“Not happy”: When Ritchie Blackmore gave up on two bands for a second time
Given how Ritchie Blackmore oversaw numerous lineup shifts in Deep Purple and was responsible for dictating large amounts of their creative direction when he was part of the band, you’d probably be able to assume that he was a particularly tough person to impress.
There isn’t exactly anything wrong with holding people to a high standard, but then there’s wanting the best from people and being a taskmaster who is impossible to get on with. The first approach can still run the risk of upsetting people who aren’t able to get on board with your vision and execute it in the desired manner, but the latter is far more divisive in the context of a close-knit creative entity like a band, especially if you’re the main individual trying to call the shots.
Some members of Deep Purple were victims of this highly demanding figure and were given the axe when they weren’t obedient enough or failed to follow Blackmore’s exacting set of demands, and others left of their own accord, unable to hack being in the same band as someone whose expectations frequently felt impossible to achieve. Eventually, Blackmore himself would end up leaving the band after having had enough with the politics, which one could argue was more of a relief for him, and damaging for the remaining members of the band left to pick up the pieces.
During his first sabbatical period from the band, he formed fellow hard rock outfit Rainbow, whose initial run lasted for nine years between 1975 and 1984. Working alongside the likes of Ronnie James Dio, Cozy Powell and Jimmy Bain in the early years of the project, Blackmore was surrounded by an exemplary cast of musicians who would undoubtedly have been capable of meeting his demands, but this proved not to be the case
While Rainbow should have been an opportunity for Blackmore to do things his own way, he eventually found himself running back to Deep Purple after his old ways of hiring and firing new members on a continuous basis began to wreak havoc once again.
Then what do you know, he repeated the cycle once again, leaving Deep Purple to reform Rainbow, and had to come to a major realisation about what it was he was truly dissatisfied with in all of his projects. During a 2017 interview with Newsweek, the guitarist proclaimed that there were many issues at hand, but that reuniting Rainbow was a real eye-opener for him.
“I kind of left the Purple camp, and I was really at a loose end,” he said of their reunion in 1993. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew that I didn’t want to travel anymore. They were all over the world, all the time. I hate travelling. It’s funny because I chose a profession where all you do is travel. I thought maybe I’ll reform Rainbow and see how it goes.”
He continued, arguing that it proved to be popular with fans, but that he was still dissatisfied on a personal level, largely due to the fact that he had replaced every member with a relative unknown. “I wasn’t pleased with the lineup,” he argued, before expressing a dislike for frontman Doogie White, who had replaced Dio in the new incarnation.
Concluding, “After being in the studio, I thought, You know, I’m not happy with the singer. My main connection with music is the singer, and if I don’t have a good singer, I can’t force it. And when you bring somebody into a band, sometimes the egos go crazy. So I thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Ego is one thing to contend with, but having to combat that in tandem with exhaustion and burnout is another thing. Perhaps what Blackmore needed more than anything was a break from music altogether, and that reforming and reuniting with old projects was only going to make him feel more jaded about his place in the industry.
