Tag: deep purple

New Music

A new David Gilmour single:

A new Deep Purple single:

What do I think? The Purple song is pretty good. It’s the first release with their new guitar player, Simon McBride. I had only ever heard him on an episode of That Pedal Show, but he’s good. Really good. He’s not Ritchie Blackmore. I should not judge him based on the fact that he’s not Ritchie Blackmore. I am a Tommy Bolin fan and when Bolin replaced Blackmore in 1975 most of the Purple fandom shat on him because he isn’t Ritchie Blackmore. I would like to think I would have given him a chance were I paying attention and not four years old so in that spirit I want to give Simon McBride a chance. I gave Steve Morse a chance too, but he’s Steve Freakin’ Morse and he was already an absolute legend when he joined the band back in the 90’s. I saw the Steve Morse Purple live a few times. The guy was shockingly good. This song is okay.

Ian Gillan sounds particularly good here. I’ll wait for the full album release before I decide what I think for reals. I am not sure when it comes out, but it will be called =1, which is a name I probably would have tried to talk them out of if I were their A&R guy, or their producer, or their friend, or their neighbor who they occasionally talk to when we both happen to be outside doing yard work or something.

As for the David Gilmour song… woah. My one fear with his new record is that it sounds like it’s sort of a family band kind of thing. His wife has been his lyricist since the 90’s, but this time around his kids are playing all over the record as well. That sort of thing usually rubs me the wrong way. Other than that one irrational hang up, this song makes me really want this new album. The song is a killer. If it’s any indication of what we’re going to get with the full album then… yeah, bring it on. I want it now. Now!

Rock stars from the 60’s and 70’s who are still getting the job done in the 2020’s. Gilmour is 78 years old. Ian Gillan is 78 years old. Ian Paice is 75. Roger Glover is 78. Don Airey is 75. Simon McBride is 45 so… yeah, he’s younger than me so he doesn’t count for this discussion. Old people rocking. Who would have thought? Keep up the good work, old people. You too, young mister McBride.

I’ve Ruined Their Lives

Cats…

I just cleaned the living room, including sweeping and mopping the floor. The cats are so confused right now. They are utterly devastated. Miserable beyond words. I have literally ruined their tiny little lives.

Just wait until I vacuum the little area rug in front of the couch. Woah boy are they going to lose their shit.

Sorry, ladies.

There could be another reason for their misery. I’m listening to a Deep Purple live record and Glenn Hughes keeps screeching the way he used to on stage and they may just be mad about that. I can’t tell, but I am pretty sure it’s the sweeping and the mopping at the core of their displeasure.

Bernie Marsden

Back in the 80’s, the English hairband Whitesnake broke through in the US in a huge way. I was pretty uninterested. Hair bands did nothing for me, even those who have lead singers who used to be in one of my favorite bands.

Whitesnake’s frontman was David Coverdale who from 1973-1975 or so was the frontman and co-lead vocalist in Deep Purple. He made three records with them. The first is an all time classic, Burn. The second is crap, mostly, other than the title song, Stormbringer, which was also the name of one of the bands I played in back in high school. The third record, Come Taste the Band is nowhere near as good as Burn, but it’s still pretty fantastic.

I don’t know the timeline following that very well, but I think David Coverdale made a couple of solo records, one of which was called White Snake… gee… what was he thinking of when he came up with that name? From there his solo career morphed into the band Whitesnake. Other ex-Purple members, John Lord and Ian Paice, played in that band. I guess they were sort of similar to Deep Purple in a bluesy rock kinda way. At some point Coverdale started firing band members (that’s how I heard it at least) and replaced them with people who were more in tune with 80’s corporate rock and eventually that lead to the self titled album that had a ton of hits on it and that was that.

Bernie Marsden was one of the guitar players in Whitesnake before the corporate shuffle happened. I knew him by reputation but I never gave the band a chance. Well, never until the pandemic when one day I found myself on Apple Music listening to Burn and saw Whitesnake as a suggested listen and I gave an old live record a spin. It sounded Purple-esque. It wasn’t bad. I didn’t take to it the way I once took to Deep Purple, but I had to give it credit. It was a good record.

