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Ian Gillan and Roger Glover had come in, so that gave us new blood. And then everything clicked with In Rock. In the beginning, I was a little bit lost as to what style I really had. Many would say your style became heavier and darker.īlackmore: Very true. : Your playing in the second incarnation of Purple was strikingly different from your work in the first version of the band. When we got around to playing it, he put in this brilliant organ solo. And when I got together with Jon Lord, I said I really liked it. : It’s interesting that the band became so popular with a cover of Joe South’s Hush.īlackmore: I used to live in Hamburg, Germany, and I’d heard an earlier version of that song on the radio. We’d be drinkers a bit, but the drug thing was not for us. : Was the hippie drug culture a factor during the early years of Purple?īlackmore: Nobody in the band took drugs. I did think our very first record, Shades of Deep Purple, was pretty good, but with the two that followed, we were kind of feeling our way, like the blind leading the blind. : Have you tried to perform at actual Renaissance festivals?īlackmore: Lame, I’d call it. And our fans know that if they come to our shows, they can dress up. We have a lot of people on stage all dressed up in medieval outfits. In fact, Blackmore’s Night is so quiet on stage that it’s very difficult to play certain things with people shouting. “On one hand I’ve gone from the loudest band in the world (Purple was named the world’s loudest band in the Guinness Book of World Records) to the most quiet band in the world,” Blackmore says. But these days, he’s leaving the heavy stuff on the backburner, concentrating, instead, on Renaissance music with his group Blackmores Night. In-between stints in Purple, Blackmore continued to charter new hard rock territory in Rainbow. While his playing on the bands first three albums Shades of Deep Purple, Deep Purple, and The Book of Taliesyn (which have just been re-released on Spitfire Records with bonus tracks) is groundbreaking, it pales in comparison to his efforts in Purples Mach 2 period, which began in 1971 with the explosive In Rock. With his blues-and quasi-classical-based approach, he cranked out some of the catchiest riffs and runs ever on songs like Hush, Smoke on the Water, Highway Star, Black Night, Woman From Tokyo, Burn, and many others. Then came Deep Purple, a band that painted a striking blueprint for hard rock and metal largely through Blackmore’s tastefully searing guitar work. Ritchie Blackmore’s contributions to guitar rock began in the mid-’60s, when he performed sessions for the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch and the Outlaws. If the legend sounds too crazy to be true, just take a look at the lyrics for "Smoke on the Water": "Frank Zappa and the Mothers were at the best place around/But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground/They burned down the gambling house/It died with an awful sound.This interview was originally published in 2010. The black smoke rising from the nearby Lake Geneva inspired the song's title, per NPR. 80 minutes into the set, as Don Preston was firing up his synthesizer solo during "King Kong" that someone in the crowd fired a flare gun, which quickly spread across the wooden ceiling, according to Ultimate Classic Rock. 4, 1971 when Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing a show at the casino. That's right: English rock band Deep Purple's classic "Smoke on the Water" was fully inspired by a casino fire that decimated the building - and almost cost concertgoers their lives. The lakeside casino in the Swiss town of Montreux has been cemented in rock history as a landmark of a concert miracle, as well as the inspiration for one of the most iconic guitar riffs in history.