)
14. Break On Through (To The Other Side) — Mark Farner (Grand Funk Railroad) and Chick Churchill (Ten Years After)
15. Light My Fire — Ian Gillan, Rick Wakeman (Yes) and Steve Howe (Yes)
16. The End — Pat Travers and Jimmy Greenspoon (Three Dog Night)

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

[Updated Jun 24] Ian Paice will play a couple of three shows in Italy this summer.

On June 23 he will perform with the Tolo Marton Band at the Marghera Estate Village in Mestre (near Venice). The night before he will appear at a charity meet’n’greet event at the Hard Rock Cafe Venice to raise money for cancer research.

Who: Ian Paice
What: charity meet’n’greet appearance
When: June 22, 2014, at 10pm
Where: Hard Rock Cafe, Bacino Orseolo, San Marco 1192, Venice

Who: Ian Paice
What: performance with the Tolo Martin Band; opening act: Break All Out Band (a tribute to Gary Moore)
When: June 23, 2014, at 9pm; doors open at 7pm, opening act starts at 8:30pm
Where: Marghera Estate Village, Parco San Giuliano, Mestre-Venezia
Tickets: €5 standing and €10 seated

On July 4 he will play with the R.A.I.N. tribute band at the Brudstock Festival which will be held near Vigonovo di Fontanafredda.

Who: Ian Paice
What: performing with the R.A.I.N. tribute band
When: July 4, 2014
Where: near Vigonovo di Fontanafredda
Tickets: free admission

On July 22 he will perform with The Perfect Strangers tribute band in Civitanova Marche, headlining the second Civitanova In Rock festival. Other tribute bands are also on the bill, albeit none of them are expected to have guests of this calibre.

Who: Ian Paice
What: headlining Civitanova In Rock with The Perfect Strangers tribute band
When: July 22
Where: Piazza XX Settmbre, Civitanova Marche
Tickets: free admission

Thanks to Ivano Bosello and Francesco Caporaletti for the info.

It’s been a slow news week, but finally here’s a good one.

Swiss newspaper Basellandschaftliche Zeitung published an interview with Ian Gillan, in which he said (in reverse translation):

Good morning, Mr. Gillan, they told us you were in Portugal. May we ask what are you doing?

Ian Gillan: The whole band is there. We have a studio in the Algarve and working on new songs. In the evening we take a sip of good red wine and enjoy the tranquility.

The interview is not dated, but the Basel gig on July 11 was mentioned, so it must be at least this year vintage. It looks like the band is making good on the promise to get back into the studio soon for a follow up to Now what?!

Thanks to Andrey Gusenkov for the info.

Classic Rock Revisited has a new interview with Glenn Hughes, talking about California Breed:

Jeb: What pushed you [to get an unknown guitar player]?

Glenn: I won’t say too much, but after Black Country broke up, it was kind of private, but some of my friends said that they could do some shows with Jason and me. It was really nice of them to say that, but I knew it would only lead to me wanting to do more with these guys, who were very famous guitar players. I knew if they sat in with Black Country that I would want to do more with them and they would not be able to do it, and it would be just like the scenario with Joe.

A few more months down the line we met Andrew. I wanted to make a specific type of rock album. It was difficult for me think who would play guitar, if it was not going to be one of my famous friends, or Jason’s famous friends. It was not going to be Jimmy Page. It was not going to be Steve Vai. I would have loved to play with these guys…like Slash. I love to play with Slash, but they would all be available to play sporadically, but not all the time, and I wanted a band. We got the opportunity to have this young man cast into our lives. I really believe in fate. I am old enough and wise enough to know to get out of my own way and to let something greater than me—I am not talking about God- but rather the greater universal thing of getting out of my own way and letting things flow. I am ambitious. I am a workaholic, but I am not the type of person who can do 100 things at once. I like to do one thing and I like to do it 100%.

Read more in the Classic Rock Revisited.

Thanks to BraveWords for the info.

California Breed played their first live show ever yesterday at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles. Here are three video clips of the performance.

Days They Come:

Burn:

Thanks to Blabbermouth for the heads up and to Bolinsstrat and Joseph Schaeffer for the video.