There was one song in particular that I really liked. I didn’t realize it was a cover song until later, but it’s a good song so what can you do?

There were two guitar players in this band so I don’t know for sure which parts were Bernie Marsden, but they both sound pretty good to me. The thing that I really knew Marsden from was actually not his music, or his playing, but it was his guitar collection. Specifically his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, which has the unfortunate name “The Beast”. That guitar is one of those legendary Les Pauls, like Peter Green’s ’59 or Clapton’s ’60. The guitar’s reputation almost supersedes the guitarist’s, if you can believe it.

Bernie Marsden passed away. By all accounts he was a quality guy, a great guitar player, and the proud owner of a classic instrument. He also wrote a couple of those big Whitesnake hits. David Coverdale had a thing for taking songs from the pre-hairband period and re-recording them and releasing them as singles. Marsden co-wrote “Fool for Your Lovin'” which was a good song even to my ears in the 80’s. He also co-wrote “Here I Go Again” which was a mega-hit the second time around. Fortunately the hit version swapped out the word hobo from the chorus, though Coverdale replaced it with drifter which along with gypsy and rock and roll were words that he used over and over and over and over again, constantly.

Rest in peace, Bernie Marsden. I’ll give some of those old Whitesnake records a spin in your honor today.

Two Fun Monday Things

I just want to add a quick post to mention two things that just happened because they are funny and weird and worth mentioning on a pointless blog like this.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to listen to podcasts while I work. I play them through the Apple HomePod Minis in the bedroom. Today when I tried to connect to them via Airplay they weren’t available. I asked Siri to tell me the weather and it came back saying it wasn’t connected to the internet. Our HomePods are setup through Jen’s Home app so I told her and when she gets a chance she’ll look at it.

A few minutes later, I am sitting at my desk working and suddenly, seemingly at random, Deep Purple’s Space Truckin’ comes roaring out of the HomePods. Oh yeah, it does! Come on, let’s go space truckin’ babie!

I know why it happened, but it’s just really funny that it did. Once the song was over it started playing some horrid Aerosmith song and I couldn’t get that bastard shut off fast enough. The Purple song though, that was a treat.

A few minutes after that I decided to water the plants. Literally, that’s not a urination reference. I literally watered the plants. I have a candle burning on the same table the plants sit on. As I was watering one particular plant I smelled smoke. I then saw smoke. Huh? Oh, it’s just my arm. It was over the candle and my arm hairs were singeing off. That’s all. Nothing major. No damage done… except to a few arm hairs. I can still sort of smell it though.

All of this before 10:00am

45 Years

45 years ago tonight we lost Tommy Bolin.

What a colossal waste.

Rhythm

I’ve never been one to claim that I have any particular rhythmic skills beyond the barest minimum, but I need to ask this question.

I’m listening to some music as I wrap up my Friday at work. Deep Purple, Made in Japan. Strange Kind of Woman is playing as I type this. It dawned on me a minute ago that I kinda type in time to the music. Not every letter, but things like space bars and returns, they tend to fall on a beat. It’s far from perfect, but it’s close enough that when I do it I notice it. Also, I think I type a little slower when slower tempo songs are playing in the background.

That’s weird, right?

Am I the only one who catches that?

Am I the only doofus?

Classic Rock Throw Back Day

Today during my lunch break I was poking around on bookfayce and somehow ended up looking at some classic rock magazine site. There were a bunch of random articles that were about 10% of interesting, but I spent almost the whole hour there.

One article was the singer from 80’s hair metal band Warlock listing off the 10 albums that influenced her. Okay, I’ll bite. First on the list was Live In the Heart of the City by Whitesnake.

Now there’s a band that I probably should have liked back in the 80’s that I really did not like. Whitesnake more or less is David Coverdale, and he was the singer on one of my all time favorite albums. Burn by Deep Purple.

