We're off and running here with the first "classic" of the year, with a return to Africa (albeit a different part) and Oprah's Book Club.
I would recommend any prospective readers of Cry, the Beloved Country do a little prep work before digging into the book. It is useful to read a biographical sketch of author Alan Paton and read a quick overview of South African history. Keep in mind the book was written in 1948, before the creation of the Republic, stepped up apartheid laws, and Nelson Mandela. Paton would become intimately involved in all of these matters later on, but as of the writing of his first book he wasn't nearly a political as he would later become, motivated to react to the course of events around him.
Briefly, the plot of the novel concerns the journey of Rev. Stephen Kumalo to the big city of Johannesburg to learn the fate of his family members that moved there and never returned. Meanwhile, a wealthy white landowner, Jarvis, has also come to the city with his wife to learn the truth behind the senseless murder of his son. The two plot lines intersect in a most unexpected way, forcing each man to confront the political realities of South Africa in 1946, but they also experience a certain helplessness when it comes to seeking any kind of change in the ways of the country.
Given what we know would happen in South Africa, and even in the United States, this book can seem fairly tame. Paton's narrative urges cooperation among the different ethnic groups of South Africa: native (black), British, Afrikaaner, and "coloured" (Indian and other ethnicities). Most of the characters are sympathetic, though at times the black militancy and white prejudices creep up among the minor characters and are clearly frowned upon by the main characters as misguided beliefs. The white characters generally respect (or come to acknowledge) the dignity of the native population, while the main black characters see the need to "evolve" from tribalism to become equal members of South African society.
The introduction has a good section about the role of Abraham Lincoln in the novel. Lincoln had boldly asserted that the antebellum United States were destined to become all free or all slave states, and that the current divided approach was only a temporary phenomenon. Likewise South Africa's more Afrikaaner regions had developed more stringent apartheid systems while the British regions had not. Yet, with the surge of Afrikaaner political fortunes throughout South Africa shortly after the publication of this novel, the entire region fell under the shadow of apartheid, in a sort of reverse outcome from the American experience. While at the time this novel was written Paton had no idea what would ultimately transpire, he shows great foresight in cautioning his native country to what possible path it may be taking.
I've been keeping tabs on Nate Silver since discovering his blog FiveThirtyEight.com back in 2008. As he rightly states in one of the footnotes, it was a source of comfort for an Obama loyalist like myself, knowing that no matter how bad a day my candidate was having, he was winning the race. In fact, in 2012 Silver accurately predicted how every state would go, including Florida, besting is own impressive 2008 forecast. How he was able to do it is at the heart of this book. For the first time in, well, forever, having too much data is more problematic than having too little. The effect of this is that we are losing the ability to see the signal through the noise.
Chapter by chapter, Silver explores a wide variety of topics, ranging from baseball and Texas Hold 'Em to climate change and presidential elections, applying his experience and wisdom to each area. Frequently, the problem is that we are exposed to "hedgehogs" who make a living off making bold predictions, most of them completely wrong, because it gives them tremendous exposure and media credibility regardless of their track record. Meanwhile "foxes" have far less media appeal, but, thanks to their acknowledgement of a great number of variables, tend to make more accurate forecasts. Unfortunately, all of those variables makes them acknowledge a number of possibilities, rather than one glamorous certainty, so they aren't the profound pundits on TV. Silver tells us: "Be foxy."
I don't visit FiveThirtyEight.com (now a proud part of the New York Times conglomerate) much anymore, but has expanded into an impressive operation, with a full media team working on everything from sports to foreign affairs, sifting through the data and applying a very mathematical approach to their analysis. After reading this book, I wholeheartedly agree that more probability and statistics need to be in math curricula, on an equal footing with algebra and geometry. They certain help us gain a more profound sense of the data-soaked world around us, finding the signal in an increasingly noisy environment.
