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For added grandeur
Louder Sound republishes online a Classic Rock feature on Rainbow Rising and subsequent tour. It originally appeared in the Classic Rock magazine issue #158, dated June 2011. The feature was written by Pete Makowski with input from Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Bain, Ronnie James Dio, Tony Carey, and Cozy Powell, all collected over the years.
Tokyo, December 16, 1976
In the dark, smoke-filled basement disco of the Tokyo Hilton, the night is in full swing. The music throbs with a mid-tempo pulse, as salary men with open collars, loosened ties and uncomfortable paunches knock back the sake. Refined-looking and impeccably dressed hostesses hover in the background, circling their prey with casual yet purposeful intent.
In one corner of the room, I can just about make out the blurry outline of someone who seems out of place in this den of iniquity. Ritchie Blackmore, guitarist and driving force with Rainbow, sits almost hidden in an anonymous alcove. Dressed in his trademark black, only the whites of his eyes and a half-pint glass of imported German beer are visible.
Continue reading in Louder Sound.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
I was hoping that Uwe’s favourite band and album would be posted here. Let the floodgates open, (again). Cheers.
September 5th, 2025 at 01:13I’m gonna sit this one out and let you boys get on with your fervent celebration in the heat and the rain, with whips and chains of this relic of quasi-religious devout worship and fervor. My agnostic view of it is well-known. It had eye-catching sleeve art and the first song (Tarot Woman) was promising, I’ll give it that.
Here is a cocky review of the album I came across that is not overawed, but doesn’t lack appreciation either:
https://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/graded-on-a-curve-rainbow-rising-2/
And here is a Dio/Bain US radio interview around the time the album was released:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlZX6AnjGLE
This 1976 promo is well-known, but worth a listen for Jimmy Bain’s trademark buzzsaw Telecaster Bass sound during Do You Close Your Eyes/the Strat smash-up, once the poor guitar has gone dead at 11:02, you can hear Jimmy real well! 😂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRlHQUtEpb4
I guess that punkish sounding, forward-driving bass is what initially got Jimmy the job with Rainbow (suitably wild in contrast to the much more collected and nuanced Craig Gruber) and also made him lose it again once Ritchie had grown tired of it and found it limiting.
September 5th, 2025 at 03:56I dont care what anybody says.. Rising is one of the best hard rock albums of the 70:s and the best Rainbow album and one of the best playing by Blackmore ever. As J Bain said..its a shame that line-up didnt stay together for a longer time.
September 5th, 2025 at 10:29These days my favourite track on the album is “A light in the black.”
I especially liked the part where it’s revealed that Ritchie took his band to 0the clubs at night to make them listen to the grooves the babes shook butts to.
September 5th, 2025 at 12:18Now that’s the man in black for you!
And boy did it work: next to maybe Sly and the Family Stone Blackmorw’s Rainbow is well known as one of the funkiest bands of the 70s…
Who hasn’t heard those babes begging ‘oh please Mr. DJ…put on that groovy sixteenth century song by the sexy Rainbows…’
I’ve always said side 2 of Rainbow Rising is the best album side ever! Only 2 songs but Stargazer and A Light In The Black, wow! it doesn’t get better than that.
September 5th, 2025 at 18:54Ritchie use to shake his booty back in the mid 1960’s, don’t forget that film clip of this young hips swaying. Play that funky music white boy……………well he isn’t that bad, not as bad some white boys attempting to do that. Cheers.
September 5th, 2025 at 21:57so much for Uwe’s “I’m gonna sit this one out”,,,,,,,,,,,,sheesh……..if that is sitting it out I don’t want to see him getting stuck into it. Well we ALL have been there with him………………Three links only in that post of him ‘sitting it out’ @ 2, not to mention him being unable to resist a dig or two, just to remind us of his penchant for Rainbow………….We have to have a good laugh don’t we…………Cheers.
September 5th, 2025 at 22:02I added the links to feed the nostalgia warmth of other people, not to support my own minority view of Rising, I know that the album has been influential for Euro fantasy melodic power metal whatchamacallit.
