The band has gone through many line-up changes and an eight-year hiatus (1976–84). The 1968–76 line-ups are commonly labelled Mark I, II, III and IV.[13][14] Their second and most commercially successful line-up featured Ian Gillan (vocals), Roger Glover (bass), Jon Lord (keyboards), Ian Paice (drums), and Ritchie Blackmore (guitar). This line-up was active from 1969 to 1973, and was revived from 1984 to 1989, and again in 1993, before the rift between Blackmore and other members became unbridgeable. The current line-up (including guitarist Steve Morse) has been much more stable, although Lord's retirement in 2002 has left Paice as the only original member never to have left the band. As of 2012, the band has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[15]
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History
The beginning (1967–68)
In 1967, former Searchers drummer Chris Curtis contacted London businessman Tony Edwards, in the hope that he would manage a new group he was putting together, to be called Roundabout. Curtis' vision was a "supergroup" where the band members would get on and off, like a musical roundabout. Impressed with the plan, Edwards agreed to finance the venture with two business partners: John Coletta and Ron Hire, all of Hire-Edwards-Coletta (HEC) Enterprises.[16]The first recruit was the classically-trained Hammond organ player Jon Lord, who had most notably played with The Artwoods (led by Art Wood, brother of future Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, and featuring Keef Hartley).[17] He was followed by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who was persuaded to return from Hamburg to audition for the new group. Blackmore was making a name for himself as a session guitarist, and had also been a member of Screaming Lord Sutch's The Savages. Curtis' erratic behaviour soon forced him out of his own project, but Lord and Blackmore were keen to continue, and carried on recruiting additional members.[18]
For the bass guitar, Lord suggested his old friend Nick Simper, with whom he had played in a band called The Flower Pot Men and their Garden (formerly known as The Ivy League) back in 1967. Simper's claims to fame (apart from Deep Purple) were that he had been in Johnny Kidd and The Pirates and the car crash that killed Kidd. He was also in a group called The Delta Five which played the same circuit as The Savages, and it was then that he had first met Blackmore.
Bobby Woodman was the initial choice for the drums, but during the auditions for a singer, Rod Evans of the Maze came in with his drummer, Ian Paice. Blackmore had seen Paice on tour with the Maze in Germany in 1966, and had been impressed by the 18-year old's drumming. While Woodman was out for cigarettes, Blackmore quickly arranged an audition for Paice. Both Paice and Evans won their respective jobs, and the lineup was complete.[19]
The band began in earnest in March 1968, rehearsing at Deeves Hall in South Mimms. After a brief tour of Denmark and Sweden that April, in which they were still billed as Roundabout, Blackmore suggested a new name: Deep Purple, named after his grandmother's favourite song.[18][20] The group had resolved to choose a name after everyone had posted one on a board in rehearsal. Second to Deep Purple was "Concrete God", which the band thought was too harsh to take on.[21][22]
Early years (1968–70)
The band's second album, The Book of Taliesyn (including a cover of Neil Diamond's "Kentucky Woman"), was released in North America to coincide with the tour, reaching number 38 on the Billboard charts and number 21 on the RPM charts, although it would not be released in their home country until the following year. Early 1969 saw Deep Purple record their third album, simply titled Deep Purple. The album contained strings and woodwind on one track ("April"), showcasing Lord's classical antecedents such as Bach and Rimsky-Korsakov, and several other influences were in evidence, notably Vanilla Fudge. (Lord and Blackmore had even claimed the group wanted to be a "Vanilla Fudge clone".)[25] Not satisfied with the possibilities for singles off this album, the band also recorded a single called "Emmaretta", named for Emmaretta Marks, then a cast member of the musical Hair, whom Evans was trying to seduce. This would be the last recording by the original lineup.
Unfortunately, Deep Purple's troubled North American record label, Tetragrammaton, delayed production of the Deep Purple album until after the band's 1969 American tour ended. Thus, the album sold poorly, finishing well out of the Billboard Top 100. Soon after this third album's eventual release, Tetragrammaton went out of business, leaving the band with no money and an uncertain future. (Tetragrammaton's assets were assumed by Warner Bros. Records, who would release Deep Purple's records in the US throughout the 1970s.) During the 1969 American tour, Lord and Blackmore met with Paice to discuss their desire to take the band in a heavier direction. Feeling that Evans and Simper would not fit well with a heavy rock style, both were fired that summer. Said Paice, "A change had to come. If they hadn't left, the band would have totally disintegrated."[19]
In search of a replacement vocalist, Blackmore set his sights on 19-year-old singer Terry Reid, who declined a similar opportunity to front the newly forming Led Zeppelin only a year earlier. Though he found the offer "flattering", Reid was still bound by the exclusive recording contract with his producer Mickie Most and more interested in his solo career.[26] Blackmore had no other choice but to look elsewhere.
