The guitar icon Ritchie Blackmore knew “wasn’t a great player”
Ritchie Blackmore has never been the sort of person to follow the crowd in terms of his opinion, and while many people admire his fearless and outspoken personality, there have been numerous occasions where this approach has rubbed people up the wrong way.
It shouldn’t be taken away from the Deep Purple guitarist that he was a phenomenal player with great versatility, but quite often, there was an element of arrogance that came as part of a package with Blackmore, with him frequently being needlessly dismissive of others around him while failing to acknowledge that he himself was fallible.
Not everything he contributed to the early incarnations of the band was as flawless as he may have liked to make out, and while albums like Deep Purple In Rock and Fireball showed off his furious hard rock edge in all of its glory, there are also albums like The Book of Taliesyn which take the symphonic prog elements too far and crumble under the weight of their own ambition and self-importance.
However, what should be noted is that even though it didn’t always work out, this fearlessness that Blackmore had when it came to testing out new styles and introducing different elements to his work was always impressive. The fact that he had no qualms about dragging his bandmates in new directions once they’d arguably exhausted what they’d delivered over the course of a couple of albums was indicative of a desire to keep challenging himself, and he held those around him to the same standards.
With all of this in mind, you’d think that Blackmore would have had plenty of admiration for other guitarists who boldly chose to take their craft in adventurous directions and tested the limits of where rock music could go, but such were the exacting principles of what was acceptable or not in the realms of the genre according to Blackmore, even some of the greatest guitarists didn’t get the nod of approval from the hard-to-please guitarist.
In a 1991 interview with Guitar World, Blackmore was questioned on the direction that the band appeared to be taking around the time that Fireball and Machine Head were released in 1971 and ‘72, respectively. After interviewer Mordechai Kleidermacher proclaimed that there was an element of blues and funk creeping into their sound, he asked whether guitar icon Jimi Hendrix had any influence on the sound of the record, to which Blackmore responded in typically nonplussed fashion.
“I was impressed by Hendrix,” he admitted, before rowing back on his statement to clarify that this had little to do with his ability as a musician. “Not so much by his playing as his attitude. He wasn’t a great player, but everything else about him was brilliant. Even the way he walked was amazing. His guitar playing, though, was always a little bit weird.”
There’s no denying that the guitar work of Hendrix was a little bit out of the ordinary, but to say that there was nothing impressive about him when he was responsible for pushing the boundaries of rock music on a technical level is an absurd statement for anyone to make.
Blackmore may have wanted to seem high and mighty or contrarian in insisting that Hendrix wasn’t all that, but instead, he ended up looking a little foolish by dismissing perhaps one of the all-time greats as a pedestrian player.
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