The band Ritchie Blackmore said was bigger than Jimi Hendrix: “Eight-minute songs, with dynamics”
If you look back upon the rock and roll account of the swinging sixties, you would be forgiven for thinking that everybody in London was on a perpetual acid trip, strolling down Carnaby Street in technicolour dreamcoats. The reality of post-war Britain was a lot different, and even its soundtrack has been plagued by revisionist history.
London in the 1960s was a city positively bursting with musical revolution, with a countless array of rebellious young groups taking to ramshackle stages and underground nightclubs every day of the week. In the end, though, a handful of artists – the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones being the two glaring examples – seemed to command the headlines more than most.
Ultimately, though, this sparse collection of rock and roll rebels barely scratched the surface of London’s listening habits during that era, as Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore can attest to.
Although it wasn’t until the prog and hard rock age of the 1970s that Deep Purple managed to break into the musical mainstream, their early origins back in the late 1960s saw Blackmore and the gang rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers of London’s counterculture era. As such, the legendary guitarist is more qualified than most to set the record straight on the listening habits of 1960s London. .
“According to legend, the talk of the town during that period was Jimi Hendrix,” he told Guitar World back in 1991. Hendrix’s move to London in late 1966 did seem to launch his legacy as the greatest guitarist who ever lived, as well as helping to introduce the English capital to the expansive, mind-bending world of psychedelic rock, in the process. According to Blackmore, though, the account of Hendrix’s importance has been greatly exaggerated.
“That’s not true,” the guitarist declared, accusing the pages of music history of ignoring some of the most prominent outfits of the time in favour of Hendrix’s otherworldly sound. “It was Vanilla Fudge. They played eight-minute songs, with dynamics,” Blackmore declared. “People said, ‘What the hell’s going on here? How come it’s not three minutes?’ Timmy Bogert, their bassist, was amazing.”
While they might not have performed in front of The Beatles, and Vince Martell failed to establish himself as the greatest guitarist of all time, Blackmore affirms that Vanilla Fudge were far more prominent in the landscape of London’s counterculture than anybody else. Whether that is a wholly accurate view or not, it does beg the question of why the group never reached the same dizzying heights as somebody like Hendrix.
Aside from their blistering cover of The Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ in fact, the Long Island outfit never particularly courted the attention of the UK mainstream over the course of their extensive and enduring tenure – although they did fare a little better in their native US.
Even if they didn’t amass the same legendary reputation or mainstream success as Jimi Hendrix though, Blackmore is adamant that the group were just as revolutionary in their day, helping to establish the bold new realm of psychedelia as well as carving out the early origins of the hard rock and prog sound that Deep Purple made their name with years later. So, perhaps their rock and roll impact did rival Hendrix’s, after all.
