Rainbow Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow Tracks: 1. Man on the Silver Mountain 2. Self Portrait 3. Black Sheep of the Family 4. Catch the Rainbow 5. Snake Charmer 6. The Temple of the King 7. If You Don't Like Rock 'n' Roll 8. Sixteenth Century Greensleeves 9. Still I'm Sad Line up: Ritchie Blackmore – Guitar Ronnie James Dio – Vocals Micky Lee Soule – Keyboards Craig Gruber – Bass Gary Driscoll – Drums Shoshana Feinstein - Background Vocals Record Label: Oyster Year of Release: 1975 Notes: Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow is the first album by Rainbow, released in July 1975. It was recorded and released while lead guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was still a member of Deep Purple. Lead vocalist Ronnie James Dio called this his favourite Rainbow album. Elf had supported Deep Purple on the previous year's tour promoting the band's album Stormbringer. This album marked the first collaboration between Dio and Blackmore, and it is essentially the lineup of Elf, Dio's previous band, with Blackmore instead of Steve Edwards. Blackmore would dismiss all the other Elf musicians and recruit new players for subsequent Rainbow albums. Two of the songs on the album were cover versions. "Black Sheep of the Family", a song that Deep Purple had refused to record for their album Stormbringer, was a cover of a song recorded by Quatermass (written by Steve Hammond), and "Still I'm Sad" was an instrumental cover of a Yardbirds track (written by Paul Samwell-Smith & Jim McCarty). The original vinyl release had a gatefold sleeve, although later reissues on the budget arms of Polydor reduced this to a single sleeve. This line-up never performed live and the live-shots used in the album art are of Blackmore in his Deep Purple days and of Elf playing live. The album's songs, however, have been performed by subsequent Rainbow lineups. Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow was re-issued on CD in remastered form, in the US in April 1999. The European release followed later in the year.