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Gettin’ Tighter: first impressions
I had a chance to preview Gettin’ Tighter: The Story of Mk.IV Deep Purple (a.k.a. Phoenix Rising documentary). Here are my first impressions.
First of all, it is a misnomer to call it a Mark 4 documentary. It starts with the demise of Mark 2 and we don’t get into Mark 4 territory until half way through the film. Which will be good for casual fans as it provides enough background to Jon Lord’s opinion expressed in the documentary that the 1976 collapse of Deep Purple was a logical conclusion to a series of events that started with the departure of Gillan and Glover in 1973.
The documentary is created around two extensive interviews with Jon Lord and Glenn Hughes, who both narrate the story. For the die hard fans there are few revelations, although I have found interesting tidbits here and there that I didn’t know before and they were enough to keep my attention. For example, one such tidbit was Jon Lord admitting that he refused to play in Indonesia as recently as late 1990s due to the memories of the infamous 1975 visit still being too painful.
Historic footage was restored and remastered to the best of abilities allowed by current technology. For this the the video team deserves utmost kudos. I imagine that the material they had to work with was rarely of pristine quality.
Phoenix Rising is due to be released on May 20.
Order it from a store near you
despite what the vendor might say, there is no DVD-Audio package, see formats details:
DVD+CD
CD+DVD
Blue-ray
2LP+DVD
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Any North American release date ??
May 20th, 2011 at 02:21I’ve read that the import editions may not work in DVD/Blu-ray players sold here.
thank you for the first impressions! i am curious how much of the 1975 sunbury footage is shown?
May 20th, 2011 at 02:23Does it include that crappy, very amateurish footage from New Zealand TV?
May 20th, 2011 at 10:18Great, but what about the unseen footage? Jakarta? USA?
May 20th, 2011 at 14:19Phoenix Rising ? more like Bayonne New Jersey ! if any documentaries are gonna be made about this band, it should be about BLACKMORE,GILLAN,GLOVER,LORD,PAICE.
May 20th, 2011 at 19:40After looking the DVD, only for Hardcorefans!
May 20th, 2011 at 20:25I have just an impression about this “Gettin’ Tighter: The Story of Mk.IV Deep Purple” because I just have the dvd “history and highlights”….the material is the same…
May 20th, 2011 at 20:34What Jon Lord did not know about that ‘infamous 1975 show’, is that the DPIV twin concerts in 1975 really open up all the horizons in the Indonesian world of rock music as well as the development of astonishing live concerts, including the unstoppable coming of modern western musicians till today in our country before the incredibly passionate audience who even sing along the riff of Smoke on the Water(DP 2001, 2004), Sweet Child of Mine (Slash 2010), The Number of the Beast (Iron Maiden 2011), etc..
Even Lord’s trick to play our traditional songs with his keyboard had truly amazed many of our senior keyboardists and influence our musician that there is more in a band than the vocals..
So thank you Deep Purple especially DP MkIV for tremendously inspiring and encouraging the music development esp. rock, in Indonesia..
May 21st, 2011 at 10:20Sorry or the most footages are 8mm and not restored on this documentary,THE EDITED Hamburg 70′ is in pristine quality and MIJ are really good, or the Jakarta 8mm , Cal Jam + more are not restored…
THE iNTERVIEWS WITH jON & gLENN ARE SIMPLY GREAT
RISES OVER JAPAN IN HD IS SUPERBBB SOUNDS GREAT AND THE PICTURE QUALITY IS AWESOME !!!
ALL IN ONE A GREAT PACKAGE !
BY THE WAY THE CD WITH “AND NEVER BEFORE RELEASED TRACKS” TRACKS…ITS A LITTLE BIT STRANGE FOR ME…
May 21st, 2011 at 12:00…NEVER BEFORE …???? WHAT OF THIS CD IS NEVER BEFORE UUUUHHH…..?
@9. CAPS lock get stuck?
I’m already getting bored with this release and I haven’t even seen it let alone bought it…. It sounds from the above review that it’s just another excuse to patch up previously available clips and concert footage with a few minutes of interviews from the ever willing Hughes/Lord and call it a “defining” documentary.
