Maybe I'm just bad at explaining it?
The commonalities between DP and JP always seemed obvious to me, I fell for Priest at a time (1977) when Purple had split up and only Rainbow was carrying the banner (albeit less satisfyingly so, Rainbow never appealed to me as much as Purple, it had no swing). Then I listened to "Sin After Sin" (Roger Glover produced) and I immediately felt musically at home. And I wasn't the only one, in the German serious rock press JP were derided (in a pun on "
Deep Purple in Rock") as "
Deep Purple in Leather - but without Jon Lord ...". English magazines described them as "
bad enough to make you long back for even Dee Purple".
The way Priest employ riffs and embed them in their music is very much the Purple/Blackmore recipe. When I hear songs like these, I don't hear Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath (though there is a Sabbath content in Priest's music as well), I hear Deep Purple:
That chugging rhythm (you rarely have with Led Zep or Sabbath,
Paranoid is an exception) is prevalent with Purple Mk II too (but generally too unfunky for you, I know
):
Same with how Gillan sang over these tracks.
Am I projecting things? Maybe, but that still doesn't explain why at age 15 I saw Bon Scott-era AC/DC in 1976 opening for Rainbow and was aghast about how primitive their music was, yet about half a year later in bliss at hearing this:
(The riff at 01:24 is pure Blackmore though at 03:24 Queen arrive; no worries, Ritchie reemerges at 04:41!
)
And it had nothing to do with the image. At that point I had no idea how Judas Priest looked (and they hadn't in any case adopted their leather image yet)
and had already seen AC/DC - they had looked much like their music, unelegant!
********
Stumbled over this by accident, made me laugh out loud.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CPyDBcAo9LQJudas Priest was the first rock concert my son saw - he was 11 at the time and spent most of the gig on my shoulders to be fascinated with the group in the aftermath (it didn't last, he moved on to Korn, Whitesnake and Guns & Roses!). Years later, during a stay in Berlin, I invited my daughter to a Priest gig, she was then in her early 20ies. After the gig she said "
That was enlightening from an anthropological viewpoint." And then "
I can't believe how much of that stuff I knew listening to it wth you in the car when I was still a kid ...", only to then deadpan: "
Parental abuse knows many forms!"
