Deep Purple - Deep Purple in Rock (1970)

Warner Bros. Records ■ WS 1877

Released June, 1970

Produced by Deep Purple

Engineered by Andy Knight, Martin Birch, Philip McDonald

Side One:	Side Two:
Speed King Bloodsucker Child in Time	Flight of the Rat Into the Fire Living Wreck Hard Lovin' Man

Ah, Deep Purple "Mk. II".

Why, out of all the bands that have gone through such monumental lineup changes (Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, etc) they are the only ones that seem to have become firmly labeled with "version" numbers is beyond me. Perhaps it's because the lineup change has such a drastic overall effect on songwriters--we can say "Barrett-era Floyd"¹ and "Peter Green" and "Bob Welch" and so on, to notate the controlling voice's change. I don't know--anything would be just a guess, and it's likely just an indicator of the varying mentalities of fans that Deep Purple's chose that approach.

Still, "Mark II" has its place highest in the echelons of music, particularly for being so thoroughly entrenched in hard rock when it was rapidly morphing into heavy metal (though most of the albums at the time given that have largely sloughed off that title as it has gained higher and higher minimums of power/volume/aggression/speed/etc over the years). Indeed, if the average person can assign anything to the name "Deep Purple", it is probably "Smoke on the Water", their monstrous hit from two albums (and years) farther on, Machine Head. Now, of course, "Highway Star" has gained a measure of fame from its inclusion in Rock Band, so there might be that further connection, but it, too, comes from '72's Machine Head anyway.


While I grew up with "Smoke on the Water" as I did with many a classic rock song, it regained strength when I came into my love of Frank Zappa, and the story of the burning casino studio in it. About four or five years ago, I happened upon the 25th anniversary edition of Fireball, the album between this one and Machine Head. The packaging, the tracklisting--it seemed intriguing, and I went ahead and got it. I quickly fell for that album and it's peculiarities (particularly the romping and somewhat odd "Anyone's Daughter", which hasn't really got an analogous partner on the other two albums, nor the non-album singles), then let myself begin to spiral outward from it and into the other albums from this particular line up of Deep Purple.

Both of the other "Mk. II" albums were indeed released in expanded formats, with Deep Purple in Rock and Machine Head bookending the set with the fewest and greatest number of bonus tracks (Machine Head has an entire alternate mix on a whole separate disc). In my inescapable desire to partition albums under schemata entirely of my own invention but apparently quite convincing (to me, at least), there's a progression that I think of in many bands--a spark of novelty in the first album that establishes a sound clearly and gains a lot of appreciation as a result, a second album that seems to take that sound and throw out any and all boundaries, and then a third that refines everything learned in the first two²--and that tends to, as a result, often determine and define my preferences (I usually like the second album most). Deep Purple ends up no exception to this--Fireball remains my favourite, and I tend to prefer In Rock after that, and Machine Head last, despite the obvious appeal. It's not defiance, it just seems to work out that way.

Either everyone agrees with me on Fireball or no one does, as I see it least of all on vinyl, though I admit I don't look too intently. I picked up this rather beat up copy of In Rock on a trip to a used store I frequented less than most others two or three years back, simply because I was in the depths of my affections for Deep Purple at the time. It has a kind of charm for a record like this to look like this--it's not an ultra rare disc, so it's nice to see one that was loved for a good few decades, not treated as a hermetically sealed idol so much as a well-loved piece of momentary joy for someone.

And that's really how Deep Purple works--not that they can't be placed on any pedestals, but it's music that demands enjoyment from listening, as it is built heavily on grooves, whether we're talking about Gillan's vocals, Blackmore's riffing, Lord's vamping, Glover's basslines, or Paicey's flood of fills and feel-based drumming. I have a number of records that have that cute instruction: "To be played LOUD" (eg The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars), but Deep Purple in Rock I just kind of instinctively turn up--I do worry a bit about the neighbors, but it feels like the kind of thing that your neighbors would either nod sagely at the playing of, or shrug and admit that it at least makes sense to be playing it loud.

While "Anyone's Daughter" has no equivalents floating about (from the band in question, I mean), the smaller hit "Highway Star" is hinted at when Deep Purple in Rock opens: "Speed King" is another boastful self-descriptive blast of groove and power. I should mention this is the U.S. issue of the album, wherein the introductory flurry of distortion and wild guitar flailing from Blackmore as well as the first snippet of Lord's organ introduction is omitted (about a minute and a half). That is a shame, let's be honest--but the real joy of "Speed King" is the riff that just leaps out of the gate, grounded by Glover's deep bass, and backed by Paicey's blasting drums. Gillan immediately makes clear the meaning of the witty description of the song in the gatefold ("Just a few roots, replanted") as his words reference early Little Richard hits. But it's all filtered through the riff-based power of a band that would come to define hard rock in many of the best ways. The forward movement of the song is what is most allusive if one knows "Highway Star" already--Ian Paice's drums are fantastically thoughtful without any sacrifice of power and movement, something that is not as apparent in the later song. Lord and Blackmore³ have a brief interlude where they trade subdued and gentle licks, but it's returned to the relentless pace of the opening, uninterested in anything more than a pause for anything else.

