Deep Purple 1968 I never particularly wanted to be famous. I just wanted to be able to pay the bills that were mounting up. I was out of work for quite a while after Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent I was in a band called The Outlaws and then we fell apart and then I was doing a few sessions with Joe Meek who wrote 'Telstar'. He helped out moneywise and then I had a pretty sparse time from like 66 to probably 68. Chris Curtis from The Searchers who was I was friends with, he wanted to put together a band sent me telegrams 'you must come to England, you must come to England' he said right we're going to form a band and I said great who's in the band he said well Jon Lord is in the band on keyboards. So I went that's great and I met John he was playing, believe it or not, in the Flowerpot Men. I don't know if he was Bill or Ben... The Flowerpot Men are quite important to me and my family... I saw him and I was well impressed and Jon and I got together I said well if we could get this drummer that I've seen in Hamburg... he was incredible that was Ian Paice. I said, but I don't know how to get hold of him. So we were holding auditions in this old house, these singers turned up and one of the singers that was coming for the audition brought Ian Paice along with him, which was our first singer. They used to play for a band called The Maze, very good band. So I said to John you you have to hear this drummer, he's unbelievable. We had a drummer at the time but as soon as Ian started playing we knew that he was the guy for us. Jon knew a bass player and we got that bass player in. Very nice guy, very good bass player and then we had the singer from The Maze. That's the one who did 'Hush', Rod Evans, great guy, great singer, but he was a little bit too cronerisch. And I went to a club called Mothers in Birmingham and Robert Plant stood up and sang with the band that was playing and I thought that's the kind of singer we need in our band. I spoke to my friend Mick Underwood who's since passed on and I said: do you know any singers? He said yes our singer. I said well surely you need your singer... He said: no, no, we're breaking up and that was Ian Gillan. So I went to see Ian Gillan and I was very impressed with his screaming and the way he looked. He looked like Jim Morrison, so that helped and we got together with Ian and I was very impressed with Ian's scream. He could scream like Arthur Brown. I don't know if you've ever heard of Arthur Brown and 'Fire'? Great record! He could scream, Edgar Winter could scream too, so I was impressed with that and to me it was a little bit of competition for Robert Plant who I knew very well. Great guy! It seemed to work but had it not been for me seeing Robert Plant singing at the Mothers club I would probably never changed the singer and the rest is not history Marshall Amps I knew Jim Marshall very well. He was a drum instructor and he was teaching Mitch Mitchell of all people. I used to go to their shop the guitar shop where I got my Gibson from. Mitch Mitchell was serving, Jim Marshall was there and he knew nothing about amplifiers but he drew a double stack and I think it was Ken Bran and Ken Flegg who took the best electrical circuit from Fender and box put it together and put out a Marshall that's how that started. I used to go to The Bletchley Factory where I would plug my guitar in and play really loud to test the amps cause I couldn't get used to the Marshall sound. I like my box sound all the people on the assembly line would walk out cause they would complain that I was playing too loud and they couldn't work under those circumstances which was quite funny and I went there about four times. Every time I went there Jim Marshall would come out from the office down the road and go I knew you were here cause I could hear you down the road. He was a very nice guy and he was a drum teacher. He had the Ealing shop with Mitch Mitchell who was learning the drums there. Mitch Mitchell by the way was an actor, child actor and if you look at a lot of the English films you'll see him as a school boy. Very good actor and he was in many films.... incorporated school kids and Jim was very affable kind of eye. He knew nothing about amplifiers. Yet it's funny to see today every band has got a Marshall amplifier. And that was built in the beginning by someone who knew nothing about amplifiers. He was a drum teacher. I always find that slightly amusing and Ken Flegg and Ken Bran were the two electricians that built the electronics with the sound. So that was how that came about. I lived in Hounslow, Aston. Ealing was our nearest Guitar Shop and I did buy my 335 from there. I went there with the intention of buying a Jet Firebird Gretsch and then after half an hour of sales pitch he said forget the Gretch, he said that's a toy compared to the 335. And I went but I want the Gretch. I love the Jet Firebird. He said no no, you all appreciate the 335 Gibson much more later in life. I ended up with a 335. I went there with the intention of buying a Gretch and walked out with the Gibson and I was paying 30 shillings on the HP... high purchase, and my other 30 shillings went for the amplifier so I was left with next to nothing to live on for the the week. I was working in a factory at the time making