Every guy that has picked up a guitar in the 1970’s or 1980’s has played the riff from Smoke On The Water. It always happened.
Deep Purple is one of those bands that I’m often tempted to include with The Metal Years. All of my metal friends liked them. They had a heavy sound. They were often included with other metal bands like Black Sabbath in conversation. Ritchie Blackmore was the guitarist that certainly had a heavy rock background. Even considering all this, I can’t bring myself to call them Metal.
This is especially true with the album Perfect Strangers. I’m listening to it right now and yes it has some screaming guitar bits and pounding percussion but when you compare it to something like W*A*S*P that we just talked about in the last post, this is not metal. It is good Rock & Roll though. During the Roach Days I used to tell girls that I was the perfect stranger.
To my knowledge, this is the first album that I owned that included Ritchie Blackmore. I has to preface it with the to my knowledge because Ritchie Blackmore has been in 143,826 bands and appears on over 8 million records. Well maybe not that much but he really was involved in a lot of musical projects over the decades.
We went down to Indy to see Deep Purple at Market Square Arena. I’m certain that I didn’t appreciate Ritchie Blackmore then like I should have. 20 something years later I’d cross paths with Ritchie Blackmore again and then I’d be much more appreciative. Stay tuned.
Knocking At Your Back Door
Mean Streak
Perfect Strangers
Wasted Sunsets – The guitar on the intro is signature Blackmore
Hungry Daze