"Bloodsucker" eases the pace a bit, but pumps the "groove" quotient up to compensate. Glover's bass rides under a tangled lick from Blackmore, but controls the sound, giving the bottom end the motor of the snaking movement of the song. Paice is happy to largely just keep the beat this time, though he continues to do so with great flair. Lord gets to turn the burners back to a simmering feeling, drawing out the emanations of the groove to a stretched, low-slung rest. But he's not left to just this, as he gets a higher end solo that is turned in for another of the same from Blackmore--neither is overly long, even as they trade back and forth, each just a few bars to show off and flutter at the song's melody and feel. Gillan's voice is defined primarily by the stomping shuffle of Paice's drums, but when he lets loose on that shrieking "Oh, no no no!" (not to be confused with the song "No No No" from Fireball, of course), he really makes his, ahem, voice heard and gives the song his own little inscription.

I suppose it's not terribly surprising to me that "Child in Time" is the most appealing part of the album amongst the folks I know--either I know people who have no interest in Deep Purple, or I know people who like them whose taste is more readily ascribed to progressive rock bands, at least of the Pink Floyd variety, if not the more nerdy King Crimson set (this should not be taken as insulting--when we get to "K", we'll actually have a poll for Crimson, as I own enough). "Child in Time" is something like the amalgamation of hard rock, jam band, and progressive rock: it's a ten minute epic song, filled with noodling, vamping, and slow, deliberate movement toward intended ends. With the heated coals of the beginning--gentle, sparse ride from Paice, majestic organs that cross the solemnity of church organs with the ominous nature of horror movie kinds--Gillan naturally chooses a lower voice to keep the song in the proper place, Glover and Blackmore largely just following Lord's lower-pitched left hand. The mood Lord has established for us is borne out in the words Gillan sings: "Sweet child in time you'll see the line/The line that's drawn between good and bad/See the blind man shooting at the world/Bullets flying taking toll". Gillan's voice increases in power and pitch at the third line, but drops back low again after that, only to climb to an extreme with the next: "If you've been bad oh, Lord I bet you have/And you've not been it, oh, by flying lead/You'd better close your eyes/Oh! Bow your head..." and then from that extremely passionate warning turns to the shrugging, "If only you'd listened sort of tone," as he sings "Wait for the ricochet..." His voice is gentle, singing only "Oooh-ooh-ooh..." repeatedly now, as Glover begins to push the band upward with a huge swathe of low end cutting through the track, Gillan's "oohs" traded for "aahs" (writing really can't do this justice, you know), which gradually expand and grow with the rest of the track, to shrieking, impassioned, wordless expression--before Paice turns the track martial with emphatic drumming, alongside Lord's rhythmic pounding of keys. Blackmore slinks in his best solo on the album, soulful and wildly appropriate, as the entire song suddenly takes on a lolloping gait, charging forward instrumentally on the blazing fingers of Blackmore, his lead part like sparks from the flames now risen from those opening coals, the song burning faster, brighter, higher, harder, louder, sharper until it climaxes with a lead from Lord instead, which stops short, and returns to the slow roasting opening instead at just the right moment, but leaves Lord still playing a lead part.
Amazingly, the words I typed above are the only ones Gillan really sings in the song, and he begins to repeat them here, sounding like a revelation--like new lyrics, despite the fact that they are nothing of the kind. The song climbs and climbs as before, until it collapses into a chaos of distortion and sound, a final destruction that emphatically and appropriately punctuates the song and the side.

Side two returns us to the sounds that opened the album, though "Flight of the Rat" is a bit more at ease than the energetic "Speed King" or the groove-laden "Bloodsucker". Maybe that's appropriate--the title does imply a different kind of travel (be it air-travel or escape). Everyone's a bit more relaxed, oddly, as if this is a palate cleanser following the beauty of "Child in Time"--it's a more "fun" track, as much of the second side is.  It's another long track (around eight minutes), but it's more of a steady one than the rollercoaster of its predecessor, and its introspective lyrics are the opposite numbers-wise--they take up more of the left side of the gatefold than any other song, though this largely reflects the brevity of the lines. The interlude for instrumental show from Lord and then Blackmore (which eventually stops for a pretty great wah-wah "breakdown") only furthers the feeling that this track is sheer enjoyment in a can, so to speak.

