The Deep Purple album that left the band divided: “Jon liked the idea, but Ritchie never”
Like adding magnesium to a bottle of vodka, as mercurial and dangerous as it might have been, Deep Purple was never known for having the most stable lineup ever.
For as many classics as they may have given the rock world, their penchant for insane riffs was only matched by their constant drama behind the scenes, with various lineups coming and going throughout the years. While the band was commonly known with Ian Gillan behind the microphone, one of their first projects with the singer didn’t get off to the best start.
Trying to integrate a singer is always a difficult task. The truth is, even if it is just an optical illusion, as an audience, we always believe a frontman to be the leader of the group, so when a new one arrives, there is natural tension. It left one of Gillan’s first works with Deep Purple in a difficult spot.
When the band first got together, they thought of playing songs more concerned with jamming than writing mainstream singles. Founded by Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, and Ian Paice, the original lineup featured Nick Simper and Rod Evans on bass, each bringing a commercial sheen to the music like on their version of the Joe South song, ‘Hush’.
While the band had a decent following playing the same kind of arrangements, Paice thought that they were going after a sound that had already been played many times over. Since most of their tracks were cribbing the notes of American jam bands like Vanilla Fudge, their best course of action was restructuring the lineup, firing Simper and Evans to move on to more incredible things.
Although Gillan was brought in alongside bassist Roger Glover, his strengths wouldn’t be fully utilised on the band’s debut record with him. Instead of writing purely hard rock, Gillan’s first foray into the world of Deep Purple came with their concerts playing alongside the London Symphony Orchestra, which never sat well with the rest of the band.
As Glover recalled in Classic Albums, Blackmore wasn’t keen on playing classical music, saying, “It divided the band. Jon liked the idea, but Ritchie never liked the orchestra thing”. Given Lord’s roots in the world of classical piano, he thought that it would be a great exercise in experimentation for the band, pairing Blackmore’s hyperactive soloing with the sounds of sweeping strings.
Even though Gillan could sing beautifully over the songs, he did remember having some trouble putting together the lyrics, telling Behind the Music, “We were sitting at the bar, and Jon comes over and says, ‘Dear boy, could you find some time before we are supposed to perform this fucking thing to write lyrics for the third movement?’. So I got a napkin and wrote lyrics a few hours before the show”.
It is the kind of exchange begging for a biopic movie scene, but that would go against everything Deep Purple stood for. Instead, we can just imagine the two men quarrelling in a pub in perhaps the most polite way possible, knowing that they were about to tear up the world with the rock sounds.
While Blackmore painstakingly worked through the setlist, he didn’t find his calling until he saw what Led Zeppelin was capable of. Convincing the band to go in a similar direction, the second iteration would become one of the most celebrated acts of the 1970s, marrying Lord’s love of sophisticated music with Blackmore’s rock and roll visions on albums like Machine Head and Fireball.
For all of the reservations Blackmore may have had, though, the band’s classical concerts would be enormously influential further down the road. Rock and classical music may have seemed like opposites, but epic shows like Metallica’s S&M and the complex pieces of power metal owe Deep Purple a debt of gratitude for paving the way for them.
