DEEP PURPLE'S MOUNTING MAJESTIES

DEEP PURPLE'S MOUNTING MAJESTIES

Richard Rlegel

Deep Purple are beautifully cooperative examples of the “dinosaur theory" of heavy metal rock. Their metal-gorged footsteps shook the earth in the early 1970s, they were brontosaurus-huge on all fronts of rock—records, radio, concerts— but their big-body, small-head developmental imbalance finally caught up with them in 1976, and since that overnight extinction, all we ever hear of Deep Purple now are occasional, furtive replays of “Smoke On The Water” or “Highway Star," on the AOR. The record companies unearth Deep Purple’s massive bones every couple years or so, and put them on display in museum-style greatest-hits or concert compilation albums, but nobody seems to notice, and Deep Purple sink back into their Mesozoic ooze, for another good long sleep.

Initially Deep Purple followed a highly ’60s-ish rock aesthetic, one borrowed from Vanilla Fudge, in that the group chose the most unlikely outside songs available, and then covered them in wildly histrionic, overblown versions that provided instant “psychedelia,” minus the need for substance consumption. Of course, Deep Purple speeded up their borrowed material, to foaming-fingers Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore arpeggios, in contrast to the Fudge’s torturous spaceouts, but the formula was much the same. This route brought Deep Purple two big U.S. hits within a few months of their founding, via their covers of Joe South’s “Hush” and Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman.”

Following this auspicious start, Deep Purple floundered a bit, as they searched for a more personal (if equally chartworthy) style of rock, and in early 1970, when they released Concerto For Group and Orchestra, recorded at the Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it looked like Jon Lord and the Purps might be lost to Moody Blues-style hyperbolerock for good. But Deep Purple had also replaced Messrs. Evans and Simper with Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, respectively, and the new members’ somewhat tougher musical abilities came together with the founders’ identity-quest at just the right time to produce the smashing Deep Purple In Rock, the album that introduced the “classic” Deep Purple sound.

Deep Purple were writing their own material now; the speed and flash remained, but the pompous orchestral-rock fusions were thrown out the window, to be used and abused by the Moodies or E,L&P as desired. Deep Purple’s booming new style turned out to be very long on clever, brain-seizing hooks, and rather short on lyrics that provided anything more than incidental commentary on the songs’ speedsucking rushes. For a smart bloke like Jon Lord, palying dumb in his humor-informed lyrics was the perfect way to balance out his nimble-fingered keyboard virtuosity, and to avoid the pretentiousness that plagues these academic Limeys.

In Rock was followed by the equallysuccessful Fireball., and then, in early 1972, came Machine Head, the classic Deep Purple album to end all D.P. LP’s for us American fans, as it contains “Smoke On The Water,” “Highway Star,” and “Space Trucking.” Unfortunately, Machine Head was Deep Purple’s highwater mark, and a year later, some of the same critics who had congratulated the band for In Rock and Machine Head were now castigating them for continuing the formula ort subsequent records. Deep Purple were already the butts of many rockwriterly in-jokes about the absolute interchangeability of their members, and in 1973 the band went self-fulfilling prophecy, as Gillan and Glover were replaced by David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes (but the band still sounded the same as always!)

Purple albums like Burn and Stormbringer were accomplished and professional, but that nice balance of instrumental overkill and conceptual dumbness seemed to be fading, and the group began to sound rather desperately caring about their pop. Founder Ritchie Blackmore dropped out in 1975, to be replaced by the James Gang’s Tommy Bolin. The surviving Purps must have begun to wonder a bit about their band’s vitality, when it appeared that any one of them could be readily and seamlessly ousted by a mere American. In mid-1976, Deep Purple folded for good.

Of course there were many immediate spinoffs—Paice, Ashton, & Lord; David Coverdale’s Whitesnake; the Ian Gillan Band; etc.—but none of the ex-Purps became particularly successful, except for Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, which has thrived in large part because Blackmore has creatively applied the metallic-interchangeability theory he learned so thoroughly in Deep Purple: Any guy you can hire is only as good as he sounds like the guy before him, all the way to the bank. But I don’t look for anything as unsettling as “Highway Star” from Rainbow, ever. Rock belongs to the professionals now, man.

Deep Purple were a monstrous, clever dinosaur, more entertaining than most, but if you want to hear them now, you’ll have to go dredge the primeval swamps. Dinosaurs are people too. Extinct is forever. Nobody’s gonna take my car...