Mark I is a band that's lucky enough to have their own sound (which is, umm, like Cream with loud Hammond organ, a croony vocalist, and a penchant for classical flourishes), a snazzy guitar player who does a pretty boffo Hendrix impersonation, and probably one of the better rhythm sections in late-60's Brit-invasion rock. So why does every song that isn't a Cream or Experience cover sound like it should be? There's introductions and stuff that let the band fly to the extent of their proto-prog limits (pretty far for pre-King Crimson, pre-ELP 1968, I'd say), but when the lyrics start, they sound unwilling to stray from their Cream roadmap. The only song that really has its own identity is 'Hush', a badass rockin' cover of some old Joe South song (don't worry, I don't know who that is, either)...everything else sounds ripped from Fresh Cream like they haven't grown originality genes yet.  And you know what? Excepting a few of the trio's better singles, Deep Purple could wipe the floor with Cream, and this album still beats the living snot out of Fresh Cream, even with all the quotations, steals, and impersonations.  This is one enthusiastic bunch of afro'd Brits, charging through a set of their favorite covers and a few originals, and their energy is infectious. It's refreshing that they don't give a good goddamn about trying to play the blues correctly, and indeed they barely even try although that's exactly what everyone wanted to hear in 1968. Play the fucking blues, man! Blues scale! Blues scale! 12 bars! Harmonica, motherfuckers! Not too many people were prepared to hear these kind of 10 dollar chords and 10 finger organ solos like what Ritchie and Jon Lord dish out, but the band attacks them like they're ripping through 'Louie Louie' (or, heh...'Hey Joe') in their garage. Of course, most of the time singer Rod Evans tends to kill the mood with his vocals, which sound closer to Tom Jones than Muddy Waters. The guy's simply a crooner-type at heart, and it ultimately led to his demise in the band.  Oh, he makes a decent attempt at sounding like a tough guy, but I always end up looking forward to the next kick-ass instrumental part while he does his upper-class loverboy thing.

Deep Purple albums, by definition, don't have a whole lot of songs on them, and Shades of is no exception. They had some allergy to keeping things under 4 minutes in length...broke out in hives or got anal warts or something. This means that, say, 'Hey Joe', which the Hendrix Experience managed to blast through in just short of three and a half minutes, takes frigging 7:29 on Shades of Deep Purple, both because there's a huge, completely unrelated intro section that rips off from Ravel's 'Bolero', and because the tempo is taken down to near Black Sabbath tempos. I find their take on the song interesting (it's clearly based on the Hendrix version rather than, say, the Byrds one from 1965), but when it comes in last on an album with three songs over 6 minutes, and all of those minutes are packed full of soloing, feedback, and wailing, don't blame me if my attention begins to wane. Their schtick is mostly to Purplize some famous song (here, it's Cream's 'I'm So Glad', 'Help' plus the aforementioned 'Hush' and 'Hey Joe') and let their soloing fill in whatever gaps might be left. Taken individually, none of the songs on the record are at all bad, but the Deep Purple sound at this point is so predictably busy that an album full of this kind of soloing can test one's patience.  Jon Lord's soloing style is pretty much as fans of the latter albums might expect, but Blackmore has yet to move beyond his influences to become the sprinting whammy-bar wiggling fiend we'd later fall in love with.  Here he sounds heavy and flashy, but not very confident, as if the notes don't fall from his fingers very easily. The band as a whole can strike one as being laughably 60's, or, as I said above, laughably Cream.

The originals are, without exception, listenable but unremarkable. The opening instrumental 'And the Address' introduces our boys to the world with some trippy Jon Lord organ effects that sound straight out of 'Inna Gadda Da Vida' before we hit the go-go groove that will bring us on home to our Ventures records for some hot dogs and a blow job. Ritchie and Jon get their respective licks in (they never fail to), but the song doesn't really go anywhere after they start. Rod Evans first attempt at songwriting, the jive 'One More Rainy Day', is trashy sentimental pop better fit for some crap-ass band like the Searchers or somebody who doesn't rock as hard as the Purple does. The organ part reminds me of the intro to Joe Cocker's 'With a Little Help From My Friends', and it always throws me off when they never actually shift to playing that song. On an album so enamoured with cover versions, your mind plays tricks like that, you know. 'Mandrake Root' is much better until you realize the riff is stolen from 'Foxey Lady' and the vocals are so close to Captain Vegetable Pants Tom Jones that you might be afraid you've crawled into the wrong sleeping bag on accident. The best original, heh heh...it's the psycho surf number! 'Love Help Me' is so goofily out of character (well, it's obviously ripped from Are You Experienced? tracks like 'Third Stone From The Sun' again, so maybe it's not out of character at all) that I can't help but feel charmed by it's very silliness. This is a band that truly could've used a bit more of a sense of humor at times, and moments like this remind you that Lord and Blackmore aren't out to simply solo you to death.

