Deep Purple was once part of the Guinness book of records as the world’s loudest band (I think that they were once clocked at 100,000 decibels)! Their epic album, “Machine Head”, which contains probably THE world’s most famous guitar riff (along with Jimmy Page’s opening bars to “Stairway To Heaven”), “Smoke On The Water”, came out in 1972. I still remember as a teenager going to my high school dances in Winnipeg at Kelvin High (the same attended by a certain Neil Young!) and there would actually be live bands that would (try) playing “Smoke On The Water”! It was kind of funny because the guitarists, younger or even the same age as me, couldn’t quite get it right. But they were always a zillion times better than me and my friends (as back then I certainly didn’t play guitar and I still don’t!) as we’d be directly under the stage and in awe watching these bands have a go at Deep Purple.
The band that showed up in Rome in 2003, perhaps the greatest year so far for me and concerts (Paul McCartney, Yes, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, the Stones, Jethro Tull and Procol Harum) consisted of lead singer Ian Gillan (all dressed up in white and barefoot!), drummer Ian Paice (who’s also played a few years ago with Paul McCartney and David Gilmour on Sir Paul’s “Live at the Cavern Club” DVD) and bass guitarist Roger Glover, some of the original members of the legendary band (Paice, Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore were there from the very beginning back in 1968). Lord and the author of that memorable riff, guitarist Blackmore, unfortunately weren't in Rome though. Blackmore's place was taken by the great Steve Morse (there’s also Don Airey on keyboards who’s also played with Ozzy Osbourne, Rainbow and Whitesnake, which I saw at the Montréal Forum with David Coverdale who once sang with Deep Purple).
They played most of their big hits, including “Burn”, one of my favourites, and "Woman From Tokyo". At one point, towards the end of the concert, Morse started in with one of those strange guitar solos which no one present really understood. And then, all of a sudden and unexpectedly, he broke into the opening riff of “Smoke On The Water”, and pretty well all 15,000 of us present went bonkers! Nice to hear that in 2005 at Bob Geldof's "Live 8" concert in Barrie, Canada, 35,000 people showed up to watch Deep Purple.
Great memories of the 1970s and those high school dances in Winnipeg (all pics by M. Rimati)!
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