The only musician that Ritchie Blackmore actually admires: “Truly monumental”
“I was impressed by Hendrix,” Ritchie Blackmore once said. “His attitude was brilliant. Even the way he walked was amazing.” It’s a fair assumption, right? Hendrix is routinely considered the greatest guitar there ever was, so it’s a good shout. However, the Deep Purple guitarist wasn’t impressed by much else.
He openly said that he didn’t like The Rolling Stones, called Jeff Beck a guitar hero of his, but quickly followed with the backhand that he couldn’t write a song, and claimed that Jimmy Page was lacking when it came to improv. It’s about as brutal an assessment of some of the finest performers the rock world has ever known, which can confirm to us one thing: Ritchie Blackmore is a tough man to please.
This honesty and perhaps that he ranked the way Hendrix walked among his finest facets is indicative of Blackmore’s almost-mystic aloofness. He is one of rock’s most obtuse characters and plays into the sound and songs he has written. He may well be one of the finest technicians, but he aptly plies that craft in a realm he can call his own. Regarding songwriters, nobody has achieved this same feat quite like Bob Dylan.
Thus, it is no surprise that Blackmore is a huge fan of the original vagabond. “I would love to play with Bob Dylan,” he once said in a radio interview. Hard to argue there, too. Dylan is, without a doubt, the greatest lyricist of the last century, and his ability to craft songs that both appeal to the masses but speak poetically about real and genuine subjects of human discourse is about as clear an indication as one might hope to find that he’s the best there is.
That’s good enough reason for Blackmore to consider him worthy of real consideration and, perhaps, even appreciation, “I mean, it sounds kind of funny in a way, but he is the only person I admire in the business. I have been in the business for so long, he’s the one that I still feel remains mysterious. There is something about him that I think is truly monumental.” This has pretty much been the case ever since Dylan changed music forever with only his second record and wove his own false backstory of growing up as a runaway in the circus.
However, all the mystique would count for nothing if he wasn’t also perhaps the “Shakespeare of our time”, as Penn Jillette, of all people, puts it. Blackmore acknowledges this, continuing: “And he is so creative; when you think of all the songs that he has written, you know, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, it’s endless. So, I’m a big fan of his.”
That being said, mysticism can be a tricky thing to keep hold of in the public eye. So, Dylan and Blackmore coming together always had the hallmarks of a potentially awkward encounter. Blackmore found this out at his own expense. Recalling their first meeting, he explained: “Bob Dylan came up to me once and said, ‘Hey, who the hell are you?’ And I kind of admired him for that.”
Ritchie replied: “I just walked away with my head down and continued to look out the window. He was looking out of the window a lot, too. I think it’s important, people today, they don’t look out the window anymore.”
This encounter typifies the pair. As Blackmore said: “They used to complain at school, I looked out of the window for long periods of time. That sums up my life, I like to look out of the window, do nothing, daydream.” As for Dylan, his own rather blunt line tied into his four chords and the truth persona didn’t come across so clearly in conversation as he tried to cling to his idiosyncratic sense of identity.
As the writer Sam Shepard said: “Dylan has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own mind. The point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in? He’s not the first one to have invented himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan.”
That is something Blackmore greatly admires, even if he did feel the cutting side of it once while he was just breaking through in the 1960s.
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