Capn's Final Word: Original, except for all that stuff they steal from all those other bands. A cover band with flashy fingers.

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Hey now, this is very much the exact same, only slightly different. As if that wasn't designed to confound you enough, you should probably sit down and have a listen to this album to hear what real confusion is all about. Is Deep Purple still a psychedelic cover band, or what? Are they a pop band or a neo-prog bunch of classical massacrists? I tell you what...Deep Purple could always play, but when they decided to 'progress' and try to attain the lofty goal of becoming the heir apparents to Keith Emerson, they degenerated into a very uninteresting group of afro-headed instrument smokers. The cool thing is, on Taliesyn at least, they're still a pop band at heart, so even when they fly off into the soft-headed stratosphere, where the air is thin and the philosophies thinner, like on 'Listen, Learn, Read On', their ridiculous Word of God conceits come off like hipster late-60's come-ons rather than, you know, like Yessongs. Kinda like a harder Moody Blues, to be exact...same low-fi gee-whillikers sound effects, same go-go dancer 'rock' style, same incomprehensible, hilarious 'poetry' intoned in a llllllooooowwww voice like the guy's trying to tell you your fly's open without alerting the entire congregation. It's so stupid it's fun, but soon enough they would get too 'sophisticated' to make it stupid and would rather end up with a puddle of dire mush.  I mean, hell, on this song, Deep Purple sounds about as much like the Deep Purple we love as Sarah McLaughlin does. Except without the baby flab jaw and the legions of carpet munching Gilmore Girls fans following them around.

The only time I really feel the real Deep Purple Vibe (and by that, I mean Purple as a whole, not Mark I), as it were, is on 'Wring That Neck', which ushers in the Purple Jam tune, the same form that would sprout breasts, achieve menses, and flower into womanhood on 'The Mule' and 'Lazy' on later records.  It's also one of the few Mark I tunes the Mark II band would play regularly, and that's because Rod Evans isn't up there gaying the whole thing up like he does so much. 'Wring That Neck' isn't much more than an interesting riff, but the interplay between Blackmore and Lord finally catches fire right here. There's actually quite a bit of interesting playing throughout Taliesyn, from the classical flirtations of 'We Can Work It Out' to the understated folk-rock gorgeousness of 'Anthem', where Paice's drumming really shines for its subtlety rather than it's ability to disintegrate gallstones from 50 yards without the use of a scalpel. 'Anthem' is my favorite song on the album by far, something I was almost sure was by Big Elvis Presley, but a thorough (i.e. somewhere between 20 and 35 second) search of the Internet provided no clues other than the song was composed by Evans and Lord. It's a just about note-perfect imitation of Elvis Circa Comeback, that Memphis schlock-country tearjerking that seemed to be the exclusive stomping ground of American lite-rockers turns out to be just about the peak moment of Mark I. Again, this sounds about as much like Machine Head as a 95-year old Creole woman clearing last years' collection of snuff, boogers, and various flying insects from her hair-encrusted nasal passages, but it's great. Sixties idiots should grow up and cut their hair, and then run down to their local cutout bin and attempt to steal Taliesyn instead of paying a dollar fifty. Really.

Oh, so much of the rest is kind of run-of-the-mouth Mark I Purple: there's the Beatles cover ('We Can Work It Out') that takes the original and massages, gropes, and gooses it until it resembles the Strawbs and sprouts a new love-child named 'Exposition' out of it's forehead, there's the Tina Turner cover ('River Deep, Mountain High') that takes the original, follows it home from class every day, calls late at night and hangs up, masturbates over it's old high school yearbook pictures, and takes potshots at junior congressmen in it's honor, and then there's 'Kentucky Woman', which you may have suspected is a cover of a particular hit song by a certain Mr. Neil Diamond, and you'd be correct. And you might surmise from my rapid change in tone from the conversational and colloquial to the formal and stilted, that I may have something against Mr. Diamond, and you'd be right. This is them man who stole my 2^nd grade girlfriend, the sick, sweaty sonofabitch, and I WANT HER BACK. All he had to do was wiggle his hips to that 'Ken-tuck-y WO-MAN! (duh duh duh)' rhythm once or twice, and my hopes of a little 8-year old nookie went out the window. It's alright, I've still got my guit-ah! Where's your sister, baby? I don't dig the Diamond, and I don't dig the Deep doing the Diamond, for I think it's derivative and dumb.

