Elizabeth the opera singer (a.k.a. the lady who forgot about singing more than all of will ever know) analyses Gillan’s take on Gethsemane.

I’m very familiar with this song and have seen it performed many times, but have never seen nor heard the original with none other than Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan! This is going to be a treat for my ears!

Thanks to Mike Whiteley for the info.

Darker than Blue reminds us that Made in Japan is turning 50 these days. Albeit the album was released later in the year, but the three historic performances that were recorded were held on August 15th, 16th. and 17th, 1972.

We’ll drink to that. Continue Reading »

Edel has posted a video of the band performing Demon’s Eye at an open air gig in Düsseldorf, Germany, on September 3, 2005. That was one of the couple of warm up gigs before the release of Rapture of the Deep a month later, with Wrong Man being premiered live at the same show. Continue Reading »

Online incarnation of the Classic Rock magazine has a writeup on that desperate time in Thin Lizzy history when they had to resort to recording covers anonymously to make the ends meet. An album called Funky Junction play a tribute to Deep Purple was the result.

The band were desperate to do something that might finally bring in some income, so they accepted £1,000 to record an album of Deep Purple covers for Stereo Gold Award, an imprint set up by budget label entrepreneur David L. Miller, whose cheaply recorded 101 Strings compilations still clutter charity shops 60 years on.

Miller had developed a business model that was as ruthless as it was efficient, hiring up-and-coming musicians to re-record popular songs and releasing them as albums an unwary shopper might think was original material. Typical was an album of Jimi Hendrix songs credited to “The Purple Fox.” As Miller himself once proclaimed, “We are not in the recording business, we are in the plastics business.”

Continue reading in Louder Sound.

Be sure check out THS special on the album that we did back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the ‘net.

Thanks to Gary Poronovich for the info.

Ultimate Guitar has an editorial titled 8 Reasons Why Steve Morse Was the Perfect Deep Purple Guitarist. Of course, all of us (okay, okay, most of us) have known these reasons for decades.

An era has ended this July, when Steve Morse announced his permanent departure from Deep Purple so that he could be by his wife Janine’s side through her battles with cancer.

Over the past 28 years, the Morse has done what probably no other player could – he has successfully filled in Ritchie Blackmore’s shoes while serving as an ever-giving well of creativity that saw Deep Purple through seven studio albums and countless live shows.

And yet, his contribution to the legendary hard rock has largely been understated for the better part of those 28 years, even if Morse himself was a well-respected member of the global guitar-playing community. As a means of going at least a little way in righting that wrong and honoring Morse’s legacy, below are only some of the things which made Steve Morse a perfect guitarist for Deep Purple.

He was Deep Purple’s longest-serving guitarist

For many people out there, Ritchie Blackmore will always be the definitive Purple axman – which is largely understandable given his instrumental role in the band’s rise to greatness – but it was Steve Morse who had stuck with the band for the longest time.

Morse joined the band one year after Blackmore’s dramatic departure in the middle of 1993’s “The Battle Rages On…” tour, and would spend the next 28 years with the legendary hard rock band. Although Morse wasn’t Purple’s first pick (that would be Joe Satriani, who filled in for Blackmore for the remainder of the aforementioned tour but had to turn down the offer to join the band for good due to personal obligations), he’d certainly prove to be the right one.

With Morse, the band found one hell of a guitarist perfectly equipped for the demanding role, but without any of the tensions that marked practically every Blackmore era. Morse would go on to record seven studio albums with the band, slowly weaving his guitar magic into Purple’s DNA – but more importantly, the enhanced sense of camaraderie and easygoing Morse helped re-establish (and maintain) could be felt in recorded material and live shows alike.

Take a look at any live footage from the Morse era, and you can clearly see a band having fun playing together – and what would sadly turn out to be Steve’s last gig with Purple is no exception. You can check it out below.

Continue reading in Ultimate Guitar.

Simon McBride spoke to the Scars and Guitars podcast at the beginning of June (i.e. after the start of the tour, but before the announcement of Steve’s retirement).

At the end of the day, for me, with this gig, there’s been lots of people saying, or asking me will I play like Ritchie or will I play like Steve or will I do this like Tommy or Satriani or whatever. So that thing initially kind of confused me a little bit; I didn’t know what to do. It was only when I was talking to [DEEP PURPLE keyboardist] Don Airey about it, and he just said, ‘Forget about it all. Just be you. Play your own thing.’ That’s it. Which I did. And I kind of started to relax a little bit and just be myself.

When you start to think about who else has been in the band, you get a little bit confused what to play or when to play or what to do or ‘should I play this like Ritchie?’ or ‘should I play it like Steve?’

Everybody has their own opinion on the guitar players in DEEP PURPLE and which ones worked better or whatnot. I [am] respectful to everybody who’s played there, because they’re all good players — every single one of ’em — so whether it’s Ritchie or Tommy or Steve, I just kind of [am] respectful to what they’ve done in the past, and I just do my own thing most of the time.

