So, what have you been listening to lately?

[Pilgrim]

I have always loved the Mitch Ryder version - and this one by Creedence is pretty irresistable. This is just doing it right.

[uwe]

There are more energetic ways to celebrate Little Richard's brilliance ...

[Dave W]

I prefer the version from King Ralph.   

[uwe]

Way to go, Little Richard needs a frantic approach and John Fogerty - for all his qualities - doesn't muster that in the CCR version. Though he came close to it on Travellin' Band which always sounded like a nod to Little Richard to me.



Little Richard is DP's most prominent 50ies influence, you could hear it in their own songs ...





and their encores ...





They were all diehard Little Richard fans. And Ian Gillan took that "frantic delivery"-aspect definitely serious! 

[uwe]

An adolescent wet dream of mine. Unjustly largely forgotten.

[uwe]

Listen to DP with a guest vocalist making inroads with the C&W genre no matter what Dave says!

[uwe]

A supergroup of sorts ...

[westen44]

Very good.  That must have been a one-off collaboration, though.  I couldn't find anything else on YouTube. 

[uwe]

They're old buddies though. Pre-DP, Trapeze (with Glenn) and ZZ Top had the same tour management and did doubleheaders in Texas, the State were Trapeze for some reason was most popular in the US.

[Dave W]

Listening to 50s oldies today.

[uwe]

This fits then:

[Basvarken]

As (the often simplistic) Blackmore compositions go, MOTSM is actually quite intricate in chord changes. Maybe that is why it's rarely covered.

I've actually heard quite a few bands have a go at it. Not always a guarantee for success. Although the audience seems to really like it

Here's a Dutch occasional formation for a RJD tribute doing the song (amongst others):

[uwe]

To me, it's one of those all-time great majestic Blackmore riffs (though it was never a real hit), in a class with Smoke on Water, Burn and Knocking On Your Back Door, that Ritchie recipe of playing a riff in those slightly nasty sounding parallel fourths on the D and G string. And following the riff in G minor, the verse of the song doesn't start on a G minor chord (as most DP and Rainbow songs would) as the root (I), but moves mostly in half-bars (also unusual for Deep Purple or Rainbow) as follows:

VII - IV -    I - VI - IV - VII
   I - VII - IV - VI -  IV - I

followed by the bridge

  V - III - V - II
III - IV - III - I
VI - VII

before hitting the G minor root note riff again.

That's not exactly PROG, but for a Purple/Rainbow chord structure pretty nifty. A lot of Blackmore numbers are four or five chords that move mostly in full or double bars, here he was trying something different here. (Deep Purple/Rainbow both weren't exactly 10cc as frequent chord changes go.)

If Blackmore hadn't already had a wandering eye for a way out from Purple, MOTSM should have been on Stormbringer. It would have been interesting to have heard what Coverdale, Hughes, Lord and Paice would have made of it. But in the Stormbringer sessions, Ritchie was already hoarding for his solo album (= the Rainbow debut) which he immediately recorded afterwards in Munich with DP-opener Elf (sans their lead guitarist Steve Edwards of course) as his backing band.

Your fellow-Holländers don't do a half-bad job with it, I've heard that song played and sung worse so often.



(Let's face it: UDO's not very agile voice has issues covering all those chord changes.)

I like how the Dutch singer sounds like a cross between Dio and Coverdale, that gives it a Purple feel. Compliments!

[Basvarken]

Always thought it was a bit of a rip-off from this song

[Basvarken]

You can hear the autotune doing overtime on the UDO recording. It sounds awful.