Los Angeles / give me Norfolk, Virginia / dial one oh four ten oh nine / tell the folks back home th...
Los Angeles / give me Norfolk, Virginia / dial one oh four ten oh nine / tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling / and the poor boy is on / the line
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This album, the fifth from Deep Purple Mark II, (Ian Gillan / Ritchie Blackmore / Jon Lord / Roger Glover / Ian Paice) seems to be something of a curio's egg these days - Rock Fans Of A Certain Age will all remember Child In Time, Speed King, Smoke On The Water and Lazy, but who remembers any of the tunes on here? Apart from the one about that sweet lady from the capital of Japan?
Understandable maybe, because after all we are talking about a band that had sired the great albums In Rock, Machine Head, Fireball and the live Made In Japan, so perhaps this was bound to be a little overlooked, much in the same way as, well, Radioheads "Hail To The Thief", good as it is, will not be mentioned in the same breath as "Kid A" or "OK Computer" will it?
When you also consider that by the time it was recorded (in Italy and Germany throughout late 1972) Gillan and Blackmore were no longer on speaking terms, with Blackmore and Paice already turning their thoughts to employing a new bassist and singer, it just makes you appreciate this great band all the more, because given all the circumstances they still sound tight and inventive. I mean when all is said and done DP sit up there dining at the top table of Great British Rock Bands with Zepp and Sabbath.
This is a remastered 30th anniversary edition, which comes complete with a booklet giving a precis of the infighting going on within the band during the recording of this album. It is very funny to read, and I won't plagarise it here, apart from the bit when DP were in Italy trying to get the sessions going at a villa and found out that the Stones Mobile they were using was too tall to drive through the archway of said building, so they had to run cables through the drive into the front room of the villa where they were playing.
Spinal Tap or what?
As a bassist myself, Roger Glover has my utmost respect, being one of the 20th century's finest four string men and it was he who wrote a major part of said booklet here, not only is the dude a great bass player he also has a wonderfully droll style of writing. Still, on with the music!!!
Track listing Woman From Tokyo / Mary Long / Super Trouper / Smooth Dancer / Rat Bat Blue / Place In Line / Our Lady - there are also seven bonus tracks on this enhanced CD.
Purple put down one of the truly great prog rock classics in the opener Woman From Tokyo. A hard rock start morphs into a beautiful middle section with organ and hi-hat percussion before launching back into a searing riff. Jon Lord throws in some Jerry Lee Lewis boogie-woogie piano and the band enter into a jam that remains one of their finest moments. Some great lyrics too "I'm at home where I just don't belong....." "soon we shall see just how black was the night...when we're alone in the city of light".
Mary Long is lyrically a vitriolic attack on the moral majority movement that was raising its ugly head at the turn of that decade. "how did you lose your virginity, Mary? when you will lose your stupidity?" sings Gillan. In all honesty this track sums the album up, the band lay down the groove and Gillan steps in for the vocal, but the feeling of a band at one with each other seems to be missing, which of course was just the case during this records recording. Things pick up for Super Trouper (thankfully not the Abba song!!) but a take on the feeling of loneliness that all rock stars face from time to time. A super trouper was one of those dazzling lights used in the stage show. Nice vocoder effects on this track and some more jamming on the bridge. "You think you know me, but I'm just a shadow in the rock and roll sky", sings Gillan.
Smooth Dancer is a fast paced number with some good vocal-guitar interplay..."black suede..don't waste your time on me", well the story is that Mr Blackmore, famous wearer of said black suede, thought that DP would be better off without Mr Gillan (who wrote the lyrics).......and he recorded the vocal without the band present. We get to the second really good track which is Rat Bat Blue. A riff eerily like Jimmy Page's cameo on Zeppelins "Moby Dick" starts things off and carries on throughout. "You look so fine", sings Gillan and he has only one thing on his mind here, and that is not going to bed early with a mug of Horlicks. More like going to bed early with a member of the fairer sex. Jon Lord comes in with some killer keyboard work much like his solo on "Burn" and the rythym section keep it going to 4-4 time.