Before starting here, let it be known this is the second self-titled album by Trapeze, not the eponymous debut album from 1970. This isn't a unique occurrence, but when a band isn't well known outside of Texas, it frequently leads to mass confusion over which album is which. Don't be surprised to find the first album being sold with this album's cover art, or vice-versa. Caveat emptor, I suppose. A good rule of thumb is the price, as this album has been out of print for years and still commands a fairly high price compared to the old debut album, which goes in and out of print from time to time and is therefore more common. While I don't think I paid extortion prices to get the decidedly non-remastered One Way Records reissue, it wasn't a bargain either. Actually, there must have been a breakthrough and this album is now readily available in mp3 format for a reasonable price via your preferred e-tailer. The CD is still pretty bonkers-expensive, though.
Trapeze is one of those bands I've previously described as "living organ donors", gradually giving up their members to other, larger bands until nothing remains. In some ways, the band is the rock music version of the Giving Tree, feeding Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Whitesnake, and Judas Priest with their alumni. It is the curse of being a band of good musicians: while you aren't doomed to languish in obscurity, you don't get the chance to shine in your own right either.
The original Trapeze was a quintet, formed by the merger of a 1960's pop group The Montanas with three younger musicians on the rise in an outfit called Finders Keepers. The debut was released by the new Moody Blues label Threshold and produced by MB bassist John Lodge. Although label and producer were retained for the next album, Medusa, the band shed down to a classic power trio. Following the third album, You Are the Music, We're Just the Band, bassist/singer Glenn Hughes was poached by Deep Purple, forcing guitarist Mel Galley and drummer Dave Holland to make some quick changes. Toward the end of the Hughes era, they had been planning on expanding to a two-guitar quartet. The original plan was to switch Hughes to rhythm guitar and hire a new bassist. They partly went ahead with this and brought aboard Pete Wright on bass, while Rob Kendrick was named the new guitarist. Since, as far as I know, neither were singers, Galley assumed vocal duties himself, and this was the lineup featured on their fourth album, Hot Wire.
In the early days of the recording of their next album (this one), Deep Purple split and Hughes made the snap decision to return to his old band. Unfortunately it amounted to only a short tour and a couple recordings before Hughes left again to focus on a solo career. Post-Purple Hughes was a drug-addled, aimless person according to some accounts, not the same guy from the early 1970's This may have short-circuited any real trio-era reunion. Apparently Wright and Kendrick must not have been too put out by the interruption as they are back again for most of this album. In fact, they are such nice guys that two of the ten tracks here ("Chances" and "Nothin' for Nothing") are from that brief reunion and feature Hughes on vocals. Also on board for this album (as well as Hot Wire) is original keyboard player Terry Rowley, from all the way back in the quintet era, though he plays as a session guest here.
On the whole, however, the album picks up where Hot Wire leaves off, sporting the same lineup and roles as before. You've got to hand it to Mel Galley, the guy refused to give up on this band. He's a halfway decent vocalist, but aside from a single song on Medusa and third-string work on the debut album, he hadn't really embraced the role until Hughes's departure. He doesn't have anywhere near the range of Hughes, but carries on nonetheless and never seemed to shy away from singing the Glenn's parts live. His style is more suited to the open-ended jam songs, which dominate this album. Galley, who usually co-wrote with brother Tom, had always trended toward writing in this style, leaving the more structured songs and ballads to Glenn Hughes on the early albums. So it's no surprise that as at least a co-writer of every song save the cover of "On the Sunny Side of the Street" the jams abound here. The Galley songs tend to play very well live on stage, going all the way back to the days of "Black Cloud" from the second album and most of them were expanded generously on stage. In fact, at least three of these songs on this album had been road tested already, as they appear on the 1975 live album Live at the Boat Club, which I'm fairly sure is the only legitimate release featuring Rob Kendrick. The only problem with this approach is it tends to create fairly flat studio performances. Even though I can nod my head happily through every song, there aren't any real standout moments. It's one jam followed by another, and songs like "Star Breaker", "Monkey, "Soul Stealer", and "Gimme Good Love" all sort of bleed into one another. You don't get anything like a "Medusa", "Jury", or "Seafull", songs that plumbed the darkest depths of their second album and were distinct and special.