But I can’t help it if I didn’t like it all that much back then (I preferred both the debut and LLRnR) and still don’t like it all that much today:
1. Tarot Woman: brilliant number, highlight of the album;
2. Run With The Wolf: barely ok, filler;
3. Lady Starstruck: contrived attempt at writing a single which failed;
4. Do you Close Your Eyes: as awful as Sweet’s Turn It Down, hard rock like hard rock must sound to you if you don’t like hard rock, unerotic and to answer Ronnie’s plaintive question: with that kind of music I would not only close my eyes, but also hold my ears and hope for it to be over soon;
5. Stargazer: sounds like the promising demo to a song that could have been much greater had they devoted more time to it, underdeveloped;
6. A Light In The Black: too darn fast and at that too darn long as well, Fireball (the song) was at least mercifully short, moronic in its mindless repetition.
I don’t think Rising was a compositional masterstroke, no. More rushed job. “But the performance! you cry. You see that’s my point: The sound attraction that DP held in my ears was never just determined by Ritchie, but also by Jon Lord’s and Ian Paice’s groovy playing. Why should I like an album that has exactly those two for me key ingredients totally missing? That is like telling a Ritchie acolyte to state that Come Taste The Band is his favorite DP album. The singleminded minimalism of Dio era Rainbow never did anything for me, I found it a reduction from what DP had offered. Ritchie without Purple doing what he wants in unrestricted fashion is an environment that might boundlessly gratify his ego, but diminishes in my eyes and ears his maverick potential of coming up with the unexpected.
If I was asked why I like DP over Led Zep and Sabbath, I would give you two names: Jon Lord and Ian Paice. Now explain to me why I should have preferred Tony Carey’s and Cozy Powell’s contribution to Ritchie’s music over theirs? I was always more a fan of “DP the collective” than of “Ritchie the guitar master”. Or put differently, my love for Purple was always too deep (pun not intended) for Rainbows rising (pun forced!) anywhere near. If you’ve been exposed to the revolutionary underground energy of In Rock, the proggy experimentalism of Fireball, the sheer craftsmanship of MH and WDWTWA, the improvisational ease of MiJ + dug the blues and funk influences of Burn and the slightly decadent compositional and stylistic diversity of Stormbringer, then Rising is at best a piece of genre rock to you. But I was approaching 16 when I first heard it at a friend’s house (who had the album already), not 12. Figuratively speaking, my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles days were already behind me, I was listening to stuff like David Bowie’s Station To Station and Roxy Music back then too not to mention bands like IGB and PAL or the Glenn Hughes debut. If Purple was “2001: A Space Odyssey”, then Rising was STAR WARS. And I always thought STAR WARS an unpleasant mix of the reactionary and the bit silly.
But for all of those to whom Rising means the world: I’m happy for you. It’s not like I can listen to Tarot Woman or Stargazer and not draw a guilty pleasure idiot smile on my face.
And a remix from the ground up – if the masters are available – might do wonders for that album. I also would really like to hear Fritz Sonnleitner’s
https://iiif.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/image/2/373fa2c1-d8db-4e5a-8e01-a8cd09b12599/full/!511,430/0/default.jpg
original score to Stargazer which Ritchie deemed too flowery/ornamental – what you hear of the strings on the song I always found strangely underwhelming and only a rough sketch of what could have been. I think they lacked time for something greater.
September 6th, 2025 at 01:46#8 Uwe:
I think your criticisms towards Rising are very unfair, as they contain milestones of the genre that will become heavy metal/power metal in the following years.
according to your criticisms within Purple, then S&M and TBRO and everything Purple did after Bananas is irrelevant stuff that shouldn’t exist.
Blackmore himself from the third or fourth album onwards, Glenn himself from The Way It Is onwards.
Gillan himself from dream catcher to forward.
the same Lord from pictured whitin (for many it would already be indigestible even if it is pure poetry) onwards
Rising as a whole is not a homogeneous album, and this is its biggest flaw, but it was written according to the inspirations of the moment and it was genuine.
If even Rising is no longer good then we can say that hard rock is dead after Made in Japan, but fortunately I think that is not the case!
