The classic Deep Purple song Ritchie Blackmore wrote as a joke: “Hang on to your hats”
Being a rock star is serious business. Forget what you think you know about life on tour, or in the studio, the reality is that when so much money is attached to your success, things get serious very quickly, something Ritchie Blackmore knows all too well.
The ins and outs of being in a professional rock band aren’t always as glamorous as they seem. Even though playing songs to the people directly might be one of the greatest feelings in the world, there’s a lot of red tape between getting to that stage, including making nice with some of the press that don’t exactly care about the music at hand. Artists have to make their fun when dealing with the media agents, and Ritchie Blackmore found the perfect inspiration when messing with one of the press junkets.
For the past few years, Deep Purple had been going strong with Ian Gillan and Roger Glover in the fold, playing songs that were much more in tune with what the hard rock acts of the day had wanted to play. When talking about their first inspirations, Blackmore mentioned seeing Led Zeppelin as the obvious reference point when crafting their tunes, recalling in Classic Albums: “It wasn’t until Led Zeppelin came along where we thought ‘That’s the kind of music that we want to play’. That riffy kind of rock”.
Aside from the primal sounds of Led Zeppelin, the band had gotten used to improvising onstage, often taking their tight pop tunes and putting a much bigger arrangement around them when they were playing live. Sometimes when they performed live, even the band admitted that they wouldn’t be sure where the show would go next, coming up with songs on the spot or deciding to completely restructure the tune from the ground up.
When asked about their improv ability, Jon Lord explained that it came from years of common practice, telling Metal Evolution: “We had the pleasure to play in front of playing customers and say ‘Hang on to your hats, you’re gonna like what we’re gonna play. We don’t know what we’re gonna play, but we know you’re gonna like it’”.
As the band were riding in the bus to the next gig, Gillan remembered Blackmore coming up with the riff to ‘Highway Star’ because of the press asking them about songwriting. He explained: “Ritchie was dicking around with a banjo and one of them said ‘How do you write a song?’. And Ritchie said ‘Like this’ and just started strumming an open string and started looking out the window”.
There was something to Blackmore’s instinctive riff that lit a fire in Gillan, writing an entire song about the freedom from riding in a fast car. Lord even got to add different extensions to his solos, laying down a quasi-Bach chord progression for the mid-section jam and Blackmore one-upping him with arpeggios in the style of Mozart.
Despite the song originating from a joke jam session, Blackmore considers the solo for ‘Highway Star’ one of the few solos he had that had to be planned out, saying, “When it came to a solo, there would be lots of time where I would have 8 or 16 bars where I would no idea what I was going to play, except for the solo on ‘Star’”.
Blackmore continued: “I wrote that out note-for-note about a week before we recorded it. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out, and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression, Dm, Gm, Cmaj, Amaj.”
Though the tune’s structure may have started in a rudimentary place, it took four of the most accomplished musicians in the hard rock scene to turn it into something spectacular.
