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Pretty much the first take
Bass Player magazine has an interview with session player extraordinaire Lee Sklar. And he thinks that working on Billy Cobham’s album Spectrum with Tommy Bolin, among others, was a highlight of his 2,000-album (by the latest count) career.
What are some of the moments in your career that you think of as outstanding?
“Stratus with Billy Cobham – bass players always want me to talk about that. I got to know Billy when The Section went out on a tour opening for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. When he had the opportunity to do a record of his own, I think he had Stanley Clarke in mind for the bass, but for some reason it didn’t work out.“I had never really considered myself a chops monster, and those guys didn’t need one. They needed someone who could hold down the bottom, and that bassline just fell into place. We finished the whole album in three days; I did two days, and then Ron Carter played on some big band tracks.”
“What you hear on the album is pretty much the first take of every song, all done live without overdubs. Jan Hammer is one of the most gifted synth players, and Tommy Bolin’s guitar playing is some of the best that ever was. For them, that bass part just ended up being a foundation that holds things in place while they went off.
The whole interview can be found in the GuitarWorld.com, albeit there is nothing more Purple related in there.
Thanks to Uwe for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Posted this before, but it fits herr: Lee reenacting his original bass run …
https://youtu.be/C1Z4ux1y1b8
May 5th, 2025 at 02:202400 albums approximately for that trusty old Fender bass guitar. Between Sklar, Mo Foster and Tony Levin, well those three have played on almost everything we could easily say. Cheers.
A rather good recent Tony Levin interview with Rick Beato.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRScUtBc6yU&t=1s
May 5th, 2025 at 07:57Call me sad got Specturm on LP way back, upgraded to remastered CD, more recently got 180gm remastered blue vinyl and Blu-ray AUDIO! Being a Tommy Bolin fan this was a ‘must’ and if you believe everything you read his playing on said LP got him the DP audition. Had the pleasure of eventually seeing Billy Cobham live…
May 5th, 2025 at 09:02ps – seen Lee Sklar – brilliant bass player -PJ
I’m not aware that anybody in the Purple camp (other than Ritchie, more of that later) was aware of Tommy’s prior work either with Zephyr or James Gang, they only knew him via Spectrum.
The story I know goes like this: DC, the avid record collector, had a copy of Spectrum and raved about it to Jon and they both heard the album again and again on a drunken night at DC’s then LA home. (Glenn Hughes had advocated ex-Humble Pie Dave Clempson as a fellow Midlander.) Jon was in the end convinced and it was then decided to find Tommy (which proved difficult at first though by coincidence he didn’t live too far away from where the Purple guys lived in LA).
Interestingly, DC (I don’t know whether this was true for Jon as well, kinda doubt it even when drunk) was under the misapprehension that the lightning fast synth lines played by Jan Hammer on Spectrum all stemmed from Tommy’s heavily processed guitar, stuff like the intro to Quadrant Four:
https://youtu.be/unxshBHfVsY
(The lead lines you hear for the first minute are all Jan Hammer on synth or keytar, Tommy doesn’t make an entrance until 01:11 when he synchronizes the riff with his guitar.)
To DC’s defense: He wasn’t the only one who thought that Hammer’s lines were played by Bolin and Tommy even had a chip on his shoulder by then because people would always approach him at social events and laud his playing at the beginning of Quadrant Four to which Tommy would then say a little curtly: “Thanks, but that was Jan.” 🫤
Bolin was an excellent guitarist, but he wasn’t “Blackmore-does-Bach-on-Highway-Star”-fast or technical, which is why the Highway Star solo in its original form always eluded him (and Tommy wasn’t the type of musician who would actually sit down on his butt and knuckle down to learn Blackmore’s triplets and quadruplets).
Cobham’s Spectrum album is today a little forgotten because jazz rock (a successful sub-genre in the second half of the 70s and early 80s) has fallen out of favor with the public. At the time, however, it was a hugely pivotal and influential record, inter alia leading Jeff Beck to call it a day with his rock trio Beck, Bogert & Appice and venture into jazz rock instrumental music with Jan Hammer as his keyboard foil. To boot, Spectrum climbed to #26 in the Billboard 200 Charts and to #1 in the Billboard Jazz Albums Charts. Unthinkable today.
Whether Blackmore ever heard Spectrum I don’t know (he never really liked Jazz Rock by his very own admission). But Tommy caught his attention via a James Gang performance on TV in the Midnight Special
https://youtu.be/tR00q2yrsN8
https://youtu.be/_A7hnox9uvU
That is where the Blackmore quote comes from that “Tommy looked and dressed like Elvis” – Tommy’s (himself an Elvis fan, they are all over, Karin!) lamé suit at that performance was of course a nod to the King.