Taliesyn is a ridiculous, mostly-horrid, terminal Sixties album that manages to stay defiantly fun despite all of that for at least part of the action. It's like an exercise in the rape and pillage of everything that has anything to do with good taste and restraint, and if you view it like that, it starts to become almost addictive. So if you're stoked to a high boil on a steady diet of speed, Pop Rocks, and Fireball, you'll probably find damn near most of Taliesyn to be a sad, immature bore. But if you like kitsch, or have a deep addiction to Jon Lord leaning his big moustache across the keys of an amplified Hammond organ for a half hour, you might get a kick or three out of this album. I mean, there's plenty of people out there who prefer, say, They Might Be Giants to, say, Black Sabbath, but I don't have to sit next to them on the bus. The main problem is that Deep Purple is schizoid...are the pop? Are they prog? What the hell, do they do either one particularly well? Hell no, but when they mix the two together in such an improbable way, I can't help but cry out 'yikes!' and dive for cover underneath my ever-growing piles of stupid, idiotic hard rock records.  

Capn's Final Word: Still an incomparably original cover band, but yet one with next to no good taste. A Godsend for lovers of cheese.

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Mike      Your Rating: D
Any Short Comments?: This album eats shit for breakfast. It's painful to hear such songs like "River Deep - Mountain High" and "We Can Work It Out" massacred. Things would get a lot better round the times of the mighty "In Rock," but right around this time, this band and this album were ill. Mentally ill. They had to have been to release this testament to incompetence.

As a comedy album, though, it rates about a B+. Take it or leave it.
 

Let me remind you again...before Deep Purple got Ian Gillan and a shot of Devil in their souls, they resembled nothing more than a Moody Blues-dippy flower-child hairy-woman earth-children Public school Lewis Carroll-worshipping bunch of kids who happened to find a fuzztone and a Bach transcription book while rummaging around their burned-out basement looking for a lighter to blaze up their hash brownie. Hard-rocking, ass-licking, fire-kicking Dogs of War they were NOT. And they certainly wouldn't be Speed Kings until they danced a pirouette u-turn on In Rock and decided to revolutionize rock music by just playing harder and faster than anyone since Freddie King. But in 1969, they'd yet to have their revelatory discovery of the Enormously Loud Power Chord, and were still dicking around with their psychedelic classicized pop that was leading them nowhere. Hell, they sound near about early-year David Bowie on Deep Purple as they do the frigging Jimi Hendrix Experience, and it's only getting worse. While the first album seemed to get by on giddy enthusiasm and ridiculous Cream imitations, and the second album got by on dippy experimentalism and ridiculous Eric Burdon and the Animals imitations, Deep Purple shows the band trying to forge their own road rather than riding the Coverversion Express for another album. This is for sure the Rod Evans Experiment, more of a backing band than an actual band, and it's his pop inclinations that win out the stylistic wrestling match this time around.  At least this album ditches the scourge of cover versions that had begun to get stale on the last album in favor of some more of the bands' original compositions...any more ten minute Phil Spector covers and I was liable to toss this disc out the window. I'd like to say that the new songs have great melodies in the vein of the fantabulous 'Anthem', but I can't. 

The prog-classical fringes that first poked their heads out on Taliesyn are either muted completely or shunted off into 'April', a huge multipart suite that starts off as a sort of inspirational instrumental waltz by the band and ends up as a bunch of inspid orchestral-symphonic mess that features, well, the notes Lord wrote on the page, and not a single Purplist playing an instrument. How the band could allow this to happen on their third record shows me how much of a mess they were in at this point. There's the Rod Evans schlock-pop croon band on one hand, the Jon Lord conservatory dissertation band on the other, and everyone else hanging around in a strangely satisfying limbo in between. My question is, where's Ritchie in all this? Had Blackmore not yet taken his How to Win Friends and Influence Your Bandmates management course yet, or what? He keeps getting more and more marginalized as each Mark I album comes by, and here he's damn near invisible. Sure, at heart this is still a guitar band more than, say, a vocal band or a zither band or a meat-whistle band, but Ritchie Blackmore's contribution to the songwriting and performance aspects of this album are his weakest on just about anything I've heard from the man outside the Bent Out of Shape album.  I don't even like many of his solos, which almost sound like they're aping the San Francisco A  Like I said, the Purple Superpowers are Evans and Lord,  and I'm afraid their individual songwriting tics and tendencies sink Deep Purple in a tasteless soup of half hammy psycho-pop and half progressive indulgence.

