“Something wrong”: The guitarist Ritchie Blackmore considered too perfect
Competence barely matters in music. Nobody in history has ever said, ‘Well, I fell in love with my favourite artist after being blown away by their competence’. Its soul, expression and something the French call je ne sais quoi, which literally doesn’t mean anything, that matters. Ritchie Blackmore had that sacred, mystic combination, so did Jimi Hendrix, but according to the former, Joe Satriani eclipses the need for the unknowable trio to his own discredit.
Blackmore has always considered Hendrix as the pinnacle. He’s far from alone on that front. Ironically, the pinnacle was devoid of perfection. “Although learning to play a Jimi Hendrix song for most contemporary guitarists may not pose a tremendous challenge,“ Steve Vai recently told Far Out, “Playing them just like Jimi has never quite been achieved.”
Hendrix played with such expression that he seemed to drift off into oblivion, almost as though he was unaware he was playing a guitar. As Vai continued, ”His touch on the instrument, sense of groove, choice of notes and overall ability to control audio chaos in innovative ways was remarkable.” For Blackmore, that sense of note choice was Hendrix’s defining feature, often because he missed the right one.
However, what he heard from his Deep Purple replacement, Joe Satriani, often sounded like perfection. And perfection perhaps leaves little room for the fallibility of the human soul. “To me, listen to Joe Satriani, he is a brilliant player, but I never really hear him searching for notes. I never hear him playing maybe a wrong note,“ he explained on his YouTube channel.
In this sense, it seems there’s a fine line between perfection and formula—or perhaps more aptly in rock, does ‘perfection’ even have a place? ”Jimi Hendrix used to play lots of wrong notes,” Blackmore continues, ”because he was searching all the time, ‘where the hell is that correct note’. When he did find that right note… wow, that was incredible, but if you are always playing the correct notes, there is something wrong, you’re not searching, you’re not reaching for anything.”
Hendrix reached for the ether and found notes floating there. He’d lasso them as best as he could, occasionally missing the odd one in search of something a little more spiritual than engineered Vorsprung durch Technik technical proficiency. However, Blackmore was keen to add that he still respected Satriani. “That’s not to say that he is a very brilliant player,“ he added, even expressing that he was pleased Deep Purple managed to find a first-rate replacement.
After all, you have to accept that stars like Hendrix are rarer than a cheese sandwich in China. ”I do like to hear someone reaching for something, you know, not quite making it, and sometimes they do make it and they are very polished, like Joe Satriani, it’s a very polished player, almost like too polished, that’s what worries me sometimes.”
Alas, that’s not to say Blackmore would be charmed by two-chord shoddiness by a lousy pub band either—there is a scale to everything.
