Deep Purple?

Who?

You know, they did that cover of Billy Joe Royal’s “Hush,” turned it into a manic speedrun hit back in ’68.

Naww, that’s somebody else. You’re trying to think of the band that recorded that bombastic atrocity, “Concerto for Group and Orchestra,” with the Royal Philharmonic.

NO! No! Deep Purple ain’t classical music, Deep Purple is one of the most honcho energy-blasts around, they been puttin ’ out nothin ’ but sheer lava-lanches of sockout rock’n’roll since their first album, Deep Purple in Rock!

(Fade to punchout' sounds. Who are these Deep Purples, anyway?)

Deep Purple was born in the heyday of flower power, five rockers from the alleys and suburbs of London. Though they might not say so, the unofficial leader of the group has always been Jon Lord, their walrus-moustached organist. He comes from roughly the same neck of the musical woods as Keith Emerson — classical training up the ass, and did write not only “Concert for Group .. but a second, related piece of tacky nonsehse, “Gemini Suite.” It may even be true that, like Frank Zappa and Keith E., Lord possesses more of the sort of knowledge that you get in conservatories than it’s safe for a rocker to have.

There is a schizoid quality to Deep Purple’s music — shifting immediately from “Concert” to an album like In Rock was like going for a ride in a Parisian hansom and disembarking in a New York subway. But both Lord and his less-schooled buddies decided long ago that what they wanted to do was churn out good, railing noise, and have a ball doing it. You might think they’d have convinced themselves they were the greatest band in the world, because they could straddle the gap between kitsch and raunch, but far from coming on with any super-star-cilious conceits, Deep Purple are just like you and me. They like their tacos hot.

They had a flair from the beginning; it managed to get them signed to British Polydor and not long after to Bill Cosby’s short-lived Tetragrammaton in the U.S. They weren’t too strong on original material, so they padded their first pair of albums with covers — “I’m So Glad,” “Hey Joe,” “River Deep, Mountain High.”

The Purp also specialized in wild, protracted, uptempo instrumental breaks. It was the season of Cream’s pinnacle, after all. But there was more to Deep Purple’s ersatz exercises than just jammin’ them blues. Every once in awhile, somebody would throw in some bullshit little classical cop, which tended to make some peopel think in front that the band was a mite pretentious.

It wasn’t Brahms that got ’em their first flash, though, it was Joe South, in the form of the originally rather Gene Pitneyish “Hush,” which they covered in the manner previously described. It was a hit, bigger in England than here, but their first three albums failed to create any stir at all. Just another band. Then Tetragrammaton folded, leaving Deep Purple in the lurch in the States, not doing that much better at home.

Two things happened to change their European status: the original vocalist and bassist split, and were replaced by Ian Gillian and Roger Glover, as the first move. “When Ian and Roger came into the band,” says Lord, “we tightened up immediately. We’re not exactly funky, but we became funkier when they joined. It was just what we needed.”

The next thing they did was to get hitched up for their historic Albert Hall concert, performing the infamous “Concerto,” with the “Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,” conducted by a portly gent named Malcolm Arnold.

The Royal P.O. specialized in soundtracks for spy flicks and the like. The performance itself was a classic of sorts, the orchestra mushing about in the symphonic boutique for awhile then shutting up to let the rock group work over the same themes, with fuzztone. Somewhere in the latter stages, ,they finally got together for a “historic jam of the giants,” as Mick Jagger said of Jamming with Edward.

Quality-wise, it was about on a par with Edward, but you can bet your ass it was historic. Albert Hall was packed, the show was written up in the straight and rock press alike, broadcast on radio and TV and in general enabled Deep Purple to snatch the attention of the public. And who thought the whole thing up?

“It was meant,” said Lord, “tonguein-cheek, for people to have a laugh, but it was misinterpreted almost everywhere. I never set out to write something serious. We had a promoter who was very high-powered, always full of ideas, and one day he said: “Why don’t you do this, write a big piece?” So I said okay, and wrote a, few notes a week more for my own amusement than anything else. I had almost forgotten about it when all of a sudden he calls me up and says, ‘You’re playing Albert Hall in September.’ This is June! So I rushed and did it. It was never intended to be a real combination of the two forms, because I think it emasculates the rock when you try to do that. We rehearsed it three times with the orchestra, went in and did it. Then they recorded it. Its appearance in the U.S. as our first Warners album gave a lot of people the wrong idea. Deep Purple in Rock should have been out first.”

The “Concerto” was for laughs

Lord’s liner notes verify his claims: “What puzzles me, is that an evening which was intended to be, and in fact turned out to be, FUN, should be treated by some of the critics with such longfaced seriousness.”