Sadly, Trapeze probably peaked somewhere during the last days of Glenn Hughes. Although Hot Wire enjoyed the highest chart position of any of their albums, scraping the Top 200, Trapeze was clearly on the downhill side of the band's fortunes. Following the album, Galley and Holland would be reduced to session men for albums ranging from Glenn Hughes's Play Me Out to Justin Hayward's Songwriter. Meanwhile, Rob Kendrick formed a "new" (read: illegitimate) Trapeze that was a local sensation around Texas. In 1979 they brought back the "real" Trapeze (minus Kendrick) with a new vocalist, Pete Goalby, and new song-based (rather than jam-based) approach, exhibited on their sole studio album, Hold On. Success remained elusive, however, and eventually Holland went to Judas Priest, Goalby to Uriah Heep, and finally Galley to Whitesnake, laying Trapeze to rest for the last time. The band that once had ZZ Top open for them (not a typo), has been relegated to a curiosity, primarily of interest to die-hard Deep Purple fans.
There was a little flicker of a reunion around 1991, but it only yielded two new songs performed live in London with Geoff Downes from Asia. Complicating any reunion were a lot of things. Mel Galley had seriously injured his arm while in Whitesnake and never really recovered his guitar-playing skills. Also Glenn Hughes, who was still a few years away settling into a much more professional career, was still pretty erratic. A few years later, Dave Holland would get into serious legal distress (Google it) and Mel Galley died of cancer well before his scheduled release date from prison, making any reunion of any lineup impossible. These days the best way to hear live Trapeze music is to track down Glenn Hughes in concert, though don't expect any songs from this album!
Since going to a weekly approach I've been pretty verbose. It's not secret that I have a lot to say about Ritchie Blackmore and the Kinks and how little they overlap, but Jade Warrior is a true outlier in my collection. In fact, if a colleague hadn't (mistakenly?) slipped it into a stack of CD's for me to borrow about 10 years ago, I doubt I would even know who the heck they were.
Jade Warrior is certainly a "different" kind of band and they have existed in one form or another since the release of this album in 1971, born out of a series of psych/pop 1960's bands I've never heard of. Loosely speaking, the first three albums tack more progressive rock, while the albums from 1974 onward are decidedly more ambient/chillout stuff that probably appealed more to fans of the growing "new age" musical style. The first three albums were released on the Vertigo label, which had quite a reputation in the early 1970's for releasing premier hard and progressive rock, while the rest of the decade was handled by Island, which insisted on stripping the band down to a duo instrumental act that bears little resemblance to the Vertigo albums.
The first album, though unmistakably a rock album, owes a lot more to the still-yet-undefined "world" music sound than the two albums that would follow. This likely has to do with the DIY percussion by the members of the trio. This would be replaced or augmented by "real" drums on the next two albums. Although all Jade Warrior album covers are Japanese-inspired, the music draws from all corners of the world, Japan included. This album also pioneered the band's distinct "loud-quiet-loud" style. Within songs, mellow flute-driven music is frequently interrupted by fuzz-distorted electric guitar, particularly in the multi-part songs "Dragonfly Day" and "Masai Morning". Among songs, mostly-rock songs like "Telephone Girl" and "A Prenormal Day in Brighton" will nestle comfortably against mostly quiet songs like "The Traveller" or "Slow Ride". Browsing the various YouTube comments, it's not surprising to see people making comparisons to Jethro Tull and Santana, mainly due to the flute and guitar playing styles more than the song structures themselves.
In future years, the band would continue to consolidate around guitarist Tony Duhig. Unfortunately Duhig's health was fragile at best in the 1980's and album releases were few and far between. Following his death in 1990, the band ultimately decided to continue on, with Jon Field, the sole remaining original member, later bringing Glyn Havard back. He had been squeezed out of the band following the label change to Island. The band continues on to this day as a trio, with Havard on guitar, and 1980's addition Dave Sturt on bass. As with the Island albums onward, they are augmented by a large cast of session musicians. They maintain an informative website that can probably explain things better than I ever can.