"Into the Fire" is probably the album's heaviest track, in that more indefinable sense: Blackmore and Glover are crushing with their strings, and chug along with immense weight. Paicey pounds out a thumping rhythm with some semi-Moon-esque fills that give it a great flavour, while Gillan ups the feeling of a relative of "Bloodsucker", as his words are dragged along in the wake of the song's rhythm, until that pause at the end of each stanza where he let's loose: "Into the FI-IRE!" he yells, not the shriek of "Child in Time" or "Bloodsucker," but a more throat-scorching bellow that seems to belch up flames of its own, throwing smoke and ash into its sound. Just foot-stomping beauty, here.

Lyrically, "Living Wreck" is beyond odd; its witty description relates it back to groupies, while the lyrics themselves imply a groupie fallen all to pieces ("You took off your hair/You pulled out your teeth/Oh, I almost died of fright..."). So far as I'm concerned, it's best to look past them (or take a bit of humour from them, at best). Blackmore's riffing, particularly following Gillan's first stanza, part muted, and hanging out firmly in the mids, is engaging and dirty in the best sense that guitars can be. The bassy bridge (a mix of Glover and Lord at the low end of his keys) booms and shakes the track under a meandering, casual lead from Blackmore, an unusual sound for him on the album, especially with its pinched, thin, mid-range tone that gives a crustier feel to the track on the whole.

The album closes with "Hard Lovin' Man", which gives Glover an unusual (but brief) spotlight at open, to slide back and forth on a line that defines the arc of Paicey and Blackmore's charging feel for the song. A burnt, crispy drone of semi-distorted keys (yep!) emanates from Lord's fingers, and turns that chugging gallop into something different, banding itself around the other three instruments. It turns into a peculiar, semi-off lead from Lord, that, as per usual, turns instead to a lead from Blackmore, who turns in a typically sparkling performance, one that seems to rustle and shake within a carefully controlled, limited space to keep it tied closely to the song as a whole. The whole thing collapses into absolute chaos, defined by the stereo-panned howls and squalls of distortion from Blackmore.

I have a longstanding affection for the hard rock vein of classic rock, particularly the kind that didn't explode so completely as to define itself as itself, instead of a component of the whole (I'm looking at you, Page/Plant/Jones/Bonham!) and lose track of where it fit within the grand scheme of rock music--indeed, I have a hunger for the kind of sounds that seem to have fallen out of the 1970s approach to hard rock, lacking in pretension, dripping with fist-pumping kinds of energy and the histrionics and groove that made it so appealing in the first place, so much so that I once wrote about my favourite modern instances, and you can hear some strains of it in the last band I wrote about, Davenport Cabinet.

Deep Purple in Rock (and, to be fair, Fireball) really sate that craving quite well--In Rock perhaps managing it more thoroughly, if not as well, thanks to the "pure rock" approach to the album as a whole. It's always interesting to gather the different thoughts about bands like this--today, a coworker actually mentioned the band purely by chance, he of an age to know them more as former "contemporaries", and was semi-surprised to find I'd just been listening to the band. Friends into classic rock don't bring them up much, but tend to respect them, and my father has one of his "strange" opinions when it comes to them--his preference is for the Rod Evans era, and albums like The Book of Taliesyn, though I suppose this isn't too great a surprise considering he and I have always differed on the "harder" and "heavier" elements of rock music (we'll have more fun with this contrast with later artists, I think!).

I think In Rock serves as a good place for anyone to go who has an attitude like mine: I don't like being coloured by (ie, magnetically drawn to) a familiar single like a gravitational pull--the desire to hear the familiar is strong in almost all of us (if not, discounting extreme willfulness, all of us period), and it makes it hard, sometimes, to get a feel for an artist or an album when there is that point of inevitable attraction in a work. In Rock does have "Child in Time", but this is both an extremely long track and also only the kind of track you're likely to be familiar with when crossed fingers at the "progressive" nature's chances of appealing to highbrow sensibilities encouraged someone to pass it on as "proof" of Deep Purple's quality. Yeah, I'm kind of cynical--I'm wary of a lot of communities surrounding that word, and the occasional recursive interest in "proving" the value of things.

I think Deep Purple stand pretty well on their own, without the need to prove they aren't "dumb rock", nor to prove that anything that is (or could be) is not inherently valueless.

As a final note, though, I hate typing the title of the album. Is it In Rock? Is it Deep Purple in Rock? Obviously, the cover is a sort of pun and requires the whole phrase, but does that mean it was a play wherein the title was attached to the artist to make it work, or the original intention? No, this doesn't really matter, but these things tend to stick with me anyway.

¹"Barrett-era"--doesn't that just sound nice, as a phrase?

²This idea has been applied (quite subjectively) to numerous artists over the years. Mostly by me, and no one else. I keep it because I like how it fits together in my brain.

³If you don't know this--yes, seriously, those are the members' names. I know it sounds like some kind of fantasy heroes. I'll admit, too, it's less fun to refer to them as "Jon" and "Ritchie" respectively.