September 6th, 2025 at 11:52Thinking about it, what I liked about classic Purple was that mix of 40% Ritchie + 30% Jon + 30% Paicey (I am simplifying of course) that permeated most songs. I did not find hearing all of the sudden 80% Ritchie in Rainbow a strengthening of the original recipe, (Black)More isn’t always better. Rainbow – especially the Dio years – was like a strictly organized military campaign, but it lacked elements of surprise, spontaneity and cross-insemination, things that had made DP so special.
It is telling that Tony Carey, Bob Daisley and David Stone have all said that even the portions of Rainbow’s live set that were made to look improvisational were meticulously worked out beforehand and well-rehearsed. I’m not saying that DP had none of that, but there was a palpable telepathic quality to Ritchie’s, Jon’s and Paicey’s band interplay I never heard with any Rainbow line-up. I missed that.
September 6th, 2025 at 12:17I DEMAND all japanese concerts released.
September 6th, 2025 at 19:24Hello.
September 7th, 2025 at 00:50I’m new here 🙂
“…according to your criticisms within Purple, then S&M and TBRO and everything Purple did after Bananas is irrelevant stuff that shouldn’t exist …”
Huh? I can’t follow your argument, Fla76, care to explain? I don’t think Slaves & Masters is a horrible record at all and Rainbow released albums following Rising that actually attained a higher overall songwriting quality.
I believe Rising suffered mainly from being made under great time pressure and because it was such a narrow concept plus the flawed production/mix. It was also the first time in a big budget studio for Tony and Jimmy, they didn’t have much recording experience. Even Cozy Powell didn’t have the recording experience of Ian Paice. Cozy’s work with the Jeff Beck Group, Bedlam and RAK/Mickie Most hadn’t seen him confronted with state-of-the-art productions like MH, WDWTWA, Burn and Stormbringer. Stormbringer as an album sounds twice as cool, collected and sophisticated as Rising – you can hear that by that point Mk III were relaxed in the studio and used technology to its best effect. It is no doubt the more professionally made record – “shoeshine music” or not.
Calling Rising “uneven” (to the point of disparate) is actually a good way of putting it. With more time, lots of things could have been improved on that album and what good ideas there were developed to full bloom. Let’s not even talk about how Stargazer would have been turned into a magnus opus had someone like Bob Ezrin with his sense for grand arrangements gotten his hands on it.
September 7th, 2025 at 00:55@12
Hey 👋🏼
Welcome 😊
September 7th, 2025 at 09:23@13 Uwe:
September 7th, 2025 at 10:47I’ll try to explain, I was generalizing by saying that following your reasoning about Rising – if even Rising in your opinion has mediocre songs – then we can throw away almost everything that came after the breakup of MKII (or if you want after the breakup of MKIII)
Fantastic LP always been one of my favorites, great cover artwork as well!!
September 7th, 2025 at 11:36Newbie Claytonimpep: Welcome and don’t listen to Karin!
Are you an Elvis fan too? That definitely helps here.
September 7th, 2025 at 12:17@17
“Welcome and don’t listen to Karin!”
– 🤣🤣
I was so tempted to write the same about you! But I am a well behaved Danish woman, so I didn’t! 🤣
And I don’t give a tiny rodents wet behind if anyone is interested in Elvis!
September 7th, 2025 at 17:47Just because I don’t like him doesn’t mean that everyone else have to have the same taste in music.
Hey, I even tolerate you Uwe, so the range here is W I D E🤣
We even allow wimmin. Not swimming, wimmin, wi-himmin!
September 7th, 2025 at 19:58Ritchie’s brilliant solo on Hold On contains more of his off-the-cuff musical genius for me than all of Rising combined, Fla76. What other people might like as “grandeur” is to me pretentious lead-footedness on Rising. To my ears, Rising sounds more dated today than anything on Stormbringer or CTTB.
Dio era Rainbow were trying to be so serious-faced and dark as well as all-nuances-squashingly heavy with their music, it sometimes tipped over into the hilarious – all the playfulness and neat elegance (a key ingredient of DP) had gone out of the music. Frankly, no Manowar would be imaginable without the Rainbow Rising image and music as a role model – are you sure that is something to be proud of? 🤣 (Joey DeMaio was a bass tech for Dio era Sabbath, so he had firsthand experience of RJD night for night.)
