STEVE LUONGO I Was In Rainbow For A Week Despite working with Legends like The Who's John Entwistle and Robin Zander from Cheap Trick, Brian Johnson from AC/DC and Anne Wilson from Heart, Steve Luongo just didn't click with Ritchie Blackmore which meant that his stint in the band Rainbow was extremely shortlived. What's your connection with Ritchie? Well, I was in Rainbow for a week. I got a call from a friend of mine, this is a good story I don't tell it very much, I got a call from a friend of mine saying... this is out on Long Island and Ritchie lived on Long Island. He's saying Ritchie Blackmore is trying to get in touch with you and I thought well come on if Ritchie Blackmore is trying to get in touch with me it's really not that hard. So I get this swirl of you know half a dozen phone calls throughout the day and I say this is crazy and I knew that his manager, Rainbow's manager Bruce Payne he had an office in Connecticut was which was right over the state line so I rang him up and I said "Hi, this is Steve Luongo and I've been getting calls from friends that Ritchie Blackmore is trying to get in touch with me" and if that's the case I wanted to give you my contact details. And Bruce said "Well, yeah". He was kind of hesitant, I don't know that he was ready and then all of a sudden he said "Well, what are you doing tomorrow" and I said "I'm easy tomorrow". He said "Why don't you stop by the office". Anyway one thing led to another and I brought some stuff of me playing and they had heard of the things that we did in Rat Race Choir and so they asked me to come to an audition which I went out to Long Island. I drove out to the Island and there was a single one kick drum, just a four-piece basic drum set and all the guys were there. As it turns out Joe Lynn Turner, the singer, old friend of mine from New Jersey, David Rosenthal, the keyboardplayer, same thing. I had glanced off Roger Glover, you know over the years. Cookie, who was Ritchie's guitar tech, grew up on Long Island so I knew him. Colin... just I knew almost everybody in the band but Ritchie... if you know anything about Ritchie, he just not liked to be off balance. So he says to me "Do you do a drum solo" and I said "Yeah". He said "How long? I said ""Whatever you need". He said "A minute? Two minutes?" I said "Yeah, whatever you need, 5 minutes, 7 minutes... if that's what you need"... "Ten minutes?" And he's just taking the piss right so I said "Yeah!" I said "Listen, whatever you need in a drumsolo, you got it". So we start playing a couple of songs and he goes into "Long Live Rock and Roll" which is a shuffle and he sits down, he waves the keyboard player off, he sits down and unplugs his guitar and tells Roger to play on and so we're doing this shuffle beat. I play a massive kit and I'm an overplayer. I'm a lead drummer just like John was a lead bassplayer and so Roger's filling on bass and we're playing together and I love doing that so I'm playing all stuff off of him and then he looks at Roger and gives him a sign. So now I'm sitting there Ritchie's unplugged, Roger's been played out and I'm on my own in a shuffle on a tiny set of drums and I had heard the stories, you know Ritchie was a prankster or tough here and that and I didn't really know him but I said "Man, you know, if you're want to see if I can play for 10 minutes, you're going to hear every freaking note I've ever learned in my life" and I mean, I am just playing and my goal was you're going to plug that guitar and play me back in or we're going to be here all night and so I'm playing on the rims and I'm under the symbols and on the sides of the drums and I'm going just berserk right until he can't take it anymore and he plugged back in and played me out. So that was kind of an omen and that things were probably not going to go well. Then we went to the studio and we recorded a track and there were some differences of opinion about how tight we were playing and what I should have just done, although I'm glad I didn't, what I should have done is said "Oh yeah, you're right, let's do it again", which I didn't do. I said "Nah, you're wrong, let's go in and listen to it" and you really don't want to call Ritchie out. And it was just not meant to be. The first thing he did in the studio, and we'll leave it here, the guy's a brilliant musician and you can't take any of that away from him and I know some people that have played with him, Bobby Rondinelli for years and so on and so forth, but he's coming down the stairs to the lobby of the studio and I'm talking all Rat Race Choir going "Yeah, Long Island". It's like a big you know old home week... And he comes down the stairs and he goes "Ah Rat Race Choir, that's an interesting name. Who came up with that one?" So I said "Bob Dylan, because it's from a Bob Dylan song". And he said "Oh really, was he in the band?" and I said "No, he's a songwriter from Greenwich Village". So I knew that it was going to go pear shaped any minute, just go in and do your thing, and I figured the only thing that I was going to get out of there with was my self-respect, not to be told that I did something wrong that I didn't. That's showbizz, it's the one of those... I think everybody has to have one of those in their career, so that was mine. © Vintage Rock Podcast - December 1, 2022