But Ritchie – always a visual person – wasn’t just smitten with the looks, but also said of Tommy’s playing: “One of the few American guitarists worth listening today.”
Tony Carey is finally adamant that Ritchie even took all of Rainbow (on his invitation) to a Mk IV gig in 1975 to show them what they would be up against (competitive little bastard he is!) and that the whole band – Ritchie included – enjoyed the Purple performance. Make of that what you will. That might have been the Long Beach gig to which Linda Blair went as well, subsequently meeting, falling in love and becoming an item with you know who!
https://www.picclickimg.com/VVoAAOSw~SFnEPwW/Deep-Purple-OLD-PHOTO-Music-Band-Singer-Performer.webp
https://fanforum.glennhughes.com/gallery/index.php?raw-image/129-glenn-with-linda-blair/&size=large
May 5th, 2025 at 14:47It sounds like Ritchie may have gone to that MKIV gig with his Ouija board in the hope of exorcising those demons for Linda. Or perhaps to summon a few of his own demons to enact some dastardly deed. Or maybe he was hoping to exorcise his own demons, getting a few tips from Linda. The mind boggles. Cheers.
May 5th, 2025 at 21:47@4
“Tommy’s (himself an Elvis fan, they are all over, Karin”
May 5th, 2025 at 23:25Yeah I know!
And in Randers is placed a shrine for EP!
Used to be called Graceland! (I’m not amused…. In my hood! 😜)
Speaking of Tony Carey….and a few others who are aligned directly or indirectly with the extended Purple family – there is a new album out by a group called SIGN OF THE WOLF. Among the artists contributing to it are Carey (Rainbow Rising), Vinnie Appice (WWIII, Black Sabbath, Dio, Heaven & Hell) on drums, Steve Morris (ex-Ian Gillan) on guitar; and Doug Aldritch (Dio, Whitesnake, Glenn Hughes, Dead Daisies) on guitar. I have seen a few reviews…very positive.
May 6th, 2025 at 15:06A non-AI voice by a real human with some background knowledge recounts Tommy’s journey to DP and how his paths with Ritchie crossed more than once:
https://youtu.be/PWDhuCgfHTs
Interestingly, according to this depiction
– Ritchie too was aware of Spectrum, but only saw Tommy in the flesh on TV with the James Gang in 1974 (the vids I linked in my previous post),
– Ian Paice apparently owned and loved Spectrum as well (that to me makes sense because if you were a technical-minded drummer in 1973, there was no way you would not listen to Billy Cobham’s first solo album)
– Tommy too mentioned in an interview that Ritchie had “seen the band” (meaning Mk IV) and liked it.
I wonder what attracted Ritchie to Tommy’s playing. He must have been aware that he (Ritchie) was technically superior to entirely self-taught Tommy who by his own admission didn’t even know scales (in contrast, Ritchie could even sight-read music though he might have lost a lot of it over the decades because he didn’t use it often enough), but I have a hunch that our man in black appreciated how uninhibited and loose, yet at the same time ferocious Tommy played, the same things that Ritchie also lauded in Johnny Winter’s wild playing.
May 6th, 2025 at 21:34if you listen to the drum-guitar-part before the drum-solo 1976, you can hear how paice and Bolin sound like “Quadrant 4” …;-)
May 8th, 2025 at 14:12Definitely that avant-garde approach from Tommy Bolin would have pleased Ritchie we could think. Same with Jeff Beck who as we know Blackmore always revered. Throw Hendrix into that mix, the ‘out there’ approach to playing that all those guitarists had. That devil may care approach. Cheers.
May 9th, 2025 at 23:48Jimmy Page liked Bolin too, he saw him when Zephyr opened for Zep. Bolin’s rhythm guitar playing wasn’t that dissimilar to Page’s, Page was a darn good rhythm guitarist, very flowing, ornamental and with an idiosyncratic groove – people talk about that too little.
May 10th, 2025 at 22:43Yes indeed Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend always spring to mind when talking wonderful rhythmic guitar players. Electric and acoustic too, I really enjoy that diversity in those sort of guitarists. Same with Steve Howe and Steve Morse. I suppose that is the one thing we can take out of Ritchie’s sojourn with BN, he doesn’t just play a Stratocaster. Talking of Stratocaster players, I read somewhere recently that Robin Trower never plays an acoustic guitar, doesn’t like it at all apparently. Each to their own and there are guitarists who only play acoustic and not electric at all. Cheers.
May 14th, 2025 at 23:32