DEEP PURPLE - “Blitzkrieg” By Martin Popoff
DEEP PURPLE’s first platter in eight years, NOW What?!, began life
on the internet with a light advance track called ‘All The Time In The
World’, one that had the mighty Purple eaters of the world bickering
with stomachs grumbling.
“You’d have to ask the record company that,” laughs bassist
ROGER
GLOVER, who knows all too well the trouble such a first card might
cause. “Yeah, it wouldn’t have been my choice. But then again, ‘Smoke On
The Water’ wasn’t my choice either. I know nothing about that. I know
nothing about the selling of music. They felt, I guess, that ‘All The
Time In The World’ would get play on the softer stations, the Radio 2s
of the world, or... I don’t know; I don’t know what their plan was.
They’re a great company and they really believe in this record and I
can’t remember... I thought to myself, how did they come to that
decision? And I can only think that they had a meeting of all the staff
and said, ‘Right, what are your feelings?’ I have no idea. I thought at
first, you know, that’s not a good thing to put out. But then I thought,
it’s certainly going to make the album much more of a blitzkrieg when
it does come out.”
And blitzkrieg it most certainly is. Indeed all of youse who thought
a haunted, unripe banana was in the cards as the Purps doddered toward
old age before you... now what? Well, what’s up is a suitably
hard-charging record of riffs, heaviness factor likely above the last
two but maybe slightly below that of Purpendicular and Abandon, zested
and high-tested with lots of prog and textures and even a bit of a jam
here and there, all commandeered by one Bob Ezrin ensconced in the
production chair.
“Now our goal, first of all, is the sound,” says Roger, asked as to
NOW What’s?!’s personality, moving off style into sonics, as a great
producer in his own right is within his rights to do. “There’s a great
concern in the band that when we make a record that it sounds good. The
last record was disappointing in its sound, its production. And I get
given a lot of CDs by bands, and when I get back from a tour and enter
my suitcase, I’ve got 20, 25 CDs, of bands all wanting some
help—whatever I can give them, I don’t know. And I play them, and
frequently they sound better than we do. And that was very much... first
and foremost, it had to sound good. And beyond that, there’s an
unspoken thing that we don’t want to sound like any other record that
we’ve made. You never do, actually. Every record has its own character.
But there was a feeling, when Bob came to see us in Toronto, he said
some great things. One of which was, you know, ‘Forget trying to get a
big hit on the radio and be all that. That’s all over. Just be who you
are.’ He says, ‘You’re great musicians, and you have great spontaneity. I
want to capture that in the studio.’ And I think having some time to
actually prepare ourselves a bit more, we went in the studio, you know,
knowing the songs. So playing them live was easy. And all the songs are
played live. Everything that’s there is live, aside, I’d say, from
overdubs which are added later. But essentially, the tracks are all
live, and I think that gives it a great spontaneity and freshness and
feel. And I think he captured a great sound as well.”
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” continues Roger, confronted with the
impression that the album is indeed proggier than usual. “What I would
say is that DON AIREY and STEVE MORSE are unbelievably prolific players.
And it’s very difficult to hold them back. You know, they’ll always
throw something in that to them is just a piece of music, music that
other people will probably see as prog. It’s just making music that is
more interesting. And there was a desire to get more simple kind of
themes going, on this album. Almost more riffs, as it were, than clever
bits. But it’s hard, as I say, to hold them back. Because as soon as you
write something simple, it frequently gets complicated.”
As for the profusion of keyboard licks and tones and sounds all over
this grinding Purple spread, Roger figures that Don Airey has “grown
into the band. He’s been in the band ten years now, and I think he’s in a
great frame of mind. He really feels like he’s in the band, not so much
an interloper. And he’s got strong ideas.”
But despite NOW What?! being a hard rocking keyboard showcase, it
also sounds very much like a blast to play bass on, given Morse’s
circular Purple-funky riffs and all the musical origami embedded in
songs like ‘Above And Beyond’, ‘Apres Vous’ and ‘Uncommon Man’.
“Absolutely, absolutely. It’s a great album to play on. I use a
Vigier guitar; I’ve used them for years now. But Bob came in and he
said, ‘Oh, do you want to try my guitar?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He
says, ‘I’ve got a Precision.’ And I haven’t played a Precision on an
album since I think 1970. So he brought his in, and it has these really
dull strings on it. I said, ‘Well, I’ll give it a go, but you’ll have to
change the strings.’ He says, ‘Don’t change the strings!’ He says,
‘That’s a legendary bass. It’s been on The Wall, it’s been on PETER
GABRIEL, Alice’s albums, it’s been on loads of albums.’ TONY LEVIN’s
played it, for example. He said don’t touch the strings. Anyway, okay,
and it sounded wonderful. And I’ve never pushed the bass up in my own
production as much as he did. So that was a lesson to me, how much he
used the bass in the forefront.”
