When I was asked to present an award at Classic Rock’s annual shindig at the Roundhouse
in November, 2012, I found myself sat next to Amy Lord, daughter of Deep
Purple’s keyboard player Jon, and her husband, and elsewhere on the table were
other members of the Lord family, all there to watch Jon’s sister-in-law
collect his posthumous award. Jon’s
wife Vicki, it was explained to me, was too overcome to attend so it was left
to Jackie, her twin and wife of Purple drummer Ian Paice, to do the honours.
I was
able to tell Amy that, in the early eighties when she was a toddler, I’d spent a night at their family’s house
near Henley while researching my now out of print biography of Deep Purple. Her dad was a most
generous host and I recall that he and Vicki took me to a Chinese restaurant in
Henley where we were joined by Ian and Jackie. Afterwards, back at the house,
Jon and I settled down to long interview that stretched way into the night, all
punctuated by bottles of champagne from Jon’s wine cellar. Somewhere in amongst
that interview was the revelation that one of the partners in the original
management of the group had been jailed for receiving stolen goods, leading to
the conclusion that the group’s first set of stage gear was bought from the
proceeds of crime. It was almost dawn when I switched off my recorder and Jon
stumbled over to the white grand piano in his living room and played a bit of
Beethoven before we retired. Or was it Bach? Or Chopin?
I travelled around with Deep Purple
a lot in the seventies, wrote some complimentary reviews for MM when they were at their best, and
came to like them as people. This was the Mark II band – Lord, Paice, Ritchie
Blackmore, Roger Glover and Ian Gillan – which is generally regarded as the best.
I lost touch with them when this line-up fragmented, so I didn’t witness the group’s decline. Then,
in the early eighties, I wrote that book about the group and was pleasantly
surprised that most of them (Blackmore was a notable exception) co-operated
with me and were all remarkably candid about their relationships with each
other and the reasons why the group came together and fell apart. I have had no
dealings with them since that book came out, but I was given to understand that
although most of them were happy with it, Blackmore was not. It’s his own fault. Had he co-operated
then perhaps the book would have portrayed him in a manner more to his liking.
When Omnibus published a biography of Ritchie by Jerry Bloom in 2006 there was
some sabre rattling from his lawyers but nothing happened in the end, but it
all points to the conclusion that he evidently doesn’t like books written about
him.
In the
seventies I got on quite well with Ritchie Blackmore, and recall spending time
with him socially, but he could be a bit of a moody old bugger, and one wrong
word was enough to bring on a meltdown. I think he had a bit of a chip on his
shoulder because he wasn’t
spoken of in the same terms as other great British guitarists of the era, the
Clapton-Beck-Page axis, and Harrison and Townshend, not to mention Hendrix, his
great hero. It’s
perfectly true that as far as technique and skills go, Blackmore was on a par
with them all –
barring Hendrix, of course –
and he’d certainly
paid his dues, taking lessons from ‘Big’ Jim Sullivan and playing with The
Outlaws and Sutch’s
Savages before The Beatles’
breakthrough in 1963. The problem was the manner in which he chose to employ
those skills, the hard rock/heavy metal material that was unlikely to appeal to
critics, with lyrics that didn’t
really say very much, not to mention his subsequent drift into medieval folk
music.
I have
no doubt that Blackmore considered himself a more skilled player than Pete
Townshend, and he was probably right (certainly when The Who started out) but
Pete could write great songs and this drew attention to him and his group while
Blackmore was unknown (to the public, anyway). No doubt this pissed him off
mightily. Later, with Purple, Blackmore became the second musician after Pete
to abuse guitars on stage but to me this was just an act – the guitars he smashed were cheap
replicas anyway –
while with Pete it was more of an artistic statement and he didn’t give a toss about destroying
expensive Gibsons and Fenders.
At the
beginning of December 1972, I found myself in the US with Deep Purple, and on a
(commercial) plane flight from Des Moines to Indianapolis sat next to Ritchie.
At one point in the journey he produced from his hand luggage a pornographic
magazine, a fearsomely offensive example of the genre with women doing obscene
things with animals. Realising that it was of the same dimensions as the
in-flight magazine published by Braniff Airways, Ritchie systematically
substituted pages from one to the other, carefully replacing the staples before
tucking the reconstructed flight brochure into the pocket provided at the rear
of the seat in front of him. “Shame
we won’t be here to
see what happens when the next person picks that up,” he said when the mischief was
complete.
That
wasn’t the only
mischief I was caught up in with Ritchie. The following year I was in Paris
with them and after the show he and I ended up at a club called the Rock’n’Roll Circus, allegedly the same
place where Jim Morrison spent the last night of his life. Somehow Ritchie and
I became attached to two Spanish girls and I opted to leave first, bringing one
back to the hotel. Unfortunately the night porter, knowing I had but a single
room, refused to allow her to enter, so after a bit of hanky-panky by the trees
on the nearby Champs Elysees (it was a warm night) I headed back to the hotel
alone, only to bump into Ritchie arriving back with his Spanish maiden. I
explained to Ritchie what had happened to me and we agreed that he would
distract the hall porter asking for his key while I rushed through the lobby
with his girl, and we would meet on the first floor where I would ‘hand her
over’. The plan seemed to work, but when I got to my room the phone rang. It
was the porter. “Ou
est la fille?” he demanded.
“No idea mate.” Five minutes later there was a knock
on my door. “Ou est la
fille?” He came in
and, of course, no girl was to be found. Desperate to get rid of him, I said, “Try Mr Coletta’s room,” John Coletta being DP’s manager. And off he went.
Next morning Mr Coletta and his
girlfriend were none too pleased to have been awoken from their slumbers in the
double room they’d booked. But he
never found out who was responsible.
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