There’s certain things you have to play. Like ‘Highway Star’, for example, I’m not gonna play anything different to what’s there in the original, because why the hell would I? [Laughs] That’s my attitude. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

To be honest, everybody’s been so nice and so cool and so kind, especially on the social media stuff where it’s all been very positive. You get the odd negative one, but I don’t read a lot of it anyway. But it’s really cool that people accept me, because it is a legacy band and they’ve been around a long time. I really appreciate that people are digging what I do, and I feel it every night onstage. Some of the shows we’ve done, some of the audience reaction has been incredible.

We played a show in Macedonia. We came off. We did an encore and stuff. And then 20 minutes later, the audience are still shouting,” he recalled. “I’d never heard this my entire life — 15, 20 minutes of 10 thousand people shouting for more, just constantly, and they wouldn’t leave. Even Don Airey and Roger Glover were standing there in shock, going, ‘We haven’t heard this in a long, long time.’ I’m not saying that’s all for me; I’m just saying that’s just for the band.

I’m very [happy] that people like what I’m doing because it is always hard stepping into a band where you’ve had [laughs] Ritchie Blackmore, Steve Morse, Joe Satriani and Tommy Bolin. They’re not small names by any means, so it’s always very… I think if you just play and have fun, that comes across and people respect that and people will really see.

I’m 43, so I kind of grew up in that old-school playing method anyway. ‘Cause I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, so I guess I’m still part of that older generation, if you wanna call it. So the way that I play would still fit very well, whereas maybe some of the new, modern players wouldn’t fit. I don’t know.

Yeah, the response has been brilliant. I can’t complain at all. And I thank every single person that has said a nice thing about me.

Listen to the interview:

Hurry up, we’re being told that this podcast issue might disappear at the end of August for corporate reasons.

Thanks to Blabbermouth for the info and quotes.

Whitesnake is pulling out of their 2022 joint tour of United States and Canada with Scorpions. The following message from David Coverdale has appeared on the band’s website today, August 5:

It is with profound disappointment and a heavy heart that I must announce that Whitesnake will no longer be able to join The Scorpions on their US and Canadian tour due to my continued treatment for a persistent upper respiratory infection that affects my ability to perform. This includes the cancellation of our own headlining shows as well.

While Whitesnake will no longer be on the tour, the Scorpions will be continuing on. We Wish Our Good Friends, The Scorpions Every Success!!!

We Wish You Well

The tour was supposed to start on August 18 with a couple of standalone Whitesnake gigs before joining the Scorpions’ bandwagon in Toronto on August 21. According to Blabbermouth, Scorpions will proceed with the tour, with Swedish band Thundermother as sole support.

This raises all sorts of unanswered questions about the fate of Whitesnake as David had previously stated on numerous occasions that this is supposed to be their farewell tour.

Our man in Brazil Marcelo ‘no relation’ Soares writes:

Brazilian talk show host Jô Soares died tonight, at 84. He did some fun interviews with Deep Purple in the 2003 and 2006 tours. He asked none of the questions we geeks would, but at the same time he put the boys at ease talking about soccer and their families. In the 2003 interview, he got Ian Gillan to talk about the three months of quality time he had with his daughter every year, Don Airey to explain the origins of the word “soccer” and Ian Paice to laugh a lot. He also had them playing two songs and none of them was Smoke on the Water.

Thanks to Marcelo Soares for the info, and to alyen06 for the video.

Guitar Player reprints online excerpts from an interview conducted with Tommy Bolin on October 7, 1976. It originally appeared in the March 1977 issue of the magazine.

What did you learn from playing behind Albert King?

I learned a lot about lead; learned that you don’t have to blow your cookies in the first bar.

At that time, I was playing everything I knew when I took a lead. And he said, “Man, just say it all with one note.”

He taught me that it was much harder to be simple than to be complicated during solos. If you blow your cookies in the first bar, you have nowhere to go.

Blues is really good that way. It teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you’re playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.

The neatest compliment I ever got was when I was playing with Albert King at an indoor concert in Boulder, Colorado. He used to let me take solos, and I was very into playing that day.

After the concert he came up to me and said, ” You got me today, but I’ll get you tomorrow.”

I really respect him. He’s a beautiful player.

Why all the interest in so many styles, and how did you handle them all?

They were just gigs that came up. I’d rather work than not. I was very lucky to be able to play in all those extremes.

It was difficult following a guy like Ritchie Blackmore. When someone is the focal point of a group like he was, it’s very hard to replace them. After a while, it just got to be pointless.

The way I got involved in jazz-rock was through a flute player named Jeremy Steig. He played on the second Zephyr album.

He showed me various jazz relationships and put them into a rock perspective, and then through him I met a lot of New York people like Cobham and [keyboardist] Jan Hammer.

Cobham called me for the Spectrum session, and I said, “I don’t know how to read, man.” He said it was okay.

So I went to the studio, and he handed me a chart. I told him again I didn’t again I didn’t know how to read, so we had a day of rehearsal, then cut the album in two days.

In rehearsal I’d just find out the changes – for example, Am to D9 to G6 to E13 – and play around those chords and changes.

I learned quite a bit through those people. You can’t help but learn. All the different styles I’ve played have really helped me as a guitarist and helped me develop my own way of playing.

I have my own style, but it’s different for each kind of music. There are certain little characteristic things every player has.

Doug the classical composer expands his consciousness with side 2 of Machine Head (side 1 was here). Continue Reading »