But I’ve got to tell you man, on Stormbringer, I was firing on all cylinders as a writer and a singer and a player.
Because Ritchie always built his songs around the Bach guitar playing and I really respected Ritchie for that because he was an originator, the first true innovator of that kind of music. Blackmore at the time was thinking of leaving, and I think the genre of the songs that David and I were writing, like ‘Hold On’ and ‘You Can’t Do it Right’ and ‘Holy Man,’ it was becoming a little more apparent that it was becoming a crossover group. “I mean, I was with Burn, but with Stormbringer, we toured about a year and we were really at our height.
“The Stormbringer album is when I was well and truly involved in the band,” agrees Glenn, indicating that a power struggle was on. Way, way out of character for Deep Purple though. its funky! So ‘Love Don’t Mean a Thing’ is funny, because Blackmore fans, when he talks about how he doesn’t want to play this music, he’s doing it on that track.” But when you listen to that track, the groove that is laid down, even his vibe on it is funky! ‘You Can’t Do it Right (with the One You Love)’. And it’s very funny when Ritchie says he hates funky music. And funny enough, if you listen to the vibe of it, it’s funky. when we did the Stormbringer record, we were in Chicago and Ritchie had met this black guy and he was playing in, either a bar or a subway, and he was singing this song which basically Ritchie took for the vibe of ‘Love Don’t Mean a Thing,’ you know? He just maybe borrowed it, if you will, just a piece of it. We were on the road with Ritchie, the last American tour with him, the Burn tour, we were going to do Stormbringer. I’m going to give you a real exclusive here. Turns out he’s even less himself than we suspected. Back then I guess you’d call it heavy metal.”Īfter that bombastic calling card however, things get slinky and R&B-ish for “Love Don’t Mean a Thing” on which Coverdale delivers his most lascivious vocal ever.
I would call it more of a classic rock song. “I thought it was another great classic, but I wouldn’t call it a heavy metal song. “That was the second album with a song as the title cut,” notes bassist and co-vocalist Glenn Hughes. In fact, I think that’s where Ritchie got the name Rainbow from, the hook in ‘Stormbringer.’ ‘Burn’ I can enjoy any time of the day but I don’t really go for ‘Stormbringer.’” But it never felt comfortable for me to have those. But I wrote two songs to keep Ritchie Blackmore happy, which was ‘Burn,’ which is, I still think, a classic and ‘Stormbringer,’ which basically if you look at the lyrics, they are more or less sci-fi poems. I’ve never embraced the expression heavy metal because all my themes are emotional. “I wrote two songs which could be termed heavy metal or whatever. In any event, in total, it most definitely is quite mellow and quite funky.Īlthough you’d never know Deep Purple were by this point somewhat of a funk band by the opening hard rock spread of the classic title track, a song that grooves large, riffs malevolently and gets downright artful come chorus time. What distinguishes the album, however, is its almost invisible status, or its under-rating, if you will, as a fierce vocal showcase, more so than Burn or Come Taste the Band. But Stormbringer got made, and much to the chagrin of Purple purists, it got made… kind of funky. With this abridged excerpt from my book Gettin’ Tighter: Deep Purple ‘68-’76 (see ), we celebrate this diverse record, one that nonetheless hatched metal classics in “Lady Double Dealer” and the resplendent and epic title track for the ages.Ĭome record number two for the surprise Deep Purple Mark III incarnation, despondence was starting to set in, most notably on the part of Ritchie Blackmore, who would be casting his eye about for a solo situation in which to sink his teeth. Today, December 10th, marks the 40th anniversary since Deep Purple hatched a conundrum of a record called Stormbringer, one that would ultimately result in the acrimonious split for “the man in black,” Ritchie Blackmore from the band, and a complete meltdown of Purple one record later.