Ah yes, Bob Ezrin—I remember hearing he had been signed on months
back, and I cringed to think how his forward-leaning Canuck persona
would mesh with the Purps, who to my mind, might not take to his
inevitable blurts of rapid-fire direction-slinging...
“It was actually wonderful working with him,” says Glover.
“Obviously a man with such a track record demands a certain amount of
respect, and when I first met him, that respect was well-founded. I
liked him immediately. He said very astute things about the band and how
he saw us, and asked us our opinion, and when we got down to working
with him, he was the admiral in charge of the ship. Very much the man at
the helm. He can be a bit abrasive. He makes decisions very quickly but
he get things done. And certainly he didn’t piss me off at all. It’s
good to get people stimulated like that. Very good decisions he made,
and he recognized that I was a producer as well, and he frequently
talked to me about the production and what I thought, what he thought,
and hammered things out. So he was very nice to me. Got on with him as a
friend.”
“Yes, he did some of that,” affirms Rog, on Ezrin’s tendency to
reach in and pull out the entrails of a song and muck them around. “We
had a writing session. Well, we had two writing sessions before we went
up to Nashville. And we’d written the basic track ideas, and not too
many vocals. But the track ideas. And when we got to Nashville, we had
another little writing session which he came to. And yes, he did say
this should be at the front and not at the back, and he moved things
around.”
“This one song in particular that Ian and I had written... because
we got together for six days down in Portugal, Gillan and I, where we
finished all the lyrics. There’s one song we were working on which had a
very strange title, and the title came from the working title, which,
you know, various people in the band kind of shouted out what the
working title should be. And this one title was ‘Weirdistan’. And Don
shouted that out, and I thought, ‘Weirdistan’? Don kept coming up with
strange titles. Anyway, when it came to writing the words, we thought
‘Weirdistan’ was actually a great title. But what are we going to write
about? And we spent a long time on that session, about a day and a half,
writing the song, and then we got to Nashville, Gillan and I, and
finished a couple of songs, and we thought, well let’s try ‘Weirdistan’,
because we liked it, and that riff is great. So I picked up an acoustic
and I was just going over the tune with Ian, and Bob was sitting at the
back of the studio at the computer, and all we heard was, ‘I’m not
liking this.’ What? He said, ‘I’m not liking this.’ And we said, ‘You
haven’t even heard it yet. Give it a go.’ ‘No, I’m not liking that.’ And
we thought, oh dear (laughs). But we did have a couple of other ideas,
and he joined in with that, and yes, he wrote enough on the album to
warrant a credit.”
And why this insane album title? Hadn’t you gotten enough grief for
Bananas? “You can see what you like in it, really,” chuckles Glover.
“IAN GILLAN came up with it, very early on, along with the question mark
and the exclamation mark. Actually, no one knew what to make of it. I
didn’t like it at first, and then I grew to like it, then I didn’t like
it again, and we all kept coming up with titles that just didn’t stand a
chance, really. And by this time the record company had seen it and
loved it, and we kind of went, oh, whatever, it’s whatever it will be.
And I love it now. Because it’s... I think if we called it Negated
Paradise Of Armageddon, it somehow wouldn’t have… it’s like an average
title. This is not an average title. It’s a title that leaps out at you.
And for that reason I think it’s great. I remember one of the key
thoughts, the key philosophies, of the band when I first joined it in
1969, is if they love us, great, if they hate us, great. Some people are
going to love us, some people are going to hate us.”
As a closing bit of crumpet, as we wait for y’all to hear this fine
record, well, prepare yourself for some of the choicest Steve Morse
playing on a Purple you’ve ever imagined, not so much in the riffing,
which is somewhat the expected (but lots of it). No, I’m talking about
the concision and fresh oddity and variety of the solo bits. If NOW
What?! is Don Airey’s record to shine, it’s also one where Steve Morse
quietly reminds us of why he’s smart enough to fly planes.
“How has he changed? Well, I think, he hasn’t changed a lot,”
reflects Roger on Morse and his Dixie drugs. “He still feels like he’s
the outsider of the band. Even though he’s been in the band 20 years
now. Probably because he’s American and we’re not. No, that’s a huge
thing. And he really enjoys himself, playing with us, that’s for sure.
And I think he’s reined in a lot of his virtuoso chromatic scale kind of
stuff. He’s reined a lot of that in on this record. And the criticisms
do sting. I think he’s been criticized a lot for that, when people like
to go widdly diddly. Well, you know, take it or leave it, Steve is who
he is. And to have him, or to want him to sound like someone else is
kind of wrong. But what he does offer is incredible virtuosity. And I
think as far as I’m concerned, that’s got to be a Purple trademark. You
know, you start off with Ritchie on the one hand, and Jon on the other,
you’ve got to have that balance, for us. That is our character. And they
have to be virtuosos. We can’t just be regular ol’ players. So with
every virtuoso, you’re going to get difficulties. Virtuosic people
generally aren’t easy to get along with. But Steve is easy to get along
with, as long as we live in the same world with him.”
Dim 9 Déc - 15:48