I went on a little geography book binge a few years ago, meaning I added a bunch of titles to my to read list and didn't read them. Until now. In fact, this book finally exhausts the project for the foreseeable future. I think I stumbled on this one a couple years back while flipping through a catalog or Choice cards while at my old job. I would frequently find stuff that didn't work for the library, but I wanted to read for myself. They tend to be a little offbeat and as they show up here I'll make a note of them.
This book skews fairly academic. It's written by academics using mostly academic-style writing. However it never went over my head, in the way one of the previous entries (Evolution of a Nation) did. Yet it isn't targeting a broad current affairs audience the way The Revenge of Geography does. I think the best audience for the book is adults who pored over maps as kids and were fascinated by some of the weird shapes they would come across. While this is hardly at the level of How the States Got Their Shapes, nor is it as encyclopedic, both books are certainly intrigued by boundaries and how they came to be.
The trouble with tracking down a good Charlie Parker biography is that the subject only lived to 34 and for most of it was incredibly poorly documented. So rather than being annoyed that this book was too short, I've decided 138 pages is adequate, and maybe even ample. If you are looking up the page count online, be advised that almost half of the book is actually an extensive and detailed discography, followed up with an index. For the actual prose portion of the book, the life narrative comprises all but the final two chapters. The second to last chapter is an overview of the music style, which can be a little overwhelming to non-musicians. The final chapter discusses the considerable legacy Bird left in his wake.
Reading about Charlie Parker inevitably draws up a storm of emotions. On one hand he really is a remarkable individual, seemingly fascinated in just about everything under the sun, from sculpture to classical music. On the other he spent over half his life destroying his own reputation through uncontrollable narcotic and alcohol abuse. Then, hovering over both of these realities, he was also caught up in the intensely racist atmosphere of mid-20th century America. Nevertheless it seems such a senseless tragedy, compounded with the mistaken notion among some of his younger peers that his musical genius and drug use were somehow interrelated. Don't drink that juice.
The Kinks were criminally underrepresented last year, with only two appearances in the blog (Village Green Preservation Society and Preservation, Act 1), both of which left out the key early period of the band's history, and in fact both were key albums in distancing the band from those days. Kinda Kinks, on the other hand, is probably the LP-length album that best represents all of the exuberance of the Shel Talmy-era Kinks, which I've also coined as the "K" era owing to the fact that every word in the first three albums (and most of the EP's) other than the word "the" start with the letter K.
The first album (Kinks) is heavily rooted in the band's early R&B repertoire, with Ray Davies originals competing with cover songs and shady knockoffs written by their business partners, many of which were name-checked in the 1970 song "The Moneygoround". Nicely tucked into the track listing was a song that had already made a huge splash, "You Really Got Me". That song helped the Kinks break free from a Beatles-clone existence, smashing their first two faltering singles into oblivion. While it hit, along with follow-up single "All Day and All of the Night", just a little too late for the first album, the second would benefit handsomely from the boost.
Since "You Really Got Me" was a Ray Davies original, the management and record label, Pye, were suddenly experiencing an unquenchable thirst for original Kinks material. Kinda Kinks would be far less covers-driven, though "Naggin' Woman" and "Dancing in the Streets" would sneak into the track listing. This is probably, if I read the liner notes correctly, due to the sheer difficulty of trying to create 14 fresh new songs in a matter of months. So in the end it was 10, with an assist from brother Dave, who at this point was doing more singing that writing, on one of them. Adding to the misery of having to write under the gun, the band must have also been forced to record the songs quickly, resulting in some sloppy production work from Shel Talmy. Also, about half the songs, though thoroughly infused with a sound only the Kinks could provide, are filler-grade stuff. In the middle of it all though all some key tracks: "Tired of Waiting For You", "Come On Now", and "Something Better Beginning", a track you can slow dance to. Director Wes Anderson would drastically elevate the status of the other hushed number, "Nothing in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' About that Girl" when he included it in the Rushmore soundtrack. "Don't Ever Change" isn't that great a song, but has an absolutely beautiful opening riff, which, alas, doesn't stick with the rest of the song.
