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.
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