Even Ritchie saw that he had painted himself into a corner with Dio era Rainbow – that is why he wanted out after only three albums and recorded the radically different and lighter Down To Earth. More importantly, the public wasn’t really going for the damsels, dragons, demons & dungeons rock either. Left to his own devices, Ritchie lost his commercial nous for a while which had been a reliable compass for him all those years with DP.
September 7th, 2025 at 20:38@13 – ‘Let’s not even talk about how Stargazer would have been turned into a magnus opus had someone like Bob Ezrin with his sense for grand arrangements gotten his hands on it.” Hindsight again. WOULD or COULD Uwe? Presuming that Ezrin would turn Stargazer into a magnum opus??? It may have been ruined also……………nobody knows what could have happened there. But I do get your point in a certain aspect, just not the presuming it WOULD have been grander or whatever fantasy one could think it may have been. Ezrin’s background was, as we know in orchestral and other arrangements. Don’t forget that Ritchie wore the HAT though, can you imagine? I suppose it could have given Bob some experience for later on working with Roger Waters, he he he. Cheers.
September 7th, 2025 at 21:25@ 3… Agree with everything you said about Rising.
September 8th, 2025 at 12:37Fla76, as songwriting goes, Rising is the weakest album for me from the Dio era: Tarot Woman and Stargazer stand out, A Light In The Black doesn’t do much harm (but overstays its welcome), Run with the Wolf is non-descript, Lady Starstruck banal and DYCYE plain horrible. In contrast, the debut had an abundance of strong songs (MOTSM, Temple of the King, Catch The Rainbow, Self Portrait, Snake Charmer, 16th Century Greensleeves, even If You Don’t Like RnR was good fun and echoed Elf a little) and the only song I can fault on LLRnR is Sensitive To Light where I never thought the verses and the chorus really gelled. On LLRnR, Lady Of The Lake, GOB, The Shed (Subtle), Rainbow Eyes (one of the nicest ballads by Ritchie ever with a wonderful string arrangement by Fritz Sonnleitner) and even the title song are all really strong compositions. It is however telling that by 1978, Rainbow was in such a state that hardly anything was played live from that album. For the three years of their existence, Dio era Rainbow relied pretty much on songs from their first album + the Mk III chestnut Mistreated and Kill The King as their perennial set opener. (By 1978, the only remnant from Rising in the set was a snippet of Lady Starstruck and even that was eventually discarded – hardly indicating a milestone of a record from the viewpoint of the band who had recorded it.)
Looking at Rainbow’s 70s/80s oeuvre overall, I find that Rising is in the bottom heap together with the lackluster SBTEyes. LLRnR is likely my favorite Rainbow album, I’d rate it slightly above even the debut, DTEarth and BOOShape. Difficult To Cure is for me somewhere in the middle.
I don’t subscribe at all to the theory that ony the 70s albums of Purple were good and nothing relevant came after. Private Eyes, Malice In Wonderland, Play Me Out, Hughes Thrall, Clear Air Turbulence & Scarabus, Live At Budokan, Ready an’ Willing, Glory Road & Double Trouble Studio, Born Again, Accidentally On Purpose, Sarabande & Pictured Within & Beyond the Notes, THOBL, Purpendicular, Now What?!, Whoosh! & =1 are all worthy albums to me.
September 8th, 2025 at 19:35Man, there’s some serious horseshit been written on this thread… if I want to Rock I listen to Rising, as it ROCKS. Amongst all of the naysaying and rewriting of history – Hold On (lol) the screwdriver session… throwaway genius, maybe … but as a Deep Purple composition it’s still shit, one of my least favourite tracks by anyone… it sucks… and is in no way redeemed by an off the cuff Blackmore run up the fret board…
Another thing, Rising saw Dio lay down some of his finest vocal takes EVER… but boy does it plod … lol … it’s indulgent and I love it for it… 5 blokes writing songs for 5 blokes… I adore the lot of it, in all its dark D&D cliche ridden stupendous beauty.