The band hunted down singer Ian Gillan from Episode Six, a band that had released several singles in the UK without achieving their big break for commercial success. Gillan had at one time been approached by Nick Simper when Deep Purple was first forming, but Gillan had reportedly told Simper that Deep Purple would not go anywhere, while he felt Episode Six was poised to make it big.[27] Six's drummer Mick Underwood – an old comrade of Blackmore's from his Savages days – introduced the band to Gillan and bassist Roger Glover. This effectively killed Episode Six and gave Underwood a guilt complex that lasted nearly a decade, until Gillan recruited him for his new post-Purple band in the late 1970s. This created the Deep Purple Mark II line-up, whose first release was a Greenaway-Cook tune titled "Hallelujah", which flopped.
The band gained some much-needed publicity in September, 1969, with the Concerto for Group and Orchestra, a three-movement epic composed by Lord as a solo project and performed by the band at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Malcolm Arnold.[23] Together with Five Bridges by The Nice, it was one of the first collaborations between a rock band and an orchestra. This live album, Concerto for Group and Orchestra was their first album which made chart success in the UK.[28] However, Gillan and Blackmore especially were less than happy at the band being tagged as "a group who played with orchestras" at the time; what they had in mind was to develop the band into a much tighter, hard-rocking style. Despite this, Lord wrote the Gemini Suite, another orchestra/group collaboration in the same vein, for the band in late 1970. Roger Glover later claimed Jon Lord had appeared like a leader of the band in the early years.[29]
Breakthrough and break-up (1970–76)
A second album, the creatively progressive Fireball, was issued in the summer of 1971. The title track "Fireball" was released as a single, as was "Strange Kind of Woman", not from the album but recorded during the same sessions (although it replaced "Demon's Eye" on the US version of the album).[31]
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A sample of "Smoke on the Water" from Machine Head (1972), which is recognized for its central theme, a four-note "blues scale" melody harmonised in parallel fourths.
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Continuing from where both previous albums left off, Machine Head has since become the band's most famous album. It reached #1 in the UK, #7 in the U.S., and included tracks that became live classics, such as "Highway Star", "Space Truckin'", "Lazy" and "Smoke on the Water", for which Deep Purple is most famous.[30][34] Deep Purple continued to tour and record at a rate that would be rare thirty years on; when Machine Head was recorded, the group had only been together three and a half years, yet the album was their seventh LP. Meanwhile, the band undertook four North America tours in 1972, and a Japan tour that led to a double-vinyl live release, Made in Japan. Originally intended as a Japan-only record, its worldwide release saw the double LP become an instant hit. It remains one of rock music's most popular and highest selling live-concert recordings (although at the time it was perhaps seen as less important, as only Glover and Paice turned up to mix it).
The band first hired Midlands bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes, formerly of Trapeze. According to Ian Paice, Glover had told him and Lord that he wanted to leave the band a few months before his official resignation, so they had already started to drop in on Trapeze shows. After acquiring Hughes, they debated continuing as a four-piece band, with Hughes as both bassist and lead vocalist.[37][38] According to Hughes, he was persuaded to join under the guise that the band would be bringing in Paul Rodgers of Free as a co-lead vocalist, but by that time Rodgers had just started Bad Company.[39] Instead, auditions were held for lead vocal replacements. They settled on David Coverdale, an unknown singer from Saltburn in Northeast England, primarily because Blackmore liked his masculine, blues-tinged voice. [38]
With Blackmore's departure, Deep Purple was left to fill one of the biggest band member vacancies in rock music. In spite of this, the rest of the band refused to stop, and to the surprise of many long-time fans, actually announced a replacement for Blackmore: American Tommy Bolin. There are at least two versions about the recruitment of Bolin: Coverdale claims to have been the one who suggested auditioning Bolin.[44] "He walked in, thin as a rake, his hair coloured green, yellow and blue with feathers in it. Slinking along beside him was this stunning Hawaiian girl in a crochet dress with nothing on underneath. He plugged into four Marshall 100-watt stacks and...the job was his". But in an interview originally published by Melody Maker in June 1975, Bolin himself claimed that he came to the audition following a recommendation from Blackmore.[45] Bolin had been a member of many now-forgotten late-1960s bands – Denny & The Triumphs, American Standard, and Zephyr, which released three albums from 1969–72. Before Deep Purple, Bolin's best-known recordings were made as a session musician on Billy Cobham's 1973 jazz fusion album Spectrum, and as Joe Walsh's replacement on two James Gang albums: Bang (1973) and Miami (1974). He had also jammed with such luminaries as Dr. John, Albert King, The Good Rats, Moxy and Alphonse Mouzon, and was busy working on his first solo album, Teaser, when he accepted the invitation to join Deep Purple.
The resulting album, Come Taste the Band, was released in October 1975. Despite mixed reviews, the collection revitalised the band once again, bringing a new, extreme funk edge to their hard rock sound.[46] Bolin's influence was crucial, and with encouragement from Hughes and Coverdale, the guitarist developed much of the material. Later, Bolin's personal problems with drugs began to manifest themselves, and after cancelled shows and below-par concert performances, the band was in danger.