As with most British bands in the mid-1960's, the LP's were often not the best representation of the band's best work. In the CD era this means that these albums have a lot of bonus tracks and many of them are better than the original album tracks. Thanks to a clutch of important singles and the EP Kwyet Kinks (God, those puns), Kinda Kinks has been greatly enhanced with their inclusion as bonus material. In fact, the first five tracks following the conclusion of the album are required listening for even the casual fan. "I Need You" alone (a B-side if you can believe it) probably launched a thousand garage bands in the United States, where the Kinks enjoyed an influence among musicians far beyond their own album sales. "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy" and "Set Me Free" are quite possibly the best examples of what the Kinks could do in 1965. Meanwhile, "See My Friends" is the band's very first foray into Indian-influenced music, narrowly beating the Beatles and the Yardbirds to the punch though perhaps not as overt as what those bands would do initially. The Kwyet tracks are generally unremarkable with one giant exception. "A Well Respected Man" could very well be the template for about the next four Kinks albums, dripping with social commentary and exploring English music hall styles, something their rock peers hadn't considered. For me, it's probably the single most important track of the entire CD. Some other interesting aspects of the bonus tracks include the first fully formed Dave Davies song, and a demo version of "I Go to Sleep", a song Ray ended up letting others (Sonny & Cher) make famous.
In my early Kinks collecting (NOT "kollecting" - I am an adult), I let a greatest hits album cover for the first three albums until my voracious collecting of their later albums naturally led me back to picking up the others. In fact, I jettisoned the old CD once I got the actual albums, the mid-2000's reissue versions. However that CD was instrumental in getting me into the Kinks, so the uncertain consumer may be wise to start there, then go after some of the later albums, then come back around if still looking for more.
The third album, The Kink Kontroversy, the fourth, Face to Face, would continue to advance the Kinks sound pioneered by this album. However, even in the bonus tracks of this album, the listener can detect a continuous movement away from the "original" Kinks. The later albums feature more varied instrumentation and more wry lyrical observations, largely fueled by Ray's path to and from a nervous breakdown in 1966, combined with a crippling American touring ban. That, however, is another story for another album.
Last year I fell a little short the ambitious goal of 52 books, and this would have been big number 50. Instead, it has the honor of being book #1 of 2015.
Bart Ehrman has quite a reputation among the theological world, having moved from Protestant to Evangelical, then back to Protestant, then Agnostic. This, however, has not stopped him from writing about the historical Jesus and early Christianity, and it makes for fascinating reading, five stars, right out of the gates.
The historical Jesus scholarship is long-running and frequently courts controversy, and this is hardly anyone's first trip to the rodeo (including myself, having read Reza Aslan's Zealot last year). What makes this is a little more interesting is how Ehrman carries on from the roots (Greco-Roman and Jewish mysticism) and up into the branchs (the early Church). He demonstrates how with Paul's letters and each chronological Gospel (Mark, Matthew/Luke, John), the theology gets increasingly high, culminating effectively in Jesus=God. Some of the early heresies are explored in this analysis as well.
Ehrman continues to confound particularly his old camp, the Evangelicals. Within days of publication of this book, another one hit the press called How God Became Jesus, containing five or so responses to this book. While there is a lot of statements (in Ehrman's book) that are uncomfortable, even for us more lefty Protestants, this book makes for great discussion, and if it gets people talking, then that can't be a bad thing.