Coverdale made three albums with Purple between ’73 and ’75 (or was it ’74 and ’75, I used to know for sure but I’m old and senile now). Burn was the first one and it was amazing (apart from one song that’s just okay and one that is a complete dud. Everything else is outstanding, especially the title song). Stormbringer was the second. That’s the opposite of Burn. The title track is perfect and every other song on the album is about as interesting as listening to a toilet flush. The third album was Come Taste the Band and it’s divisive among Purple fans because it had Tommy Bolin on guitar instead of Ritchie Blackmore. I am not on the negative side of that fight. Tommy Bolin is a guitar hero of mine (so is Ritchie Blackmore) and I think the album is pretty good.

Now David Coverdale, in my humble opinion, is pretty good on those records. Not great, but good. There are times when Glen Hughes, the bass player and other singer at the time, shows him up but for the most part he’s fine. When you view them all as a whole you can see patterns emerge though, that were much clearer in Whitesnake during the 80’s.

David is a good singer, but he’s not the best lyricist. Yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black, and compared to me he’s freakin’ Shakespeare, but when compared to his lyric writing peers he does come up a little short. As a front man… well… it’s pretty clear that he saw Robert Plant when he was a kid and just decided to do that for a living. If Coverdale did something, it’s likely that Plant did it first.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the guy. He made Burn. He is in my personal rock music hall of fame. The guy gets an A+ for life in my book. It’s just… you know… compared to his immediate peers in both the mid to late 70’s and the hair spray 80’s… he comes up a little short, that’s all. Less so in the 80’s, I think, but… I mean… he did replace Ian Gillan who for my money is the best rock vocalist we’ve ever had… so even with a world class effort in Burn, he’s always going to be “the other guy.” I mean no offense, even though it seems like I am meaning offense. Seriously. Burn… you can do no wrong in my book after that, David. My hat is eternally tipped.

Anyway, I was talking about lyrics. Let’s just say that stylistically he is a little… repetitive. There are words and themes and such that he used A LOT on those three Purple albums that were still being hammered home in the mid-80s when Whitesnake broke in the US. He kinda seems to have a few binkies that he clings very tightly too, lyrically speaking.

So today I read that article where Doro Pesche… Peche… the singer from Warlock listed her favorite albums and that Whitesnake live album from 1980 or so was the first on the list.

Now we’ve made it clear that I love Deep Purple, and that I didn’t really love Whitesnake in the hair band phase in the 80’s. What about Whitesnake before then? I was always curious. Ian Paice and Jon Lord from Purple were also in the band for a while and those two guys are absolute giants in my book. Is it possible that 70’s Whitesnake would work for me in a way that Purple did and 80’s Whitesnake didn’t? I always wondered, but I never looked into it. They had a reputation for sleaze even before they sold any records to speak of in the US and my tolerance for sleaze rock is slim to none.

Now here we are in the quarantine wasteland that is 2020. Should I give ol’ David’s first post-Purple band a shot? Did Doro inspire me to do some digging in Apple Music?

Yes, yes she did.

While I was making dinner tonight I brought up that live album. I figured I’d play a little Mr Coverdale Bingo. I was assuming he’d use the phrase Rock and Roll in one of the first songs. Sure enough, it’s right there in the first chorus. I was a little more interested in another binky though. I asked myself, what’s the over under on the first time he says the word “gypsy?” Two songs? No, three. He’ll say it in the third song.

First song, second verse, first line. “It must be the gypsy in me.”

Oh, David.

I listened to about half of the record. It wasn’t bad. It was actually better than I thought it would be, though I wasn’t giving it the closest listen ever. It felt a little like Deep Purple Junior, which wasn’t too different from what I expected. One of the guitar players (David frequently gave the names of the soloists [thank you, David] and I may have missed them while prepping the quinoa, but I’m pretty sure there were two lead guitar players) was a little too fond of slide. The other guy was pretty good. Mostly though it just hammered home the undeniable fact that Ian Paice is pretty much untouchable on the drums, and Jon Lord is a god on the B3.

Anyway, that’s my very long and very pointless classic rock throw back story for today. Again, no offense to David Coverdale. Burn. Perfect. Enough said. I could listen to you sing “Might Just Take Your Life” or “Mistreated” all day long. Perfect. Coverdale and Hughes in harmony on “You Fool No One,” spot on. The two of them trading lines on “Lay Down, Stay Down” is basically a template for all rock bands with two voices that followed. “Sail Away”…. just 100% full on perfect.