stroboscopes for submarines. Everybody should do that at some some point in the life. The world is your oyster and you can make a stroboscope for a submarine... Musicians Ritchie admire I've never been one to want to perform with other people because I always feel slightly inadequate and I always feel that I should really be able to do it myself on my own. I'm not one for kind of having people play with me just because they're celebrities. Although I love Paul Rogers his voice, wonderful blues guy, the best. McCartney is a very good player too. I love Bob Dylan because I love his attitude as well as his wonderful songs. I'm very hard to please in that way. But obviously Billy Joel. To me America has two geniuses Billy Joel and Bob Dylan. George Harrison I did play with George Harrison. He wanted me to join the band called The Beatles. I'd never heard of them and I knew they were going nowhere so I said: no, absolutely not! The truth is he was friends with Jon Lord and Ian Paice. He lived just down the road... in Henley I think it was, and he was over in Australia when we were there as Deep Purple and he said to me very politely can I get up on stage with you and use your guitar. And I said of course. I was flattered, sure enough we all got up on stage and we did the old rock and roll number... it was 'Lucille' by Little Richard. And we had a good time. He's a very nice man, very serious and very complimentary. It was overwhelming to play with a Beatle. I mean there'll never be another band like the Beatles. The Beatles early stuff I absolutely love... "I Want To Hold Your Hand", "From Me To You", that stuff these simple melodies were fantastic. George was very modest, a very quiet man, I noticed when we were on stage he had big feet cause he was tapping out the rhythm and I did look down at one point and I thought my God he has big feet.... George was great! Meeting Eric Clapton This little story is how I met Eric Clapton. I remember Deep Purple was supporting Cream at The Forum in Los Angeles. Funny enough in the front row I think was Jimmy Hendrix and George Harrison sitting right there right in front of me which was a kind of a strange art of what I was doing. Before the show I think Eric came in to the dressing room I was in with Purple. We'd never met formly met before so we introduced each other little bit of small talk and I was always impressed with Eric's not only his ability to play brilliant guitar but his sound. I loved the Fat Sound he got so I was questioning him I said Eric what strings were you using when you first started playing and he said I was using Clifford Essex Strings. So I went wow Clifford Essex, I immediately after the meeting got my Clifford Essex Strings which I played for quite a while and then he also said that he took up Picato Strings. So I went for Picato Strings after that but I was trying to figure out how he got this great sound. Basically he was using Clifford Essex Strings in the beginning and then it went to Picato, and all these strings I used for years all because of him. Then we all went on stage did our thing and we went on as usual. The next time I saw him, I think it was my birthday, he had been sick and he'd been in the hospital which was in Minneapolis I think, or one of those places. He was in the same hotel as we were. I had a knock at the door, he'd just been let out of the hospital. I answered the door and Eric was there he had a little wooden pole and on the end of the pole was a duck and the duck would quack as he pushed it along. He said this is a present for you on your birthday and I was taken back because I didn't know Eric that well. I took the duck and we exchanged pleasantries and I asked him how he was doing blah blah blah I had the duck for years and it was it was a nice present from him. The beginning of the Strat actually came indirectly from Eric Clapton. I was living in Acton with the band, Purple. We were all together in one house. I'd often been interested in playing a Strat. One of the roadies for Eric knew one of our roadies and he came over to the house with this Strat, with a slight bent neck, bowed neck, and I was very intrigued with this guitar so I picked it up and I said would you sell this? And he said yes. I think I paid £ 60,- for the guitar which used to be Erics. And Eric gave it to whoever this guy was, I forgot his name, the roadie. I played that guitar on a song we did on "Deep Purple" called "Emmeretta". I used the Wah Wah pedal because that was the trendy thing to have in those days. Incidentally one of the first people that I remember playing a Wah Wah pedal was Big Jim Sullivan. He was my guitar teacher who lived around the corner. That was way back with Marty Wild. He played a thing called The Bat and it was a DeAmond foot pedal which if you push the pedal one way it was volume and if you pushed it up it was tone. So you had this round effect this if you pushed it around with your foot it would give you this Wah Wah effect and that was to me the first Wah Wah pedal I ever heard. And of course Jim was brilliant. Anyway back to this roadie who sold me this Strat for £ 60 that used to be Erics and I played that on "Emmeretta" blah blah blah and then after that I bought another Strat which was the Sunburst Strat and I also purchased the Black Strat as far