The one guitarist Ritchie Blackmore said was too “difficult”
Of all the greatest virtuosos that rock and roll has ever seen, Ritchie Blackmore was always his own unique animal.
Anybody could have spent their days trying to play the fastest blues licks that they could, but the minute that Deep Purple started, Blackmore had other plans in mind for what the guitar could do. He wanted to do everything he could to challenge the status quo, but that also meant knowing his limits whenever he started learning songs outside of his usual wheelhouse.
Then again, experimenting was never a bad word for Blackmore. He was more than happy to go off in weird directions as long as it fit with Purple’s aesthetic, and some of their best material has come from him thinking outside the box. The sounds of funk on Fireball may not have been his cup of tea all of the time, but even when he left the fold to form Rainbow, what he was doing on songs like ‘Stargazer’ were some of the most outlandish scales that anyone had ever come up with in rock.
But that all came from the lessons he learned when playing off his bandmates in Deep Purple. Jon Lord was always his partner in crime in many ways, and looking at the mark that he left on history with records like Made in Japan, he almost had the mindset of a jazz musician half the time. He didn’t always know what he was going to play every single time he got onstage, but he knew that he was going to find a way to get exactly what he wanted to hear to his fingers whenever he got the right idea.
There was a lot of blues vocabulary thrown in there, and more than a little bit of Eastern melodies accounted for as well, but there was a fair bit of classical music in there as well. Lord had already been an accomplished keyboardist poring over Bach and Brahms whenever he came up with melodies, and hearing Blackmore respond to that helped him internalise the kind of scales that were centuries old.
I mean, the guitarist would have been the first to tell you that the solo on ‘Highway Star’ was purely based on the kind of arpeggios that Mozart was known for doing, so it wasn’t completely alien to him. But when it came to the classical guitar world, there was no sense of him trying to ever play anything that was even close to what Segovia was doing.
Despite his later love of Renaissance-style harmony, Blackmore learned pretty quickly to give up trying to play what Segovia did if he knew he was never going to get there, saying, “I found it a little bit too – boring. It’s also very difficult to play, some of that Segovia stuff – playing ‘Gavotte’ by Segovia was not music for me then. I got through the first page and I thought, ‘Mmm – that’s enough… it’s too difficult for me.’”
But what’s even more insane is how fluid Segovia could sound when playing that music. There are a few moments where he might do his own take on a famous melody, but everything sounds so perfect whenever he is playing, always with the perfect natural touch on the strings and being able to make every single harmonic ring like a bell when he gets to the end of one of his phrases.
Being that good was a pipe dream for someone like Blackmore, but that didn’t mean that he ever had to give up on his dream, either. He might not have seen himself becoming one of the greatest classical musicians of all time, but he could at least bring that music theory into rock and roll and help advance everyone else’s vocabulary in the process.
