Deep Purple Rocks…

A hot and humid night…Panaji Gymkhana grounds…May 2002

Tidal Wave, the local band is hard at work, playing covers of Tears for Fears, Def Leppard and the Police. The place is swarming with ageing hipsters, hippies, would be rockers, and just plain good old fans, all of them a long way from home.
“Angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”
The sweet smell of cannabis is in the air, and the crowd is awash in beer. We are waiting for the Band to come on; and Tidal Wave is just a minor annoyance. The crowd claps politely as they end their set with Queen’s “We will Rock you”, the lights go off, and I wait for the Gods of Rock to descend from Mount Olympus!
Deep Purple, (the name comes from a phrase in a love song which was a favourite of the guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s mother), is credited by the Guinness Book of Records as the loudest band on the planet. They earned that distinction during their Japan tour in the late seventies, when as apocryphal stories have it, the band literally blasted the eardrums of their fans, with the first six rows of people being rendered deaf because of the Purple Sound. A small price to pay for hearing the band!
The band has undergone many changes in its lineup: it originally featured Ritchie Blackmore on lead guitar, Ian Paice on drums, and Jon Lord on keyboards along with Evans on vocals, and Simper on bass guitar. The last two gentlemen were chucked out after a while and a person named Ian Gillan was recruited to sing, and Roger Glover, to play the bass.
And then came their signature albums “Deep Purple in Rock”, and “ Machine Head ”. With the release of these two discs, the band established its reputation for loud and hard rock, based on a solid blues foundation, stretched out and amplified endlessly, through Marshall amplifiers. The Purple sound was unique, based on Ritchie Blackmore’s blistering guitar, the screaming vocals of Ian Gillan, the classical flourishes of Jon Lord, all of this held together by the pile driver drumming of Paice, and topped with the thudding bass lines of Glover. They had signature riffs for each song; and that is what I had come for, the pyrotechnics of sound as articulated by Deep Purple!
Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin between them are responsible for most of Rock music’s signature riffs; eat your heart out, Metallica, Guns ‘n Roses, and the rest of the pretenders!
Unfortunately Blackmore was not on the tour, having left the band many years ago, and Jon Lord too was absent, having quit the band midway through their 2001 European tour. There was Steve Morse instead (the ex Kansas guitarist), and Don Airey on keyboards.

And on to the show…

The lights come on along with the opening riff of “Woman from Tokyo”, and Ian Gillan, stands in the center of the stage, with Paice and Airey behind and Glover and Morse on either side. The sound is loud, and it is brutal. I am standing around 100 metres away, but the sound hits my body from the ground up and makes me jerk.
Rising from the neon gloom
Shining like a crazy moon
Yeah, she turns me on like a fire
I get high
My woman from Tokyo
She makes me see
My woman from Tokyo
She's so good to me
I am screaming my guts out and playing the air guitar like a maniac possessed, the crowd roars and jumps, and Ian Gillan’s voice is good, oh so good, after all these years, and hits you like a chill tequila shot, fiery and full-bodied.
He is the Voice of Rock, for my money he is up there with the others: Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Paul Rodgers of Free and later Bad Company, and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Gillan is prancing all around the stage, with the mike held in a lover’s kiss, and Roger Glover is keeping him company in a flowery sleeveless vest and a spotted bandanna
The band starts getting into the groove with ‘Ted the Mechanic’ from their 1997 album “Purpundicular”; ‘Mary Long’, ‘Aviator’, ‘Lazy’; the songs keep coming one after the other, with Gillan playing a long harmonica solo on ‘Lazy’.
The sound is pure energy, high Octane adrenaline, blasting off into the stratosphere on wings of fire. The crowd is swaying, jerking, tottering, as it tries to keep up with Paice’s hyper kinetic rhythm. The bass drum is my heart, thumping loud and clear; his arms the hammer of Gods. I vibrate to the primaeval rhythm of the universe.
What bliss, what glory!

Don Airey goes into a prolonged keyboard solo, with snatches of Bach and Beethoven; and it happens, he opens up the intro to “Perfect Strangers”, his fat organ sound, ringing lush and true. And Gillan’s voice calls to the night:
Can you remember, remember my name
As I flow through your life
A thousand oceans I have flown
And cold spirits of ice
All my life
I am the echo of your past
The song is eerie, with an absolute stand out riff, exotic and dreamy; the sound straight out of an Arabian Night fantasy. It is also hard and nostalgic, and Steve Morse’s guitar kicks in with the lead; a prayer and a chant for us worshippers. I am lost and floating, the music is sinuous and writhes, inviting us to join the dance.

And if you hear me talking on the wind
You've got to understand
We must remain Perfect Strangers.

Morse then rips into a twelve bar blues, creates a curtain of feedback, hooks his teeth into ‘Voodoo Chile’ by Hendrix, and then segues into ‘Whole Lotta love’ by Led Zeppelin. The crowd is hyperventilating as his guitar chews up the night and spits it out in staccato bits of sound. Each note is drenched in sweat, and comes at you like a bat out of hell. And then the sound becomes an old friend, with ‘Smoke on the Water’. This is the Purple classic, aired countless times on radio; Montreux, Frank Zappa, the Rolling Stones, all play a part in this song. I have my friend’s son (who is six years old), perched on my shoulders, as I sway in time to the music. Behind me two stout middle-aged gentlemen shuffle around hippopotamus fashion, shouting to the world “ I feel like I am seventeen again”.

Yeah, right on, Old Rockers never die, they only re - form.

And silence is next, the band walks out, with the crowd screaming for more, and walks right in with ‘Hush’, the band’s first ever hit way back in 1968. Gillan breaks out into ‘Summertime’, the jazz standard by Ira Gershwin and midway waltzes into ‘Black Night’. Gillan’s voice, swoops, soars, and cajoles, a demented banshee wailing for her demon lover. To end it all, we have ‘Highway Star’, with Morse’s guitar wailing and screeching out an introduction, and Gillan racing it to the ground, with speed inside his brain and breaking the speed of sound. Morse and Airey duel it out, keyboards and guitar pumped and at full volume, letting the broadsides fly.
What Rock and Roll!! Lordy, lord; Loud, downright dirty, sweaty, fist pumping, lung searing stuff!
The Purple sound is near operatic, laden with doom and destruction, loud enough to wake up even the catatonic dead and whip them into frenzy.
Mad men have called this band, the Dinosaurs of Rock, clubbing them along with the Rolling Stones as being too old, too weary and playing music that nobody wants to hear. They are totally wrong; for sheer rock and roll as represented by high voltage riffs and primal energy, Deep Purple has no competitors. And I am talking about rock and roll being played by a band, where the average age of its members is above fifty!

With a few red lights and a few old beds
We make a place to sweat
No matter what we get out of this
I know we'll never forget
Smoke on the water, fire in the sky

Viva Rock and Roll!!!

---Doc