as I remember this would have been 1970... '71... What I used to do with my strats was I had a habit of not liking one particular neck so what I do was take the neck off via the three or four screws at the back of the neck. I would also glue the neck so it was more stable. Because Fender has a habit as much as I love them and play them still, the top string, the top E, tends to go off the fretboard a little bit and the bottom E comes in so if you pull the neck up and I used to glue it and then it would stay in the position and not drift because sometimes it would drift with these three screws instead of you know being glued down. So that was a little thing I used to do with my my Strats. Another time we were in a hotel in I think it was Melbourne Australia. What happened was I knew that Eric was with his band in the hotel we'd had three days there where we'd been woken up very early with hammering the usual nonsense that goes down in hotels. And we were so sick of it we actually threatened the frontdesk if you wake us up again tomorrow we will bring all our amplification into a room and play at three o'clock in the morning and see how you like your patrons... liking hearing this noise. And which we did the next day, of course the hammering started as per usual, they took no notice of what we said. So we went ahead and brought in some Marshalls, stacked them and my friend actually started playing the guitar. He started playing some bad blues actually and what happened was as soon as he started playing it was so loud we got a bang on the door and it was Eric's security. And believe it or not Eric was in the next room to where we were and I thought Eric was in another floor way away from where we were and that was embarrassing. So we stopped playing as him to be next door and Eric he's trying to sleep it's three in the morning and my friend who's not a good player started playing this noise. So we stopped but the next day we had some words with his security and I said look I'm really sorry I didn't realize we were next door. Anyway that kind of went away but it kind of was embarrassing especially to think that Eric might have thought that it was me making this racket on the guitar, I was in there having a drink but I wasn't playing but that doesn't get me off the hook as it was really my idea to make all this noise. Ofcourse when we left that hotel we came back to England and we noticed the hotel that we stayed in, there was a chalkboard and written up on this chalkboard was there will be at seven o'clock in the morning a fire drill and we went here we go again. We're going to hear noises and things so we said if you do that we will bring our amplifiers in. We'll start bashing away doing what we did in Australia and luckily enough one of the guys behind the desk said wait a minute, we've just read about this in the paper. These guys will do that so they changed the time of the fire drill to a respectable one o'clock in the afternoon. So our reputation preceded us, you know, so now we're known for going into hotels with Marshalls and bashing away. I've since corresponded with Eric because he has that myopathy which I have which is arthritis that is not one of the best things to have when you're a musician. That's my small Eric Clapton story. Child In Time Child In Time, great song! We used to play with a San Francisco band and they were called It's A Beautiful Day and they had this song called "Bombay Calling" which we kind of stole the idea. We knew them as good friends. We saw them later in London I think it was, and I think Jon Lord was quite familiar with the girl in the band and David LaFlamme was playing violin... fantastic wall of repeat echo and it gave it such a haunting atmosphere. I really liked It's A Beautiful Day and at one of our rehearsals we just started playing the two notes of "Bombay Calling" and then Jon started playing the lead over the top then we gave it to Ian Gillan. Ian did a remarkable job, a brilliant job with his falsettos the way he went up in steps and he did about two takes in the studio. Mind you, he was being very naughty under the piano with some woman but we won't go into that... at the same time he was singing, so maybe he was inspired by that, I don't know, he did a great job. He came in and heard it. He said, oh no I want to change it, I want to do better. And we said "no, you've done a brilliant job, let's put it out like that" and Jon and I kind of made sure that he didn't change it because he wanted to do another version, another take. We said: "No, it's perfect". It was like probably two takes or three takes he did it in. And it was just wonderful how he did that, going up in steps to the falsettos. He wrote the words but when we saw It's A Beautiful Day in London we said "I hope you don't mind but we stole your idea". They said "yes, we know" but they had stolen one of our ideas it had two titles "It's A Hard Road" and "Wring That Neck". So that was one of our songs and we said "Okay, you know what", we shook hands and said "We won't sue you, if you don't sue us". And that's how it was left with It's A Beautiful Day if you like "Child In Time", then listen to "Bombay Calling" by It's A Beautiful Day. Smoke On The Water Smoke on the Water, this is how it went. We were playing in Switzerland, we had