'Chasing Shadows' kicks things off in a very Taliesyn vein, a 'hard rocker' that, in the final analysis, sucks ass at rocking. It's only saving grace is that it's fast, ushering in yet another Deep Purple calling-card.  As an added plus, whenever Purple plays fast, that means Paicey plays something interesting, and here he's pulling together a half-march/half-shaman ceremonial forcebeat.  He's the spoon that stirs the sauce, and since the rest of the song is so doggedly ordinary, he's the only thing worthwhile here. 'Blind' and 'Lalena' follow, both ego-mania vocal vehicles for Evans, who sounds like he's trying to channel Greg Lake through Englebert Humperdinck, stretching out each pregnant pause to bursting and over-emoting like a Star Search finalist. Blackmore plays a defiantly dull fuzz solo on 'Blind', but wisely decides to almost sit out 'Lalena', which enters lounge-lizard territory before it's all over.  'Fault Line-The Painter' is a lot better, tasting much more like Deep Purple and a lot less like Lite Blue, anyway, another speedy rip complete with endless organ soloing with a couple of good stabs, but not much great riffing.  Things take a turn for the bluesy on 'Why Didn't Rosemary?', a totally unconvincing track when compared to even 'Wring That Neck', just a toss-off blues riff and lots more of that space filling organ stuff. Just run of the mill, stab in the dark, spit in your eye lazy songwriting, is all. 'Bird Has Flown' is another 'hard rocker' that should probably have stayed on the shelf.  It's based on a near-parody 'acid' riff, heaving and shaking like those blotches of Jell-O on the overhead projector. The band generates so little heat on these tracks it's clear their hearts aren't in it. Lord wants to write symphonies and Evans wants to stuff vegetables in his pants and have the girlies in the cheap seats launch panties at his head, so no wonder this album defiantly refuses to rock.

'April', by far the most important piece of shit on this album, combines the best and worst material on Deep Purple (hell, the best and worst sides of Mark I) in a absolutely maddening way, calculated to make you hate this band before it's all over. The opening gentle acoustic/electric 'bolero' section is gorgeous, being Blackmore's most substantial contribution of the entire record.  His guitar stings our eyes as it soars over a shifting, stately backdrop of 'meaningful' chord progressions and choirs imitating Mellotrons. This section gives way to the orchestrated section, an under five-minute section that feels at least twice as long, but at least doesn't sound like the corny Disney Motion Picture Orchestra like those sections on Days of Future Passed. Then the band 'rocks' it's way out to the end no more successfully than they've been able to so far on this record, and I completely, totally miss what this song is supposed to signify. Why the orchestral section? Why the heavy organ-driven cock rock at the end? These questions go unanswered, but most often go unasked, as I rarely am able to make it past the orchestral section anyway, which sure doesn't bode too well for the next entry into the Symphonic Scoring for Dummies sweepstakes, the following year's Concerto for Group and Orchestra.

Capn's Final Word: Purple exploring all their dead ends at the same time. Not a great big kick in the head good time.

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Andrew R  stray_toasters@juno.com   Your Rating: B+
Any Short Comments?: Come on man, how does this get the same grade as Stormbringer, one listen of which I only got through because I was walking home from the library (I couldn't even stand the synthesizers on the title track)?  Yeah, the songs tend to ramble and that Rod Evans guy is a bit full of himself but he sings some great vocal melodies on the first three tracks.  The beginning of Painter has the guitar reaching the upper roof of my skull and the rest of side B displays some real energy.  The rumbling groove on Chasing Shadows is sweeter than 'Into the Fire'.

The only part that sucks is the 'classical' section of April.  Doesn't make me that interested in the follow up.  But the rocking part is great!

It's no 'In Rock' but a lot of fun to listen to after exhausting the 1970-72 trilogy and you get to hear Richtie do some things that made it into the Gillan/Glover line-up.

To me, a guy who has a sort of 'don't ask, don't tell, don't touch my butt in the shower' arrangement with classical music (It's melodically complex! It demands technical competence to perform and the suspension of impatience to appreciate! It's interesting 95% of the time, and entertaining 5% of the time!), the idea of rock guys writing lengthy symphonic compositions when they've yet to show me they can write a decent pop tune smacks me as the product of egos massive enough to only be possible in the late 60's. Never before and never since had there been a period of time in which everything was so open to experimentation...drugs, sex, Cajun food...and 'good taste' and 'self-restraint' were such bad words. Of course, this time period generated greatness (I wouldn't be spending all my free time writing these silly reviews if there hadn't been a Sixties to kick popular music across the mouth), but it also created disgusting failure in equal doses. One of the main features of the late 60's was a feeling that good ol'-fashioned rock 'n' roll just wasn't good enough anymore. Not only did it need to be stretched to its very limits, it needed to be cross-bred with more 'respectable' musical forms, thus elevating it to a level at which highbrow idiots felt they had a right to be snobbish about it. Thus we found out about jazz-rock and classical-rock, but this was all still mostly okay. The problem came in when rock guys decided they could cross the line completely and become classical composers. Like Jon Lord! Under what set of circumstances a flashy organ player for a hard rock outfit could be considered a strong candidate to be The Next Mozart is a complete mystery...apparently in Jon's mind alone. Jon's suite, which makes up the entirety of the original Concerto record, is nothing better than a bad mixture of hard rock soloing and a rather childish idea of classical music. Ritchie Blackmore spends endless periods of the 'First Movement' playing a solo that sounds like a rehearsal jam? Sure, I enjoy hearing Blackmore flash his rapidly developing axe chops, but I also like eating whipped cream straight from the can, but I also know that neither one of them's particularly good for me. Still, his tuneless, buzz-sawing solos are miles more interesting than the soundtrack-y symphonic parts that substitute 'big horn noises' and lots of crescendoing for anything resembling an actual melody. Lord would rather us marvel at the hustle and bustle of his tricky rhythms than engage us in anything emotionally resilient. There's some cool sections when the band (Deep Purple) comes back from their coffee breaks to take over from some endless bassoon solo or another, but otherwise the symphonic sections meander worse than Dustin Hoffman introducing Bruce Stringbean at the Grammy awards. There's large sections, and I mean minutes at a time, when the music is almost completely inaudible. And other times, mostly when Lord fires up his organ for some tricky-dick soloing, when it sounds too loud at any volume. I'll admit it right now - I know about as much about classical music as 8 years of playing trumpet might've taught me (nothing), but I do know that to make it through this entire 'suite' takes more intestinal fortitude than I'm able to muster. This is not merely boring, this is almost daring you to twiddle thumbs and wonder how much of your life you're wasting listening to Jon Lord's endless trip through the Land of Sap and Fat Chords. And the third section? Hehe! A big drum solo! Whee! It's like having your very own encyclopedia of everything that was musically wrong with progressive rock, all in the same place! (No awful concepts or sci-fi lyrics, though...we're saved that much at least.) I hate it, and not just because it set back the cause of In Rock an entire year, thus missing the opportunity to trump Led Zeppelin's debut at it's own game.