I would love to hear a less tinny remix, with some real BALLS but I believe the masters were lost at sea… probably thrown into the depths for being so gosh darn boring and lacking the musical depth of Love Don’t Mean a Thing or Thang… ? I was never quite sure.
😉
September 8th, 2025 at 19:53Saw Rainbow many years back in Birmingham. Superb, although Ritchie did go on a little too long with his (almost) solo stint. When you are so good, you can get away with it…I went back the next night!
September 8th, 2025 at 20:05@ 20- “What other people might like as “grandeur” is to me pretentious lead-footedness on Rising” In what way were Rainbow pretending? And the absurd comments constantly comparing Rainbow to what was before with different musician, says a lot Uwe. Who is pretending? Cheers.
September 8th, 2025 at 21:34#20 Uwe:
sure, I’m personally proud that Ritchie and Rainbow have influenced the heavy metal scene as a whole, not only Manowar, but also bands that I consider better like Iron Maiden or Saxon, or Malmsteen, or Axel Rudi Pell, or from afar bands like Primal Fear, Helloween, Gamma ray, and thousands of others would never have existed without Rainbow.
Ritchie changed his style also and above all because he wanted to sell records and break through in America, but if he had resisted with the heavier Rainbow until the 80s, he would have had a global success after when heavy metal in the 80s became a mass phenomenon.
then we all know very well in his pre-Blackmore’s night career how Ritchie was bored of always playing the same things and wanted new stimuli and new musical directions for Purple and Rainbow
September 8th, 2025 at 22:04Let’s have a ‘deeper’ look at Uwe Hornung’s ‘pretentious’ comment in regard to comparing post 70’s Deep Purple alumni bands. Myself, I don’t compare the post 70’s DP bands at all to Deep Purple, never have, why ? It is ridiculous in all its, well, ridiculousness! This is looking at it from his Majesties perspective. If we are to look at one, we may as well look at them all, don’t we think? We know the Rainbow one and as Uwe said at the beginning of this post, ‘I’m gonna sit this one out and let you boys get on with your fervent celebration’. If only eh? The Ian Gillan Band, well enough said there me thinks. Were they being pretentious in attempting to mesh the progressive, fusion and rock element? Were they a failure? Did they go down like the proverbial ‘Led balloon’? It seems so if we are to look at it that way. What about Gillan, the band? Talk about painting themselves into a corner’, Uwe’s words in regard to Rainbow. It seems so, Gillan went nowhere it seems, and don’t talk about sonic quality in their recordings either. A failure of sorts, some may say so. Don’t mention Paice, Ashton and Lord, please! Just what was all that ‘pretentious twaddle’ all about. Were they a Big Band, a Jazz band, a ‘progressive’ rock band, just what were they trying to achieve. Why did they bother at all? They sounded NOTHING like DP. A failure? Yes it seems so, where did they disappear to? And of course we cannot go down the pretentious road without mentioning good ole David Coverdale and his ever changing troupe of musicians. Was David trying to be Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant and Freddie Mercury all in one? Were his ‘bands’ attempts at rock music pretentious? How successful were they and did they sell out painting themselves into a corner? We know what happened with all these artists. They were nothing like the mothership, so they failed big time and the musicians that returned to the mothership were winners, sort of for a little while. So there we have it folks, don’t be pretentious at all, whatever you do. Cheers.
September 8th, 2025 at 22:51Fair points, I don’t rate the last two tracks on side one, but I don’t think LLRnR is up to much either apart from Gates and Lady of the lake. It’s all about the live shows for me because Blackmore had something to prove and hadn’t got bored yet. His sound was still thick and rich, as opposed to the thin weedy sound he had in later Rainbow (to my ears anyway). The main issue is compared to what came later with both Rainbow and Purple Rising is as good as it got!
September 9th, 2025 at 08:10Michael, no argument from me, Rainbow presented great live shows with often mediocre material. That‘s an art too.