a recording unit there, the mobile of the Rolling Stones which we did most of our stuff with. Ian Paice was up on a kind of a stage in a ballroom that we were playing at and nobody else was there. Just Ian, I jumped up and I said to Ian what tempo haven't we played on the latest which was Machine Head. And he said well we haven't done this tempo. And we laid down a tempo and I went okay, so I started playing and we often, Paicey and I, would play the both of us cause there was no limitations to the music. We could just play anything we felt like, so I started playing "Smoke on the Water" and I was always looking for a very simple riff to play because I'd heard The Kinks play "You Really Got Me", The Stones were playing "Satisfaction" and I felt like maybe there was a commercial element to my brain which said if you want to be heard you got to keep it simple. So I went okay, so I played the "Smoke on the Water" riff which was in like parallel forths. I love parallel forths cause they're they're Renaissance based again and I love that evil kind of forths or fifths rather than thirds so I play and then I put down A and a couple of chords, then I went to a C minor, to an A flat major, G minor, back to that C Minor, A flat major, G minor back to the [plays the riff] and I would play that with my fingers... the fourths. That was what appealed to me at that time. I love hearing fourths and fifths. Fifths being.... [plays the riff] so there was that it has an evil undertone to it. The rest of the band arrived half an hour later and I played them the construction of what I've written along with Ian and later on we put that down at the time. The rest of the band learned the cord structure I put together and the riff we put it down in the recording unit. We had the police banging on the door trying to get us out of the place cause we were making so much noise and luckily we had a master take on that and then that was given to Ian Gillan who usually did the words. I personally had nothing to do with the words of the song, I just gave them the air of the melody the chord structure and the riff. [Candice asks:] "Did you think it was going to be a hit?" No, no, it was just something that we wrote, Ian and I basically just banged it out on the spare of the moment. We were just having fun, that was it and then a week later maybe or something like that they came up with the words from the fire that was there in the casino which was pretty horrendous. That was quite frightening. We were watching Frank Zappa and we all had to try and get out of the building. Frank turned around and said "I don't want people to get out of control. Don't panic!" With that he jumped out the window. We were on the ground floor, and he was first out. The rest of us just tried to get out of this back entrance and unfortunately there was this coat hanger that went across the exit and it was stopping everybody from getting out of this gigantic fire which was kind of peculiar. Then you start to realize... the whole place burnt down in 20 minutes and the smoke it's fire can happen very quickly.... And that was the end of that. Ritchie's Passion For Music I retain my passion for music by listening to old music from the 15-1400s. Listening to a few bands that I've become friends with in Germany, Czech, Finland and Sweden. They're still playing the music that really excites me. I'm obsessed with that stuff, it was so organic, that music just grabs me. I obviously don't listen to the radio in America where they're playing the latest whatever it is. I suppose as we progress and change generations, I cannot relate to what they would play on the radio here and I don't listen to rock and roll so much anymore. I listen to the old rock from the 50s when it was fresh, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore playing, James Burton with Ricky Nelson, the Everly Brothers, I love all that stuff. Buddy Holly being my favorite at the time, of course I feel like an old granddad, you know, complaining about the music they're playing on the radio at the moment. I feel that back in the 70s when Eric Clapton was playing Cream and that stuff, it was thoughtful music, you would listen to "White Room" or something. You didn't need... that you didn't have to hear, that you could actually go "wow that's a great song". "White Room" fantastic, I love Cream. Eric of course great. He started the whole thing. There are so many types of music that I like but very rarely do I hear it on the radio. I'd rather hear talk radio about who's the latest president you know and stuff like that kind of that bores people to death. I don't hear good music from my point of view. It might be good music but it's not something I want to hear when the family all get into the truck and we go on a bit of a holiday which probably is like 20 miles down the road cause I don't like to travel. All I hear is maybe Taylor Swift or something. I find it hard to relate to that but it's not wrong, it's the new generation wanting to hear that. That's probably as great to them as the Beatles and the Cream was, and Jimmy Hendrix was to me so I can't really complain but I do like to complain and I will complain and I think the crap that they're playing on the radio today is bloody awful. © Ritchie Blackmore Offical You Tube Channel 2024