Gillan uses slurred vocals in the standard blues Place In Line, whereupon Blackmore gets to put down a nice solo simliar to the ones Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac used to do. Again Jon Lord does a solo keyboard run as the band get into the groove, but really this is a bread and butter job that is not the strongest cut on the album.
The soaring Our Lady was the final track on the original release. The bottom end, Paice and Glover (bless em!!) lead the way on this almost-gospelly flavoured number that sounds like the recording engineers went to skin up outside leaving the band to get on with it. If you're going to make one last record before breaking the band up, this is surely the one to do it to.
As already mentioned, there are seven (count em) bonus tracks. The 1999 Roger Glover remix of Woman From Tokyo doesn't stray much from the original version, it's cleaned up a bit and has a lighter second section, with an extended jam on the end. The "alternative bridge" of the above song follows, again a lighter take. The out-take Painted Horse kicks off with a "Smoke on the water" line and harmonica work. Something of a late 60s feels to this too. Another remix of Our Lady again cleans things up, but also keeps the jam section going at the end.
Two other versions of Rat Bat Blue; the first is a 57 second warm up and the second again an extended jam, without sounding markedly different to the original. We end with an 11 and a half minute "First Day Jam", apparently on that first day of recording, the band had problems getting their instruments into the studio, so this was put down so's not to waste that precious and expensive studio time. For those of you who like this kind of thing, Blackmore the bassist (yes, Blackmore) leads the band through a jazzy intro after which Jon Lord picks up the baton with a organ riff that sounds like the theme tune to some 1960's BBC current affairs programme! Blackmore stood in on bass as Glover was lost on the autobahn on route to the studio!!
The infighting that was soon to implode the band is lurking under all these proceedings like the Loch Ness Monster, which makes this strong record all the more remarkable. Consider that for the most part all four instruments, drums, bass, keyboards and guitar were recorded seperately, without the members of the band even being in the same room at the same time, the singer coming in later to put on the vocal, it's a wonder that this far better an album than it should be. No it's not as good as Machine Head or Fireball (tell me what album, from the same period could be? OK, Houses of the Holy apart) but it's still a bloody good rock record.
Due to that godawful left-speaker / right-speaker 70's production that we all know and love, younger fans might find this a tad of a let down on that front. Personally I think that these things are best left alone, being a product of their time, but the work that has gone into cleaning up this CD and presenting it in the goings on in the band at its time should make up for any shortcomings in that department.
If you've never heard any Purple before (shame on you!) then I suppose this really isn't the album to start with, try the compliation Deepest Purple instead, on the other hand if it's the only one missing from your DP Mark II collection than maybe it's about time you remedy that situation.
Oh, and one more thing, the cover art. Everyone seems to have their view of it, so for my two happenies worth.......it's awful. Five heads in bubbles floating over a mountain range. Then again, you don't get a DP album to look at the cover, do you. What do you mean, you do? Who Do You Think You Are?
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A well deserved "E" for this review. Everything I needed to know about this most underrated work by the one and only DP. Regards-Peter.
silver-fir4 07.06.2006 02:16
A hidden treasure. Even the band itself don't like to mention the record .. because of the personal problems in those times (Gillan and Glover were fired a few month later) ... But ... great studio technique (even better than Machine Head and far superior to the studio mix of In Rock) and ... a lot, really a lot of very good Purple Songs ... the group was still very popular and the newspapers full of serious articles about their music: "Woman from Tokyo" could have been a radio hit, great piano-solo and riff ...Smooth Dancer and Super Trouper are fantstic hard songs who never (??) have seen the light of the live-stage ... Rat Bat Blue with its appealing riff, once included in a german radio program "Club 16" about feminism and macho-bevaviour rergarding the lyrics. "Our Lady" is somewhat sentimental and psychedelic, without any riff, just a melody .. and the fine very long bonus track "Gem" is really a highlight of Hammond-Organ Improvisation ... one of the last ones in the tradition of Collosseum, Atomic Rooster and Purple. With "Fireball" my favourite record of Deep Purple, as I am a bit tired of "Machine Head" "Made in Japan" and "In Rock". A really good Album, totally underappreciated, not mentioning the fact of its success .... Tomas very good review
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