Herr MacGregor, I deduce from your post that Dio Rainbow was the least pretentious of all post-DP-split bands because they were closest in replicating the Purple sound, producing more of the same, only less. The others dared to be different and that was of course pretentious. That is a “Ted the Mechanic“-worthy argument if I’ve heard one, I bow to you! And rest my case.
https://jameswilding.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/good-grief-charlie-brown.png
Kosh, you misheard and/or misunderstood the deeper meaning of the second song on the Stormbringer album, it’s neither “thing” nor “thang”: It is about lingerie not being a replacement for a good relationship and true feelings, which is why the track is called “Love Don’t Mean A Thong”. Kind of an anti-Victoria’s Secret song really, give the crack its freedom back …
https://i.gifer.com/origin/3b/3bf3e9aea9a418d1b797fbad7e08e9bb_w200.gif
Another thing, Rising saw Dio lay down some of his finest vocal takes EVER… but boy does it plod … lol … it’s indulgent and I love it for it… 5 blokes writing songs for 5 blokes… I adore the lot of it, in all its dark D&D cliche ridden stupendous beauty.
You know what, I mostly agree with that statement! There was indeed something gloriously dumb about Dio era Rainbow.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ec/46/2a/ec462a5b80fdaa96285a636e18ecaeb5.gif
After all already George Orwell knew IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!. And calling it “indulgent” is perhaps a more apt way of putting it than my “pretentious”, my apologies, Herr MacGregor!
September 9th, 2025 at 21:19Fifty years ago Uwe was transfixed by that Rainbow, a spell was cast and he was mesmerised by it big time. However that fifty years has taken its toll on him, poor chap. Weighed down by that Behemoth. It must be hard being ground into the mire like that, constantly, repeatedly, never ending it appears. Oh, but it will end one day, he then can be free of that curse that was cast upon his rather young and naive soul in 1975. Cheers.
September 9th, 2025 at 21:46I was never transfixed by Rainbow’s studio output. I liked the debut at the time because MOTSM was such a magnificent riff (one of the best ones Ritchie ever did) and because I liked Ronnie’s voice, mainly however because initially it sounded more like Mk III than Mk IV did, it took me a while to latch onto CTTB because all the European-ness had gone out of DP – which the Rainbow debut had of course in spades even though, ironically, CTTB featured only one Yank while the Rainbow debut featured 4/5 of the band from the colonies. Rainbow sounded familiar to me (but over a few weeks I got more into CTTB).
I know to this day how I felt when I first heard Rising shortly after it came out in the spring of 1976. To my chagrin, a friend had it earlier than I did and he played it to me at his house. I loved Tony’s synth intro and the way the band came in then, but the rest of the record left me cold – with the exception of Tarot Woman and Lady Starstruck few chorus parts were catchy and I didn’t like the overall sound. Keyboards weren’t loud enough for me – I was used to Jon Lord! 😂 – and the drums rubbed me real bad, reminiscent of I thought Mick Tucker in Sweet (Sweet’s very heavy Give Is A Wink album had come out the same time as Rising, also recorded at Musicland I think, now there’s nothing wrong with Give Us A Wink, but Mick Tucker is hardly Ian Paice). I’m not a drummer like you, Herr MacGregor, but Cozy’s legendary Stargazer intro doesn’t impress me half as much as Paicey’s neat fills in Burn. I’m just no fan of ultra-heavy drums clobbering their way through the music, I prefer dexterity, swift elegance and swing. Mark Nauseef’s and Simon Phillips’ playing with IGB and on JP’s Sin After Sin for instance left me open-jawed. Cozy’s approach to drumming was a caricature of heaviness in my ear and lacked the musicality Inwas used to from Purple.
If I had really loved Rising at the time, I would still do so today because I never grow to dislike any music I once liked. I still listen to a lot of stuff I dug as a 15-year-0ld, no guilt involved at all:
https://youtu.be/Y2mtMVVKhUU
Nor do I per se mind stompy drums where they have their place (they were after all very much a Glam Rock thing)
https://youtu.be/CeXok1LvQWk
https://youtu.be/ZtzdigGGZys
but Paicey’s graceful drumming in DP spoiled me for Cozy forever.