Of course, the possibility exists that if Ritchie Blackmore, Roger Glover, and Ian Gillan hadn't been through the Concerto experience, they'd never have been able to beat Lord into submission and exorcise their prog demons once and for all. Concerto is Deep Purple taking an enormous, smelly, rotting dump...ridding themselves of years of pent-up egotism and misguided use of the hands.  They'd already jettisoned Rod Evans and his sad Fat Elvis-vocalization style, and were ready to cut off Jon Lord's prog cancer. If it took a massive commercial and artistic failure to snap Blackmore back to life, then that's what it needed. Concerto, as if on cue, tanked it almost completely upon release, and Deep Purple would never again be mentioned in the same breath as the Nice or Pink Floyd.  They'd sapped out the Rod Evans pop-schlock avenue and found Jon Lord's prog direction a dead end, so they went, chastened, back to the drawing board.

Well, not exactly, because they'd already written their signature metal-classical suite 'Child in Time', which is performed here as a bonus track along with a similarly extended (extended with what, you may ask? Penile implants? Scenes that would have pushed the rating to an NC-17? Christ, I think we all know the answer is an offensive amount of wanky soloing.) 'Wring That Neck' that'll try anyone's patience. Possibly because of the pressure of performing their new suite, or because of having to play at a lower volume than usual so as to not destroy the fragile woodcarvings of the opera house, or simply because of a bad recording, Deep Purple really can't catch fire during these two solo sets.  'Child In Time' is particularly lame...Ian Gillan sounds like he's trying out for the opera rather than belting out a metal tune, and the unison solo sections are so messy as to be downright incomprehensible. For a band that sounds so amazingly tight on Made in Japan a few years later, here they sound as if they have a lot left to learn. Of course, when Ritchie Blackmore fires off his finger-rockets, it's still breathtaking, but the band struggles to keep up throughout. Besides, you'll get all of this and more from whatever other bazillion pseudo-legal concert releases made under the Deep Purple name in the last few years. Don't get your kicks from here unless you're desperate. It's....embarrassing, like trying to get wasted on nutmeg and mouthwash - you might possibly get there sometime, but 

Hey! Did you know that, thanks to my handy-dandy rogue's gallery of Derp Peeples up thar below the letter grade, you can see that this album marks the debut of Mark II? How stupid must Ian Gillan have felt that his first album with his hot new band excludes him almost completely? I guess that was his comeuppance for starring in something as groaningly hippie-apologist as Jesus Christ Superstar, probably the second truly evil thing in rock music in 1969.

Capn's Final Word: Purple jamming over Lord's simpy orchestral bowel movements in the dark? Sounds about as fun as an anal root canal.