The two-volume Connoisseur Collection project on the career of Ritchie Blackmore from 1963-1984 is a checkered affair. On one hand, they have a number of rare tracks that save the buyer from having to invest in entire albums by the likes of Jack Green or Randy Pie just to hear Ritchie on one song. Same goes for saving time trying to chase down all the early singles from his old bands, like the Outlaws, Savages, and others. On the other hand, both volumes are stuffed with regular album tracks that are flat-out common. I think I picked this up in London in 1997 during my semester abroad, when the whole e-commerce thing hadn't yet made getting British CD's very easy, and YouTube was a high-bandwidth pipe dream. Since the whole Deep Purple family is much better known across the Atlantic, it was a veritable bonanza of awesome stuff I could only have dreamed of listening to in the United States. At the time it was a nice investment, though for the reasons listed above it hasn't aged well, and the running order of the tracks is a little jarring.
Each volume was dreamed up individually. The original plan was for the first volume to cover up to Ritchie's (first) split with Deep Purple, and the second volume would continue the story from Rainbow onward. About one minute after the first volume went to press, I think somebody realized there were going to be some problems, particularly when it came to covering the breadth of Ritchie's pre-Purple work and the paucity of Rainbow material beyond official releases. Let's explore this a little more closely.
First off, a couple key early moments were omitted among all of the Outlaws and Heinz tracks, namely the first-ever Ritchie Blackmore solo single and anything from his work with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. Since both are kind of important to any good Ritchie retrospective, the compilers rolled back to 1965 so that both sides of the Ritchie Blackmore Orchestra single ("Getaway"/"Little Brown Jug") could kick things off, followed by a couple appropriately ridiculous numbers ("Honey Hush" and "The Train Kept A-Rollin'") by the Raving Monster Loony Party house band.
Then, not giving much thought to continuity of sound, things abruptly shift from fun and bouncy to deadly serious with the brilliant yet out-of-place guitar movement from the Gemini Suite, a one-off classical/rock hybrid project by Deep Purple (and credited entirely to Jon Lord in the liner notes) backed by the Light Music Society. At the time this hadn't been officially released, so the compilers felt they needed to include this. Now the entire work is easy to find, but this disc does an unusual public service by separating the awesome guitar movement from the horrific organ movement that followed. It's kind of funny because Ritchie and Ian Gillan were not big fans of Jon Lord's classical hybrid experiments, yet easily turned out the best portions of the entire work.
Another instrumental work follows, just called "Bullfrog", an epic three-guitar jam from a shady self-titled album by some outfit called Green Bullfrog. An oddity in the Deep Purple story, it's actually Ritchie and Purple drummer Ian Paice playing under assumed names (which sound like the names of the ghosts in Pac Man) with some friends. Reports of Roger Glover being in on the session are untrue, based on a misstatement by Ritchie that somehow ended up on the cover of the CD booklet. It was Chas Hodges. Ooops.... Anyway, it's the coolest track on the compilation hands down and it's a reworking of a leftover track from the In Rock sessions called "Jam Stew" but the two main parts are reversed here to allow for heavy soloing from Ritchie and two other guitarists (Albert Lee and Big Jim Sullivan) with an organist who might be Matthew Fisher (Procol Harum) since the other keyboard player from those session was Tony Ashton and the solo just isn't his style.
The compilation the whipsaws back to the mighty David "Screaming Lord" Sutch with two tracks from a fantastically awful free-for-all live album called Hands of Jack the Ripper. Although he didn't realize it at the time, Sutch launched the careers of many musicians who bravely supported him on crazy projects like Lord Caesar Sutch and the Roman Empire and other over-the-top stage shows. So around 1971 he re-emerged, sort of like the weird uncle they secretly wished would go away but to whom they are secretly indebted. This yielded a studio album called Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends and the aforementioned live album. The studio album was such a disaster that most of those involved, in particular Jimmy Page, permanently severed their relationships with Sutch. However the Sutch stable was big enough that he brought in more guys in replace them. Oddly enough this would be the last time Nick Simper, the original Deep Purple bassist, and Ritchie would share a stage. As for the recording itself...wow. Ritchie is playing like his hair is on fire (three years before Cal Jam when his hair actually was on fire), but the producers felt the inexplicable need to overdub all sorts of crap, including the most cringe-inducing trombone solo ever, plus the doubling of the drums, bass, and vocals all gets to be a bit too much, even for Sutch.