After Rainbow’s debut, I found Rising anticlimactic, can’t help it and Lord knows how often I have listened to that album to try to like it and discover the magic everyone seems to hear – I just don’t. 🤷🏻♂️
September 10th, 2025 at 15:48We all move on from certain music from our youthful era. At least I have and I do wonder how or why I ever enjoyed some of it at that time, looking back on it all. It isn’t that it is bad or anything, it just didn’t hold onto me anymore, so I let it go. Status Quo is a good example of that. I was into them big time for a few years, but then it became boring to me. 1976 and hard rock was still on my radar, especially with the demise of certain bands, there was still hope and it was good, still is, some of it at least. Certain songs still stand up and that Rainbow era with Ronnie James Dio is included in that. It is what it is and as we know, time waits for no one. Cheers.
September 10th, 2025 at 22:07#32 Uwe:
dear Uwe, it’s funny how the very Teutonic sound of Rainbow never fascinated you, while Judas fascinated you and still fascinates you.
maybe because you are less critical of the production and composition of the Priests, and you are more critical of the Purple family.
you have to tell us this.
in any case you can’t deny that Ritchie with the first Rainbow created a fundamental style for all the heavy metal bands that came after.
September 10th, 2025 at 22:08and don’t be too hard on Cozy, he was basically a heavy-shuffle-metal drummer, he wasn’t some rough 80’s Viking!
He didn’t have Paice’s swing, but who in the world did?
Fla76, you have a very good point! Dio Rainbow were of course Teutonic, perhaps a bit too Teutonic for my own comfort … Was I looking for something more exotic I couldn’t get/hear at home?
And Priest were Teutonic too – I hear their influence both in Accept and in Rammstein to this day. But I heard and hear a certain British elegance in Halford’s men and also a certain lightness in their lyrics which were just as non-sensical escapist as RJD’s. Halford’s fantasy world is less Tolkien and more MARVEl graphic novel. He also always had that gay man’s smirk in his eye while Dio seemed to be very dead-serious convinced anout everything he sang, it wasn’t playful.
In the end it might have a lot to do with Cozy – none of the many Priest drummers – Simon Phillips, Les Binks, Dave Holland & Scott Travis – were “batterers” like him, they all had more swing (though Scott Travis can be a bit drum machine-like at times).
Very perceptive your observation!
As for Dio era Rainbow’s lasting influence, I don’t dispute that at all. I remember a buddy coming home with Sabbath’s Heaven & Hell (the album) and exclaiming They now sound like Rainbow, just as great! 😆 Dio and Blackmore forged something new even if it didn‘t match DP‘s widespread appeal. In contrast Bonnet and Turner era Rainbow’s were chasing American trends – with only mediocre success.
September 11th, 2025 at 13:14@30 – Love Don’t Mean a Thong ? Now Hold on, m maybe you’re onto something here… maybe not… lol.
Either way I love MK3, but Thong really is the pits… a low point and part of the reason Blackmore upped and eventually hit on the Rising response… maybe he was painted into a corner, maybe he didn’t hold the brush… I’d say Rising was a giant progression from the MK3isms of the debut… but taken in isolation I guess it might seem a, you know, indulgent and one paced… but it’s not is it? I mean, Light in the Black is simply ridiculous and by that I mean unreal… it must have BLOWN people away in 76, those of a not very into punk disposition at least… it did, it really did blow people away… it’s been parodied to death and we’ve heard it so often, from lessor sons, with lessor returns since – too many times… Rising is a work of art and one that the rock kids still love today… I’d say it did its job very nicely… it’s legacy remains and those outside of the Purps circle ⭕️ know it way more than Stormbringer for example, which often flatters to deceive alongside its sister Burn and the three early Rainbow 🌈 releases.
It’s all subjective, obviously – but it’s really hard to argue against Rising… from the artwork to the last note it’s the complete package.
So, come climb the tower…
September 15th, 2025 at 19:10The artwork was great on Rising, granted. Just didn’t think the music as impressive to match.
Wasn’t the story to Love Don’t Mean A Thing/Thang/Thong that Purple heard it first as a composition of a black Chicago street busker, liked what they heard, sneakily invited him on the Starship and then talked him into selling the song to them which they then proceeded to record for Stormbringer with a few changes of their own – after all Blackmore has a co-writer’s credit (unlike on Hold On). I don’t think they could have brought in an outside writer’s song had he made his veto known?