[Updated] Andy Fox from the Welsh radio station GTFM continues to provide an excellent coverage to all things Purple. This week he will be interviewing Ian Gillan in celebration of the Made in Japan reissue. His Rockshow is on the air every Thursday at 21:00 and can be listened worldwide online. For further listening options visit www.gtfm.co.uk or www.bcfm.org.uk (with the latter offering a much better sound quality option).

The show will be available to ‘listen again’ after the fact from the archive.

Thanks to Yvonne Osthausen for the info.

The highly controversial Northern Cyprus gig held this past weekend was a free concert, organized by the Near East University on occasion of their 25th anniversary. Ian Gillan did interviews, parts of which you can see below (in piss poor editing):

Some more bits appear on the university web site, albeit still mostly exchange of pleasantries.

And for the sake of all this not to be your complete waste of time, here’s the (almost) complete show, filmed if not professionally, but with a decent camera on a tripod:

Thanks to Yvonne Osthausen for the info and to Nikita Turovsky for posting video of the gig.

Darker Than Blue has very amusing recollections from Ken Flegg, a former Marshall engineer, who accompanied the band on the trip to Japan in August 1972:

The third gig at the Budokan in Tokyo on the 17th August went well with no significant problems, other than the acoustics of the hall could have been better. Possible because of this the subject of the monitors came up again and Ian Gillan asked over the mic before Strange Kind of Woman: “Yeah everything up here please. A bit more monitor if you’ve got it.” Then Ritchie asks “Can I have everything louder than everything else?” which Ian Gillan repeats “Yeah, can he have everything louder than everything else.” This remained on the final master.

Read the whole thing in Darker Than Blue.

Bernie Marsden’s new solo album called Shine (about which we wrote in November) is ready and will be released on August 18 via Provogue/Mascot Records.

Although Marsden was wary of flooding the credits with too many special guests, Shine does feature some extremely well-known names, from Joe Bonamassa to Whitesnake singer David Coverdale and the Deep Purple duo of Ian Paice (drums) and Don Airey (keyboards).

Track list:

1. Linin’ Track
2. Wedding Day
3. Walk Away
4. Kinda Wish She Would
5. Ladyfriend
6. Trouble
7. Who Do We Think We Are?
8. Bad Blood
9. Shine
10. Dragonfly
11. You Better Run
12. Hoxie Rollin’ Time
13. NW8

If you preorder the album directly from the label, they promise to include a free poster.

Bernie talked about the album in his recent interview with Martin Popoff:

There’s quite a bit of Ready An’ Willing in there. And you know, we’ve got David singing on it, which is fantastic. You know, and getting him involved was really, really good for me. That felt really… I don’t know, what’s the word? It felt right. To do that track. To say, ‘Mate, do you want to sing on this?’ ‘Yeah, of course.’ So it was great. We didn’t have to ring up managers and stuff in order to do this. It was just two guys talking together. He did it and it was great. And then Joe Bonamassa got involved… well, Joe was involved really from the beginning, and it was through him that I got to meet these people from his record label. I’ve been playing with Joe off and on for about two years, invited out to his gigs and stuff and then finally the guys came out and said, ‘Hey, we’d like you to make an album for us.’ And it was great. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll make an album for you but I want Joe to play on a track’ (laughs). Joe’s great; he’s a really good guy but you know about him anyway.

Read the rest of the interview on BraveWords.

Another interesting quote from Bernie regarding the bad old times (this comes from a 2012 interview with the Geeks Of Doom, as quoted by Blabbermouth). The tough question was how he feels about later incarnations of Whitesnake rerecording his songs:

I thought Here I Go Again was fabulous because for me it was such a long time after I had written the song that I could listen to Whitesnake in that period as if I was listening to Journey or Forgeigner: it was just another band who were really good. But they were an American band by then [who] just happened to have the same name and the same singer and guy I worked with. Fool For Your Lovin, when they re-recorded that I felt it lacked some of the heart and soul of what the song was all about and I know that David has more or less said the same thing in interviews over the years. I think Steve Vai is a wonderful guitar player and he did a very good Steve Vai job on that track, but I didn’t think it had the heart of what the song was all about. So you win some, you lose some. But having said that it sold about three-and-a half, four, five million [copies], so I can’t complain too much! [laughs] It continues to do well to this day.