Things remain weird for one more track called "Hurry to the City" by the oddly-named Randy Pie & Family. Somehow there must have been a Hamburg connection somewhere that inspired Ritchie to contribute guitar to this song. The band claims the legendary German garage band The Rattles as an ancestor, so maybe somebody somewhere knew somebody. The song itself is pretty blah, sort of Foghat-ish, and it's Ritchie's only contribution to the band, so keep that in mind before spending any money on Randy Pie.
The next four tracks are Rainbow songs, and none of them are particularly hard to find. "Still I'm Sad" and "Lady of the Lake" are just regular album tracks. Meanwhile, "Sixteenth Century Greensleeves" and "Man on the Silver Mountain" are extended live versions performed by a different lineup than the studio versions. Ritchie and Ronnie James Dio are present on both, but the live versions sport the high energy rhythm section of Jimmy Bain and Cozy Powell in lieu of Dio's old Elf bandmates, as well as the more versatile Tony Carey in for Mickey Lee Soule, a fine honky-tonk pianist from Elf, but clearly out of his element in Rainbow. I think the compilers realized a little too late in the game that there is far less "rare" Rainbow tracks, so to say this volume is the "Rainbow era" is a little misleading.
Singer Jack Green (ex-Pretty Things and probably a few other outfits) did a very short stint in Rainbow around 1979 which yielded no recordings. However Green was able to convince Ritchie to do a one-song guest appearance on his album, Humanesque, and the song "I Call, No Answer" is the result. Although an uncharacteristically new wave recording involving Ritchie, it is one of the true gems of this collection, and very hard to find on disc anywhere else.
Appropriately enough, we get a little bonus Deep Purple at the end, the ten-minute jam track "Son of Alerik", recording during the windup to the release of Perfect Strangers and the launch of the reunion era. It's probably as good as any place to wrap things up. "Son of Alerik" has since become a standard bonus track on re-releases of Perfect Strangers alongside old standby "Not Responsible".
Finally, it's come to my attention that some corners were cut to squish the old 2 LP version of this collection into a single CD. Volume 1 suffered a bit more, slashing interviews and cutting the ends off songs, but there was some tinkering with this one as well. In this case the last track, "Like a Bird Without Feathers", an old Outlaws track performed under a pseudonym, was cut, as well as a "Guitar Greats" interview track. While the missing song is probably not essential listening (you can judge for yourself), it's still annoying that they CD version delivers less than the LP.
Points of Departure:
Although this compilation isn't commercially available, and you shouldn't be paying more than $10 for a used copy in this day and age, there are some good "jumping off" points depending on what songs you like most. The easiest ones are the two Rainbow albums, Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow (1975), and Long Live Rock and Roll (1978), though you would end up missing out of their best, Rising (1976). The live tracks on this compilation are not the ones from On Stage (1977), but they sound pretty similar and you won't be missing out too badly if you grab this one. The Deep Purple stuff here is also easy to get for cheap, especially if you don't mind CD's, which in this crazy world have somehow become cheaper than downloads! For the more adventurous, you can do worse than to locate the old Sutch recordings, which enjoy a strong underground following thanks to the connection to the producer, the mysterious and weird Joe Meek. However, the 1970's stuff, though sloppier, is easier to find, probably because he managed to get folks like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Keith Moon to participate. Unfortunately, much of the early pre-Purple session work of Ritchie's is on now-out-of-print compilations being sold at extortion levels, so for now, just settle for the YouTube stuff various folks have uploaded. Same goes for Green Bullfrog, which in many ways was Ritchie's "last" session work, a favor to his old producer, Derek Lawrence. As for Randy Pie and Jack Green, I wouldn't really bother with their albums since Ritchie's involvement was so minimal with these artists. Finally, of course, there is Ritchie Blackmore: Rock Profile, Vol. 1, which is more heavy on the early cuts and Deep Purple tracks, stopping at 1974.