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In Rock - EMI 1970

Hell fucking goddamn shitballs, yeah! This is a rebirth, one hellspawn of a great heavy metal album from a time before anyone knew what exactly heavy metal was. I mean, there wasn't a ClearChannel for a SoundScan to tell people what to think back then, so people just called this kind of music 'heavy', and they knew what they liked. Okay, so maybe people in 1970 bought the Association and the Archies more than they did Deep Purple, but whatever happened, In Rock quickly became one of the cornerstones of the hardest of hard rock music. Of course, critics stabbed it and slashed it mostly because it wasn't very 'mature' and sounded completely unlike either the Band or the Beatles 1965, so it was mostly left for the 13-year old longhaired gas huffers that liked anything that sounded good on headphones while gobbling downers and staring at a well-worn copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves stolen from the library. Funnily enough, out of the Big Three metal bands' debut albums (I'm counting In Rock as Mark II's debut album, and thus Deep Purple's as we know them. I'm obviously ignoring the Concerto for Wang and Lubricated Palm farce, so if you don't like it, go and spot some trains or stalk some co-eds or whatever you obsessives do), In Rock sounds a thousand times fresher than Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin I (and, hey, I love Led Zeppelin I, you know? But that reliance on overloud blooze was kinda unoriginal for 1969, you know?), and still sounds just as powerful today, something which no other Purple album outside of Made in Japan can claim. There are no letdowns, no folk-rock ballad interludes, no aimless jams, just salvo after salvo of some of the most electrifying heavy rock madness ever scratched into vinyl. Deep Purple rarely even lets the tempo drop any lower than 'Fucking Blazing', and while making it through In Rock can be a tiring experience, I like to think of it as the kind of tired you get after a marathon fuck, rather than, say, working overtime or trying to make it through an Ayn Rand novel. It's simply amazing, the depth and breadth of hard rocking creativity shown on this record, one that invariably lives up to it's title and delivers on the promise of a band that had spent a few too many years wasting it's time with Rod Evans and organ solos.

In Rock was the product of all the pent-up frustration and anger Ritchie Blackmore had been generating (and this man who produces anger like a Mormon family produces blond-haired kids) over the preceding few years with Deep Purple Mark I. He had clearly spent the preceding few years woodshedding while his talents went unused in Purple....there's lots of solos to practice while Jon Lord cranks his way through a 45 minute organ solo, aren't there?  But with Roger Glover and Ian Gillan, Ritchie had found the perfect allies in his Back to Rock movement. Ian's voice was better suited to bringing down the arena roof than the girl's panties, and Roger Glover was up for anything that allowed him to crank his bass to marrow-churning volumes. Best of all, the band was able to produce seven great rock songs that somehow incorporated all the flashiness of their prog-work into riffs as violent and dangerous as they were fast.  It took chops to play a riff like 'Bloodsucker' and have the band sound tighter than a librarian's birth canal. Not every band could do it either...and Deep Purple had two melodic instruments to deal with, unlike Zep or Sabbath (well, Zep had two when John Paul Jones played organ, which wasn't particularly often). Not to mention Ian Gillan's singular ability to out-Banshee scream anyone in the rock genre, while staying in tune and never quite sounding like his nuts are being squeezed flat in a C-clamp. Jon Lord just plugs his organ into a fuzztone and follows Ritchie's lead, making for a massive guitar/organ sound that would become a trademark for...erm...this Mark. All cylinders fire perfectly in turn, and the Deep Purple band sounds not only flashy and impressive, but huge and deep, like maybe there's more going on in there than just five guys playing metallized riffs faster than previously thought possible.  

If all they'd done was jam and solo with their new personnel and sound, this album would still be listenable, but they've delivered on their songwriting promise and recorded seven good songs for In Rock, making for an album that really lacks nothing.  They've got fast ones like the garage rocking 'Flight of the Rat', the twisting chug of 'Hard-Loving Man', and the self-explanatory 'Speed King', wherein Ian Gillan makes like an unholy cross between Little Richard and a high-voltage transformer during an electrical storm.  They've got the cock-rocking strut of 'Bloodsucker' (featuring Ian screeching 'NO NO NOOOOO!!!' like he's remembering a time he zipped his fly too fast) and the stomping 'Into The Fire', which probably taught early Sabbath a thing or two.  And never once do they descend into self-parody, unless you're one of those unfortunate souls who feels everything this band does was a self-parody...those people probably aren't going to find much love in the 'hard rock' genre anyway.  Besides, being over-the-top defineshis kind of music, and criticizing that is kinda like me reviewing a bunch of reggae records and calling all of them 'underwritten' or 'unmelodic'. I personally don't much want to hear a metal album that doesn't try to be louder, or faster, or harder, or meaner, or dirtier, or more dangerous than its competition, which is the exact reason why I'll never dig Van Hagar and will always feel Metallica was a sell-out record.