I must be getting old and grumpy….
May 23rd, 2011 at 12:32I know I’m never going to prefer the ROJ film, good or better quality than the Beta transfer version. It’s a pure vintage beauty and cannot be improved because it retains the same look that people originally saw it in. There is something that just can’t be beat there. I’m quite sure it won’t be ultimately topped by this version. I like the vintage look and the quality is just fine as well and helped crush the original bootleg for good. But I guess we’ll see, although I will have to see someone else’s copy before I rush out and replace mine, which is a real collectors item…. whether or not this will be, has yet to bee seen.
May 23rd, 2011 at 14:19I read so many bad informed reviews in musicmagazines.
Even in the ones that should be able to avoid mistakes like :
Aardshokmagazine, Dutch hardrock/heavymetal magazine suggests in a raving review that Rises Over Japan is new discovered material!!!!!
May 27th, 2011 at 23:06I ‘m dissapointed with this release. Because you can’t just buy a single dvd in the shops, like the old movie. You have to have all these other things with it. Well i’m not interested in the extra cd, already have Longbeach & This Time Around. They can’t add on anymore extra Rises Over Japan footage so they add on a siily cd. It’s is rather dissapointing that no new footage is included.
May 30th, 2011 at 10:37i for one am disappointed at the bits of teaser footage (no pun intended)!
June 1st, 2011 at 02:30it is easy to see that the jakarta film footage (which is very interesting) has been edited to include only a couple minutes of performance footage. why hold these things back?! same goes for the sunbury footage from 1975. fans have wanted the FULL existing footage for years and we get 10 seconds of performance footage and plenty of people from the crowd playing in the mud and being asked what the best part of the show was…(the mud, wait no the sex… wait no the beer) very illuminating. i believe this is the LAST archive(?!) release i will buy. wer’e all getting older and we will all be dead or senile before the footage from 35 years ago gets released IN FULL.
Just received my copy, I can’t play it! DVD is not coded to US DVD players.
June 2nd, 2011 at 00:27#15: play it on your computer. i assume you have one as you are posting here. as far as i know most DVD’S play on computers. not 5:1 sound but you should be able to watch it.
June 3rd, 2011 at 05:59take care.
the mk IV documentary DVD (Come Taste The Band electronic press kit included!) is….. FUCKING FANTASTIC!!!!
After watching it the smile on my face remained for hours!
JUST GREAT!
The CD… they could have been without.
Just another compilation… and apart of that in my opinion the versions chosen are wrong.
I would have gone for:
from Budokan: Lady Luck/ Love Child/ You Keep On Moving
from USA: Burn (without the 2 minutes intro!… nice Bolin solo)/ Gettin’ Tighter (no doubt better than the Budokan one ’cause of the intro)/ Smoke On The Water (WITH the great Coverdale intro speech… in my opinion of all the mk II songs that mk III and IV released over the years this is the only one which is worthy)/ Highway Star (vsn WITH Not Fade Away)/ Going Down
p.s.: of the versions I bought… the DVD was… perfect on the DVD version, faulty on the CD version
II p.s.: speaking about Purple DVDs today I took another look at Wring That Neck from Pop Deux Paris 70… Blackmore’s U N B E L I E V A B L E! N U M B E R 1
June 6th, 2011 at 17:41Very good release, only paid 20 dollars for it, & was just a single dvd . The picture quality is very sharp & clear. It’s a lot better than that old Rises Over Japan video, won’t be watching that in a while.
Yes i agree with somebody above “why didn’t they incluse more of the Jakarta footage “, i was thinking the same thing.
This is the first i have heard somebody gave Tommy a morphine shot, & then he had those problem’s.Why did they even give him that shot? Glenn didn’t explain more? I was always led to believe he had some bad heroin shot .
September 10th, 2011 at 12:51Thought those documantary’s focused on Glenn ‘s cocaine problems to much, started feeling depressed when hearing him. There has got to be some more new Mark 4 footage hiding somewhere !