Rising (Rainbow, 1976)

I've spilled more than a few pixels here talking about Rainbow. In fact the band's leader, Ritchie Blackmore, was the focus of the first post here for 2015 (in our exciting new weekly format). Since Rainbow doesn't get a lot of attention in the United States, in spite of numerous American band members, here's a very brief sketch:

Rainbow was born from a Blackmore solo single turned album using members of the soon-to-extinct Elf in 1975. By the end of the year, Blackmore was long gone from his old band, Deep Purple, and had fired everyone except singer Ronnie James Dio and refashioned the band as a premiere proto-metal outfit. The new band, built around Blackmore, Dio, and drummer Cozy Powell released two solid albums. Dio split to ultimately join Black Sabbath and the rest of the band went in an increasingly commercial direction with new singers Graham Bonnett, then Joe Lynn Turner, all the while assisted musically by another ex-Purp, Roger Glover, on bass. In 1984, Blackmore and Glover returned to Deep Purple and the band promptly folded in spite of improving chart performance. When Blackmore left Purple again, 10 years later, he reflexively reformed Rainbow with all new personnel, but in the end his heart was somewhere in the late Renaissance and he broke up Rainbow in favor of Blackmore's Night. Although there has been substantial chatter about a "return to rock" by Blackmore, nothing has been substantiated.

Anyway, the album in question here, Rising (sometimes fashioned Rainbow Rising), takes us back to Rainbow in its absolute peak formation. It's the first album to sport the Blackmore-Dio-Powell nucleus, with then-unknown keyboardist Tony Carey and fairly-unknown Jimmy Bain on bass. The olf "Elf" lineup, save Dio, is gone, something that is readily apparent from the hard-hitting "Tarot Woman", a beautiful chunk of pure proto-metal and showing off a sound that was utterly absent from the debut album. The rhythm section plays harder and Tony Carey holds his own for the entire first minute solo intro. This is no slam to the Elf guys, it's just that the nature of the music has shifted beyond their strengths. For example, Mickey Lee Soule is a fine honky-tonk style pianist, but on the first album sounds lost, mostly playing other types of keyboard instruments. While Tony Carey is no Jon Lord, he works the synths and the organ far more effectively. However the really dramatic change is in the rhythm section. While Carey and Bain (and hell, even Dio) were not particularly well-known pre-Rainbow, Cozy Powell was a veritable force of nature on the drums and well-connected with the 1970's hard rock scene. If you have to pick one member of the band who most transformed Rainbow, it's probably him.

"Tarot Woman" is a beast of a song and "Run With the Wolf", the second track is just about as uncompromising, though a bit slower in tempo. Ritchie especially steps up his game for this track, with some particularly amazing fills toward the end of the song, complementing Dio's lyrics extremely well. Some have noted that Ritchie seemed to be a bit down since Deep Purple's Burn in 1974, with the following album, Stormbringer, and Rainbow's debut lacking some of the fire from that album. Well, I'm happy to report the fire has returned! Furthermore, they were just getting started.

There's a little detour in the third and fourth tracks, in which the needle slips over to hard rock from the aforementioned proto-metal. "Starstruck" demonstrates the band still has its chops when it comes to the blues, just in case the fans thought the band was going full sword-and-sorcery a la Hawkwind. "Do You Close Your Eyes" take things even further, the shortest track of the album and a little reminiscent of the first album's goofy seventh track "If You Don't Like Rock 'n' Roll". While not as impressive as its peers on this album, it would work very nicely on stage.

If the first side of the album showed a remarkable departure from the previous album, the next side would show the band outdoing their own work from the flip. Without a doubt, "Stargazer" is the one Rainbow song that must be heard in anyone's lifetime. Yes, it's that big a deal. Ritchie brings out the big guns for real here: monster drum intro from Cozy, epic solo by Ritchie backed with a full freakin' orchestra, and Dio reveling in his preferred and now fully-developed fantastical lyrics. And if that isn't enough, fear not. "A Light In the Black" is a sequel of sorts to "Stargazer", continuing the story. Where "Stargazer" is played at a fairly moderate tempo, its companion is designed for speed. Although the lyrics are a little less profound, Carey and Blackmore completely blow it up with a lead-instrument duel that brings back the warm and fuzzy feelings of the trademark Blackmore vs. Lord showdowns the world had been missing since early 1975.

In a perfect world this album would have been the template for the ultimate successor band to Deep Purple. In fact, today's Deep Purple Appreciation Society started life as the Ritchie Blackmore Appreciation Society in 1975 and their publication was called Stargazer (later, with the club name change, it would in turn change to Darker than Blue). That's how ripe with promise Rainbow was in its early days, even when Deep Purple's fourth lineup was in direct competition. However, one must predict Ritchie's career decisions only with great peril, and as early as 1977 the band showed signs of pulling back. While the live On Stage showed the superiority of the second lineup over the first on an apples-for-apples level, delivering particularly forceful versions of "Man on the Silver Mountain" and "Sixteenth Century Greensleeves", almost all of Rising was omitted from the setlist except for a "medley" treatment of "Starstruck" stuffed inside "Man on the Silver Mountain". Even the 2012 deluxe edition only adds "Do You Close Your Eyes" from another show. For some reason "A Light in the Black" and then "Stargazer" were removed from the setlist and never enjoyed a position as a staple of the live show, which is hindsight seems kind of shocking. The 1978 album Long Live Rock and Roll, wracked by personnel issues, particularly bass, also pointed to more commercial leanings, though only after Dio's exit in 1979 did in become clear that Ritchie was leading the band in a more commercial direction.

When Cozy Powell quit after Down to Earth, the old Rising lineup was officially vanquished from the record, The new Rainbow gradually populated its ranks with increasingly radio-friendly musicians, all under the watch of Ritchie and Roger Glover (the former had been nearly fired the latter from Deep Purple in 1973 and now they were best buds - go figure). By the last album the keyboards and drums were largely reduced to session-level (in fact David Rosenthal and Chuck Burgi were most recently sighted on tour with Billy Joel) and the vocals by Joe Lynn Turner were far removed from the Dio years.

Sometimes, in the heat of overanalysis, critics hail Long Live Rock and Roll, or even Down to Earth as the "best" Rainbow album. No doubt there are great songs on pretty much every album; only Bent Out of Shape leaves me at a bit of a loss. However, for consistently good performances across all of the instruments, the six songs of Rising are the standard by which all the other albums should be judged. Deservedly so, all personnel enjoyed continued success following the album: Dio kept true to metal in Black Sabbath and his own band, which would feature Jimmy Bain on its greatest albums; Powell would lend his services to numerous bands, including Whitesnake and Black Sabbath during the 1980's and 1990's before dying in a car crash in 1998; and Tony Carey became an incredibly successful musician in his own right, primarily in his adopted home of Germany, employing a distinctly non-metal singer-songwriter approach.