Ritchie Blackmore, Cover Boy

[Dave W]

I'm sure no one here will be interested. 

September Vintage Guitar mag

Replace the last digit of the URL with 86 to go directly to the article instead of having to leaf through.

[uwe]

Ah, that guy from Led Zeppelin again, Jeff Clapton. Didn't know her was still around.

Interesting to read about the equipment - shrouded in myth all these years and then it turns out there was nuthin' special at all, I mean which Brit guitarist did not play with a treble booster in the 60ies/70ies. Danke for putting it here!

Now that even Dave posts Blackmore, I - finally - consider my work here done.

[uwe]

This kinda fits ... Messrs Gillan & Glover in their, uhum, "formative years". Before the Purple call came.

[Alanko]

I like that shot of him backstage:



Weird that he tried 'a Hendrix' and took a lefty Strat and flipped it over. I'm guessing the black Strat down the front, with the heavy duty replacement tremolo arm and Telecaster knobs, is the Machine Head/In Rock Strat he's playing in all the early videos of the band? That Strat took a kicking at every gig, and I'm sure there's a photo of him playing it in the liner notes of the BBC In Concert album where the headstock has broken and lost its lower half.

[uwe]

Except about his first real guitar - a Gibson ES 335 - and maybe the warped neck Strat that Clapton gave him, Ritchie was never obsessive about his guitars, he sees them as tools and he never joined in the "Strat-pre-or-post-CBSchism". His view was that Fender "built good and crap guitars at all times".

I don't know what possessed him to ape the Hendrix look (I think this was 1972/73ish), other than that he thought that Jimi looked and acted inordinately cool (and "Catch the Rainbow" for instance is "Little Wing" rerecorded), maybe he just liked the sound of that particular Strat whether lefty or not, but he wasn't alone at the time.

[westen44]

It appears Blackmore was impressed by how cool Hendrix looked and acted, but not as much by his playing.  From June 2017 Ultimate Guitar--

Blackmore noted the influences from Jimi Hendrix, Wes Montgomery and The Allman Brothers Band around Deep Purple albums "Fireball" and "Machine Head" (1972): "I was impressed by Hendrix. Not so much by his playing, as his attitude - he wasn't a great player, but everything else about him was brilliant. Even the way he walked was amazing. His guitar playing, though, was always a little bit weird. Hendrix inspired me, but I was still more into Wes Montgomery. I was also into the Allman Brothers around the time of those albums."

[uwe]

I think that is an accurate assessment: With Hendrix it was the whole package. It's not like there weren't technically better guitarists around at the time (most country pickers probably), but no one had melded with an electric guitar like him before and no one was as daring and daunting. But Blackmore's tone, his penchant for delaying notes and then rushing into something fast, his stage demeanor and songwriting (many riffs), an especially blatant example here,



was full of Hendrixisms. Even the change from his beloved ES 335 to the Strat was a bow to Hendrix. Where Stratocasters had suffered from a Hank Marvin & The Shadows uncool image in early sixties Britain, the kid from Seattle made the Strat sexy and dangerous as well as the iconic axe for coming guitar heroes.

Where they differ is that Hendrix had that sexual, frenzied inspiration thing with his guitar, Blackers' soloing is more cerebral and refined artful or simply just clever. It was Don Airey who played with him in Rainbow (and who has played with guitar heroes such as Gary Moore, Michel Schenker, Uli Roth, Steve Morse and Randy Rhoads to name a few) who once commented along the lines of: "Ritchie thinks too much about his own playing to be truly gifted, to be a force of nature like all those other players, he is his own production, but a mesmerizing one."

[westen44]

I suspect it was very easy for someone like Ritchie Blackmore to detect that Hendrix was facing a real crisis in creativity as time went on.  A lot of people won't admit that, but I think it was a real problem.  But describing him as a force of nature is a term even Jack Bruce used for Hendrix.

[uwe]

Who of the late 60ies heroes wasn't in crisis in 1970? Had Hendrix survived - and some Colonel Parker/Peter Grant type taken care of him -, I'm sure we would have heard plenty of interesting and some really disturbingly off the wall stuff from him. He still had that Rick Rubin aging rock star album in him!

[westen44]

Who of the late 60ies heroes wasn't in crisis in 1970? Had Hendrix survived - and some Colonel Parker/Peter Grant type taken care of him -, I'm sure we would have heard plenty of interesting and some really disturbingly off the wall stuff from him. He still had that Rick Rubin aging rock star album in him!

He had already been trying to reestablish contact with Chas Chandler during the time of the Royal Albert Hall concert.  He needed something like that.  Also, like Noel Redding commented, Hendrix needed a very long vacation to Ireland or somewhere like that.  But I think he was probably about finished with rock.  That's why Noel noted that Hendrix would have most likely become a "jazzer."  How easy a transition like that would have been, no one knows--because Hendrix's roots were deeply in the blues which evolved, of course, into a kind of acid blues rock. 

[uwe]

He was probably done with the trio concept - lots of people (Clapton, Sting) find that tiring/one-dimensional after a while. Would he have done jazz rock/fusion - by nature instrumental music - for long and sacrifice his vocals? I doubt it. Jimi wasn't much of a singer, but he was too much a singer to follow Jeff Beck who can't sing a note and has to be eloquent on his instrument.

But of course I would have liked to hear him solo over Bitches Brew! And then that trio album with John Mahavishnu McLaughlin and Carlos Devadip Santana - they would have found a proper Indian name for him too! 

[westen44]

The Hendrix/Davis connection: real jazz/rock at it's finest

http://mikecrutcher.com/hendrix-davis/

[Alanko]

He was probably done with the trio concept - lots of people (Clapton, Sting) find that tiring/one-dimensional after a while.

I wonder if the technology of the day didn't really help. I have a few Hendrix bootlegs and live releases, and the music does tend to be at one volume. Hendrix was a dynamic player, but sometimes you can hear Noel playing at one volume, with one tone, for most of a set. Had Hendrix been around now, with small amps and pedalboards and baffles and isolation booths and things, maybe he would have a better time of it? Or perhaps he would have done Miles Davis in reverse, produced a sort of anti-Bitches Brew, stop catering to an overlapping rock audience and make more conservatively jazz or Chicago Blues albums with big horn parts and mostly clean guitar work?

I think The Police ultimately ran out of ideas given their formula. The early stuff stacks up well, as it has the reggae cross-time stuff going on with a punk attitude. I'm not sure that formula would work for ever, and it seems that the egos grew dangerously massive in that band.