I didn’t like that song initially, but it has grown endlessly on me over the years. It’s the epitome of cool for me now.
https://youtu.be/kE14fQl8eNg
September 16th, 2025 at 18:00Uwe, I’d never heard that about …Thing… very interesting backstory, if we are willing to indulge in perhaps a smidgin of urban mythery…
It’s one of those for me, if it had been written/recorded by a MOR funk/soul band most of us would never have heard it and/or just not liked it in terms of it not being ‘our’ bag… the reason it’s grown on any of us is brand loyalty, plain and simple… It’s different (for Purple) even stacked up against the other Stormbringer ‘shoeshiny’ moments, yeah okay, but I think its fair to say you’d have dismissed it as banal if it weren’t on a Purple album… I love the band, MK3 in particular yet I’m prepared to admit it’s bang average.
However – each to their own way, I’ll go mine… best of luck with what you find 🙂
September 18th, 2025 at 14:43Kosh, there are several story variations about the origins of LDMAT, but they all contain “black busker + Starship”. It was first mentioned on the 2009 Stormbringer Remaster in the liner notes.
“Lastly, I must acknowledge the great liner notes. The most entertaining story included is in regards to “Love Don’t Mean A Thing.” While in Chicago, Ritchie ran across a street busker, who was snapping his fingers singing a song about money. Blackmore invited him onto Purple’s plane, collected Coverdale and Hughes, and jammed for 20 minutes with this guy who taught them the song and the lyrics. The band finished the song that became “Love Don’t Mean A Thing”, credited to the entire quintet, because nobody ever bothered to get the busker’s name.”
https://mikeladano.com/tag/funk-metal/
Somewhere else I read that they gave the guy something like ten grand to surrender all rights, which would be similar to what Ritchie did with David Stone’s writing participation in Gates Of Babylon.
Ritchie was probably attracted to the song lyrics because at that time he was going through a (reportedly nasty) divorce with Bärbel so he might have had a suitably cynical outlook.
“the reason it’s grown on any of us is brand loyalty, plain and simple …
Not disputing that at all. Had I sat through Billy Cobham’s Spectrum, Jon Lord’s Windows, Glenn Hughes’ Play Me Out or IGB’s Clear Air Turbulence as a teenager raised on hard rock and glam if there had been no DP affiliation? Likely not (though I did like the horn rock of Blood, Sweat & Tears already back then). But that’s ultimately a good thing, DP had a Bildungsauftrag (were educational). 😎 Spectrum was my first jazz rock/fusion album, but it wasn’t the last. And I had Play Me Out long before I had anything from Stevie Wonder. Purple leads you down rabbit holes to new places as Max rightfully always says.
I think it was Steven Wilson who said that the first time he heard Tubular Bells as a kid it was a disco version on a compilation album. He liked it so much, he dug out the original and was initially disappointed because it didn’t feature the disco beat. 🤣 But he kept listening to it …
September 19th, 2025 at 16:13Top post Uwe… It’s very interesting that we’ve spent longer discussing the merits or otherwise of Love Don’t… et al than we have Rising…. probably because the varied output of MK3 demands that kind of debate… Yeah, less binary than the Yes Rising is a masterpiece vs no it isn’t argument lol…
I’ll say this, when I caught Dio circa 2004 up in Newcastle they opened with Tarot Woman and you could feel the audience draw breath as a couple of thousand neck hairs stood to attention, as we were taken to some dark corner of that studio in Germany, Carey smouldering away over his moog whilst we waited for that riff… I was in my mid 20s at this point and I’ve never felt that excited at a gig before.
I’ve also seen Glenn numerous times and we’ve had everything from Black Cloud, through Medusa, Soul Mover, Sail Away, Getting Tighter, even (the brilliant btw) Holy Man… He never fails to deliver, but he’s never delivered Love Don’t… Which is interesting, but that would be the one song I’d nip to the loo during sadly… Glenn knows his audience I guess…
I’m glad you’ve grown to love it Uwe, music is a deeply subjective and personal thing… thang (ahem).
Rock on 🙂
September 23rd, 2025 at 08:34