As was often the case with Blackmore ’s bandmates, however, Dio became disenchanted. Blackmore tinkered with the band lineup again, replacing bass and keyboard players for the third time in as many albums. In 1981 Kerrang! magazine readers named Rising the greatest metal album of all time.Īfter a sold-out European tour and live album, Dio stayed on for one more studio round, resulting in 1978 ’s Long Live Rock ‘n ’ Roll, which featured the same mixture of motorcycle-groove metal (the title track) and medieval excess ( “Gates of Babylon ”). ” The album had its less-busy side, too, with the femme-fatale rocker “Starstruck ” showing a more restrained Blackmore and Powell. The album ’s core is “Stargazer, ” an eight-minute dungeons-and-dragons epic featuring busy drumming, a long guitar solo, lyrics about whips, chains, towers of stone and the immortal line “there ’s no sun in the shadow of the wizard/see how he glides/ why, he ’s lighter than air/oh, I see his face. “Man on the Silver Mountain, ” Dio ’s signature song during his brief Rainbow tenure was the epitome of this Jethro Tull-like concept.įans of Blackmore and Dio say the next album, 1976 ’s Rising, was the band ’s peak, with former Jeff Beck group drummer Cozy Powell (later of Whitesnake and Emerson, Lake, and Powell), then-unknown bassist Jimmy Bain, and keyboardist Tony Carey replacing the original Elf core. The album ’s creative axis was Blackmore and Dio, who bonded over a mutual love for both heavy rock and medieval music. The band immediately made Blackmore happy by covering “ Black Sheep of the Family ” they then went to Germany ’s Musicland Studios to record Ritchie Blackmore ’s Rainbow. It was this arrogance that led him to form Rainbow. “Pound for pound, one of the best soloists in history, but he ’s such a d*** that he ’ll probably never get the credit he deserves, ” Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins ’ lead singer and guitarist, told Guitar Player in 1996. ” Blackmore soon invented one of the most recognizable metal riffs of all time, “Smoke on the Water, ” a number-four hit that helped the band sell 15 million records by the mid-1970s. In 1968 he cofounded Deep Purple, whose first hits were souped-up versions of Joe South ’s “Hush ” and Neil Diamond ’s “Kentucky Woman. He backed rockabilly heroes Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis onstage and attended studio sessions by the great freaked-out producer Joe Meek. Blackmore found work as a session musician. The British rock scene was just heating up in those days, with eventual contemporaries Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page preparing to form their own bands. ”īorn in England, Blackmore began his music studies at age eleven, when his father bought him a guitar and demanded that he take lessons. “Ritchie and I were getting bored with it. It never seemed to get any better, ” bassist Roger Glover told the Los Angeles Times in 1985, after a Deep Purple reunion signaled the end of Rainbow, at least for the time being. “It was successful, but it was always a second-rank band. But even Rainbow ’s members knew they weren ’t exactly making musical history. ” It also anticipated two major 1980s hard-rock trends: hair bands such as Poison and Bon Jovi, who borrowed aspects of their coiffure and singing styles from Dio, and fast-fingered guitarists such as Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani, who adapted Blackmore ’s classical leanings and rock excess. The new band, Rainbow, became a revolving door of over-the-top metal talent.Īlthough it never had a gold album or a hit single, Rainbow wasn ’t a failure the band toured successfully for almost a decade beginning in the mid-1970s and released the underrated metal anthems “Man on the Silver Mountain, ” “Since You Been Gone ” and “Jealous Lover. He immediately commandeered a New York band, Elf, which had opened for Deep Purple and starred shrieking vocalist Ronnie James Dio. The rest of Deep Purple had had the audacity to demand democracy -and wouldn ’t record one of Blackmore ’s favorite songs, Quater-mass ’s “ Black Sheep of the Family ” -so the guitarist packed up his strings and went solo. Rainbow began when Ritchie Blackmore, a classically trained and legendarily difficult lead guitarist left Deep Purple, the British heavy metal band that made him famous.
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