Band split, solo projects (1976–84)
The end came on tour in Britain on 15 March 1976 at the Liverpool Empire Theatre.[47] Coverdale reportedly walked off in tears and handed in his resignation, to which he was allegedly told there was no band left to quit. The decision to disband Deep Purple had been made some time before the last show by Lord and Paice (the last remaining original members), who hadn't told anyone else. The break-up was finally made public in July 1976.[48]Later, Bolin had just finished recording his second solo album, Private Eyes, when, on 4 December 1976, tragedy struck. In Miami, during a tour supporting Jeff Beck, Bolin was found unconscious by his girlfriend. Unable to wake him, she hurriedly called paramedics, but it was too late. The official cause of death was multiple-drug intoxication. Bolin was 25 years old.
After the break-up, most of the past and present members of Deep Purple went on to have considerable success in a number of other bands, including Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath and Gillan. There were, however, a number of promoter-led attempts to get the band to reform, especially with the revival of the hard rock market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1980, a touring version of the band surfaced with Rod Evans as the only member who had ever been in Deep Purple, eventually ending in successful legal action from the legitimate Deep Purple camp over unauthorised use of the name. Evans was ordered to pay damages of US$672,000 for using the band name without permission.[49]
Reunions and reformation (1984–94)
The Mark II line-up then released The House of Blue Light in 1987, which was followed by a world tour (interrupted after Blackmore broke a finger on stage while trying to catch his guitar after throwing it in the air) and another live album Nobody's Perfect (1988) which was culled from several shows on this tour, but still largely based on the by-now familiar Made in Japan set-list. In the UK a new version of "Hush" (with Gillan on lead vocals) was released to mark 20 years of the band. In 1989, Gillan was fired as his relations with Blackmore had again soured and their musical differences had diverged too far. Originally, the band intended to recruit Survivor frontman Jimi Jamison as Gillan's replacement, but this fell through due to complications with Jamison's record label.[54][55] Eventually, after auditioning several high-profile candidates, including Brian Howe (White Spirit, Ted Nugent, Bad Company), Doug Pinnick (King's X), Australians Jimmy Barnes (Cold Chisel) and John Farnham (Little River Band), Terry Brock (Strangeways, Giant) and Norman "Kal" Swann (Tytan, Lion, Bad Moon Rising),[56] former Rainbow vocalist Joe Lynn Turner was recruited into the band. This Mark V line-up recorded just one album, Slaves & Masters (1990) and toured in support. It achieved modest success and reached #87 on the Billboard Charts in the US,[57] but some fans criticized it as little more than a so-called "Deep Rainbow" album.
With the tour complete, Turner was forced out, as Lord, Paice and Glover (and the record company) wanted Gillan back in the fold for the 25th anniversary. Blackmore grudgingly relented, after requesting and eventually receiving 250,000 dollars in his bank account[58] and the classic line-up recorded The Battle Rages On. But Gillan reworked much of the existing material for the album. As a result, Blackmore became infuriated at what he considered non-melodic elements. During an otherwise stunningly successful European tour, Blackmore walked out in November 1993, never to return. Joe Satriani was drafted to complete the Japanese dates in December and stayed on for a European Summer tour in 1994. He was asked to join permanently, but his record contract commitments prevented this. The band unanimously chose Dixie Dregs/Kansas guitarist Steve Morse to become Blackmore's permanent successor.
Revival with Steve Morse (1994–present)
In February 2007, Gillan asked fans not to buy a live album Come Hell or High Water being released by Sony BMG. This was a recording of their 1993 appearance at the NEC in Birmingham. Recordings of this show have previously been released without resistance from Gillan or any other members of the band, but he said: "It was one of the lowest points of my life – all of our lives, actually".[62]
Gillan hinted that the group may record their nineteenth studio album in February 2010,[63] to be followed by a supporting tour.[64] Steve Morse later revealed in an interview that the band would begin working on a new album in March. But there’s been still disagreement among the members about whether to make the new studio album. Roger Glover stated that it wouldn’t really make money anymore.[65] The current band's chief sound engineer on nine years of tours, Moray McMillin, died in September 2011, aged 57.[66]
In early 2011, David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes told VH1 they would like to reunite with former Deep Purple Mark III lineup for the right opportunity, such as a benefit concert.[67]
Band members
Main article: List of Deep Purple band members
Current members
- Ian Paice – drums, percussion (1968–1976, 1984–present)
- Ian Gillan – lead vocals, harmonica, congas (1969–1973, 1984–1989, 1992–present)
- Roger Glover – bass (1969–1973, 1984–present)
- Steve Morse – guitar (1994–present)
- Don Airey – keyboards, organ (2002–present)
Former members
- Jon Lord – keyboards, organ, backing vocals (1968–1976, 1984–2002)
- Ritchie Blackmore – guitar (1968–1975, 1984–1993)
- Nick Simper – bass, backing vocals (1968–1969)
- Rod Evans – lead vocals (1968–1969)
- Glenn Hughes – bass, vocals (1973–1976)
- David Coverdale – lead vocals (1973–1976)
- Tommy Bolin – guitar, backing vocals (1975–1976)
- Joe Lynn Turner – lead vocals (1989–1991)
- Joe Satriani – guitar (1993–1994)
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