But “Gemini Suite” was still to come., “That came about,” continued Lord, “because ‘Concerto’ caused a real stir in England and the BBC said, ‘Ah, smashing, do another one.’ and commissioned me to do it! You just don’t turn the BBC down. Besides, it would, of course, add to my credentials, my roster of accomplishment.. ^ ”

“You mean, if you ever wanted to get a gig writing movie soundtracks or something,” asked your ever-alert reporter.

“Right. So I wrote it, and the band performed it one time, but there was a slight amount of dissension. They didn’t want to do it, so the record came out without them. I don’t think about it much, but both of them were fun at the time.”

Depite the initial bringdown of “Concerto,” Warners outdid themselves, at least in their advertising department, when In Rock was released. You opened Rolling Stone one day upon a full page spread with the cover picture of the band’s faces carved Mt. Rushmore and a giant headline: “POWER TO D. PURPLE!”

Unfortunately, In Rock never carved out its rightful chunk of the U.S. charts. It got into the Top 100, as did its successor, Fireball, but until Machine Head, the Purp never really broke into the Superstar echelon.

At least not in America. At the same time, D.P. were busting ass and kicking their way all over Europe and straight up the charts thereof. Until some American pundits began to notice they were about the hottest thing on the continent and started calling them things like “the Grand Funk of Europe.” The band were a bit bemused, not to say amused, by all this. Lord asked me what I thought of Grand Funk. I said, “they’re all right.” He agreed, and wondered out loud, “I never could figure out why everyone compared us to them for so long. And still do.” Politics, pops.

But the qualities which make this group unique go much deeper than superficial similarities of sound. Not many people besides their fans know it, but Deep Purple have a superb sense of humor. Which is certainly more than you can say for Black Sabbath. Or Blpodrock. Or Grand Funk, for that matter. Or most people doing pop slop these days, Heavy or Folkie. Dig the antic impulse that infuses “Speed King:”

Good golly said little Miss Molly when she was rockin’ at the house of blue lights... (etc., etc.)

I’m a speedking you got to hear me sing I'm a speedking you got to see my fly.

Speed! You irresponsible motherfuckers! It’s like what Scott Fischer had to say in his review of Machine Head: “ ‘Highway Star’ is a great song about cars and girls, and the rest is different but not as exciting but whaddya want, a concept album about drag racing?” Or the lyrics to “Space Truckin’ ”:

We had a Ip t of luck on Venus We always have a ball on Mars Meeting all the groovy people We’ve rocked the Milky Way so far... We got music in our solar system We’re space-truckin’ round the stars.

Try that on David Crosby and Paul Kantner! Chubby Checker should cover it!

Deep Purple confirmed my suspicions. “Yeah,” said Roger, “It was me that thought up ‘everynaut’ for ‘Space Truckin’.’ Damn proud of it I am, too.”

“Lazy,” from Machine Head, features one of the more memorable lyrics of rock’n’roll history:

You ’re lazy you just stay in bed

You ’re lazy you just stay in bed

You don’t want no money,

you don’t want no bread.

“I doh’t see any point in laboring over an album for a whole year,” Lord economized. “We cut Machine Head in less than three weeks. It’s our best yet.”

The live shows are the same way. Everyone in the band mugs and goes through the get-it-on motions, but the happy irony is that by being so totally jive they manage to have a raving good time.

The other night, I saw Lord lean down and flatten his arms across most of the keyboard’s span, blasting out a purple sea of fog-noise, just like John Cale used to in “Sister Ray,” with the Velvet Underground back in ’68.

Later, I asked Lord about all this vaudevillian axeflaying. He took a quaff of his beer and explained the whole thing.

“Look,” he said, “what do you think our roots are? We’re not funky, exactly, although we became funkier. You take some guy from Macon, Georgia, who’s been playing blues all his life, whether he’s really good at it or not, he’s funky. We have a totally different set of roots, a different tradition. English bands borrow American R&B and use it the best they can. Beyond that they have to fall back on technique or pure emotion. I like to think that we’re a sort of happy medium.

“The same thing applies to all this stuff about ‘serious’ music and ‘fun’ music. I told you the ‘Concerto’ was for laughs. Well, when we go in to make a record, no matter what it is, or on stage for a show, we don’t... Look, take Black Sabbath. What is all this, all this doom stuff. It4s a lot of nonsense. We don’t see the necessity of that. We don’t see why this music has to be solemn.

“When I go onstage, I’m not trying to be serious, like teaching all the kids what good music is. I’m just bashing away a lot of the time. It’s fun, and it seems to me that that’s the purpose of the whole thing. Sometimes we do ‘Sabre Dance.’ Tonight, I started into ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ until,” he laujpis, “I realized I couldn’t play it. For no particular reason, nobody thinks there should be a reason for everything, and there isn’t you know.

“Sometimes I do enjoy engaging in absolute idiocy.”