Even the doubters have to at least give some respect to 'Child in Time', the centerpiece of In Rock and probably the defining moment of Deep Purple (alongside 'Smoke On The Water', of course), a sort of half-metal/half-prog excursion into the farthest known reaches of Blackmore's speed and Gillan's voice. It's also strangely poignant, dedicated to the innocent victims of war, ones who may as well just 'bow their heads....wait for the ricochet'. Strangely enough, a song that features Ian screaming 'AAAAAHHHH!!! AAHHHHHH!!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!!!' for minutes at a time may not feel like much of a 'sensitive' song, but you'll just have to believe me when I tell you that it's heart-wrenching. This isn't about fiddling with Gollum in Middle Earth, hoping to get some Elf pussy before leaving Rivendale or witches gathered in their masses at black masses wearing glasses and taking classes, this is actually about something tangible, though it may not feel like it at first listen. Whatever...all I needed from this song for years was the stunning solo sections where Jon and Ritchie trade off lines like they're sharing a brain (Blackmore's, no doubt), speeding up faster and faster at the end like the tape's being manipulated, but all done naturally. What this song has, it's not 'flash', it's something more akin to 'abandon', as if they've finally freed themselves from their restrictions and can dedicate all their energy to making rock music that cannot be denied, and they do.

In Rock is, sadly, about as good as Deep Purple ever got, and they'd never again be able to equal the pure energy displayed on this record. They'd stay on the top of their game through the next few albums, trying for some diversity on Fireball and consistency on Machine Head, as well as proving they could play just as well live on Made in Japan, but they just could never top the mighty In Rock. Plus, considering this album is sort of a small 'lost classic', you'll probably never have heard any of these songs before by simply listening to the numbing sounds of classic rock radio. This is not only the place for a budding Deep Purple fan to begin his (or her, let's not be presumptuous) collection, I think it ought to be in the first few hard rock albums you ever buy. It's unrelentingly powerful, very tight, has memorable songs, and falls prey to almost none of the pitfalls that kill the credibility of most metal records to outsiders. I'd call that a winner anyday.

Capn's Final Word: Awwwww yeeeeeeaaahhhhh.....there ain't much more a man needs than a hot chick, a fat sack, a bucket of chicken wings, and In Rock. It's like manna for the inner demolition derby driver in all of us.

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Andrew R  stray_toasters@juno.com   Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: The first four bars of Speed King blow away the entire Led Zep catalog.

That's about it.
 

Nathan Harper nator9999@comcast.net    Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: Great album Deep Purple reviews, very entertaining. And you know you're a geek if you get the obscure Monty Python reference in the intro!
 

Elmo zulth@hotmail.com      Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: My favourite Deep Purple album, and the first album I ever heard of Deep Purple. just about every song here blows away the studio versions, even though at the start of Speed King it seems that Ian Gillan voice is being overthrown by Ritchie Blackmore. Also, this album manages to give me ear damage with my speakers at 60%, but it takes anything by Sabbath or Zeppelin 80%, 'nough said.

P.S. I know Ian Gillan can play some percussion (as seen in 'Live at the Royal Albert Hall') but I'm pretty sure its Paice on the drums in The Mule...

Roy     Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: Though many DP fans cite Machine Head as the best moment, in my humble opinion the Purps never surpassed 'in rock'; the seminal hard rock album of the early 70's and one that defined their sound for the rest of their career ( well up to 1975 and Ritchie's departure anyway...) Purple had something Sabbath and Zep never had - that fat scary distorted Hammond carrying the rhythmn normally associated with guitar, while Paice and Balckmore vied for the listener's attention. One of those albums you can listen to so many times and still hear new parts....awesome.

Isaac  isaac3rd@comcast.net   Your Rating: A
Any Short Comments?: These 14 year old (in 1970) ears had no idea at the time they were listening to one of the all time classic hard rock albums, if not THE all time classic. I just knew it rocked harder than ANYTHING out there and it was grafted onto my turntable for months.

(When I bought this album, it was actually a tossup between In Rock and the Guess Who's American Woman. Like I said, I was 14 at the time.)

But isn't it funny that this classic hard rock album that influenced so many people NEVER gets played on "claasic rock" stations?
 

Obscure even for Mark II Purple, Fireball is a neat attempt at diversifying the crushing sound developed on In Rock, trading a big share of the power for a touch of wit and uncharacteristic good humor that make me respect the band even more. It's as if they knew they'd burned up a lot of their pent-up anger on the last one and that a sequel would never be able to scale those heights, so they decided to explore all the places the band could take them. I like the fact that Fireball shows Deep Purple to be something more than simply prog-metal headbangers, something a bit smarter than your average Humble Pie.  This quick album (seven more tracks! Only one over 8 minutes in length!) starts off safely with the neck-snapping title track, no new ground broken, perhaps, but taking nothing off 'Speed King' (and featuring a pretty wicked mechanized 'WHOOSH!!!' noise to signal the beginning of the record) before already stepping into the unknown with 'No No No'. This track features another entry into political territory for this supposed 'party band', calling for generational warfare and the seizure of power, sort of like a less scary Kick Out the Jams without all the 'hep raps' from John Sinclair. More interesting is the riff, which rolls more like a soul lick than some average blues-derived runthrough, and the solo section almost enters Pink Floyd territory before tearing back into hard rock territory again. 'Demon's Eye' is even more swinging, damn near close to Big Band now that I think about it, or maybe Jimi Hendrix at his most laid back.  Ritchie never quite let go of his Hendrix fetish, but while on the Mark I albums he sounded like he was aping all the tricks, here he sounds closer to nailing the sound completely. Jon get's the most interesting solo, and Blackmore plays it close to the vest, so we don't hear exactly how much he'd been studying the Black Master.  But as it is, the song is unapologetically grooving.

Capn's Final Word: Shows Purple can do other things than shoot the big guns right at your eardrums, and well, too. Still miss the reliability of a good, stupid rocker, though.

Machine Head - EMI 1972

Tight, tight, tight. Air-tight. Boa constrictor tight.  Your high school senior prom suit tight. Back to basic full-bore metal, too; after the country-rock and psychedelic excursions of Fireball, this comes, depending on your point of view, as either a return to the mighty form of In Rock or the beginning of a retreat from experimentalism and the entrenchment in the now well-defined Mark II Purple Sound. Well, whatever happens on Machine Head, we've certainly heard it before, but we may just not have heard it as wicked laser-focused as it's presented here. There's really not much to say to the fan who already has In Rock, for there's certainly nothing here that'll surprise you. Machine Head may not set its sights very high (there's certainly no prog-metal conservatory-tryout 'Child In Time' on this album, either), but it completely demolishes everything it tries to do, which is crush bones and skulls under riffs that rock so hard they'll knock your senses loose. Despite all this allusion to brontosaurus-type metallic stomp, there's a nice amount of subtlety and some classy touches that indicate Deep Purple still have their wits intact after all this standing in front of Marshall stacks amped to overheating. All in all, Machine Head is still kickass shit, plus it's got some of Purple's best-known material, so crank it up and begin to relive 1972 all over again, even if you're just a teenager.

Capn's Final Word: A return to kicking heads into doorways, with just a little less wicked originality that In Rock had in droves. If pure hard rock is whatchoo want, this shit is like China White.

Henrik LidbjЖrk     Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: After In Rock, this is possibly the most important record in my life, since I first copied it onto cassette from my mom's disc back when I was about 10 years old. I listened to it recently through headphones while biking and nearly wet my pants. Has (almost) everything that is worth hearing in rock 'n' roll and nothing else, super tight, super fast, super groovy, even super laid back.

Sam      Your Rating: A+
Any Short Comments?: I prefer this to In Rock, possibly because I bought it before, but mainly because this record is just pure coolness.

While In Rock is a demand to take notice, Machine Head is Deep Purple doing what they do best.... play effortlessly good hard rock. This album KNOWS it's good, the band sound comfortable and relaxed, and very assured of themselves, they know they're making a good album.

This is the quintessential hard rock record. If anyone asks you what hard rock or rock music is all about, just give them a copy of this.

A must own. Timeless, perfect, cool, great songs, hard riffs, immensely confident vocals... what a rock album should be.
 

Mark II's fantabulous live album that fits the bill as probably the most complete picture of what Deep Purple was all about in 1972.  Originally released as a double LP (single CD) version culling songs from several performances from the same run, later re-released as a 2-CD (3-LP, 4-8-track) version with a few bonus tracks (which I'm reviewing here, bought as part of a 6-CD Deep Purple MP3 set they sell in Russia for, like, less than a taxi ride across town) and later a 3-CD (6-LP, 17 70 ips reel-to-reels, 38 78 rpm platters, or 1kb UltraMegaNerdo-Matic Audio Compression File) boxed set called Live In Japan that gives you three complete shows, each about the same length and identical setlists as the original Made In Japan CD. So, anyway, there's a buttload of versions of these concerts to grab, but most of you out there just need concern themselves with the shortest possible set available, 'cos Purple's got 40 fingers and 2 vocal chords, and they gotta use 'em all...ALL THE TIME!!! 10 tracks (including the bonus ones), nearly an hour and forty minutes, averaging well over 10 minutes a song. You one of those folks who thought the pedestrian single 'Strange Kind of Woman' was perfunctory at 3-odd minutes? Well, lean your head back and take a deep gulp off a Nine Minute Fifty Second version that'll make for goddamn sure you know EXACTLY how 'strange' this 'kind of woman' is! Heh! She's real weird, like she feeds the loose end of the toilet paper roll over the backside of the holder! And she says 'to-mah-to' instead of 'to-may-to'! Not to mention the fact that she likes drinking Tab. Wotta fucking creep, that goofy bitch! Glad we have Gillan and company to warn us away from a person like that... 

Capn's Final Word: Grinding hot.  I hazard to say that Purple could go on live records where none of their closest brethren could.  Buy the deluxe, high-dollar version and here them go there three times.

Who Do We Think We Are? - EMI 1973