At first nobody could figure out how they did it. How did a gaggle of English metalheads with symphonic tendencies manage to sneak up to Mt. Rushmore, replace the mugs of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the other guy whose name I can never remember with their own mugs, and do it in one night?
Then it came to me. They did it with their heavy music! After doing some serious investigative journalism I discovered the truth: they drove six hundred trucks with huge speakers on the back to the base of Mt. Rushmore and played their seminal 1970 metal opus In Rock at top volume and through precision design of each note on the album SOUND-CARVED their faces over the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and the guy whose name I can never remember! And it only took them three plays!
All of which is to say that the guys in Deep Purple are heavy metal geniuses, and In Rock isn’t just a genre touchstone, it’s the greatest rock-blasting and precision sculpting tool ever invented! Sure, they’re still at the top of the National Park Service’s Most Wanted List, and lots of people now think George Washington looks like Ritchie Blackmore, but they sure got themselves a great album cover.
In Rock was Deep Purple’s fourth release, and the first studio album to feature the new Mark II line-up of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organ king Jon Lord, drummer Ian Paice, and new acquisitions lead vocalist Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover, both of whom they acquired from the New York Mets for former lead singer Rod Evans (who’d lost his fastball) and a couple of lousy draft picks, none of whom ever made the bigs. It was a real steal.
Gillan in particular was a great pick-up—the guy could shriek like a bird of prey swooping down on your bong and was a unapologetic hambone in the bargain, a real “fuck subtlety” kind of rock thespian and scene stealer who could scream at 100 mph. Point him at a tree and have him shriek at that tree and every bird in that tree would fall out of that tree, deceased. When he sang a note it stayed sung, and for him the difference between emoting and over-emoting was so thin you could hardly slide a razor blade between the two. But he was a total original, with a vocal range that would put Maria Callas to shame, and you should really check out his haircut.
In Rock was a massive improvement on their prior album, 1969’s live Concerto for Group and Orchestra, which the band recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. But how couldn’t it be a massive improvement? The rock band that can get away with performing with an orchestra, should a band ever get away with performing with an orchestra, will be called Unicorn, and its members will be real unicorns. Who can stand on their hind legs and rock out. Every other band who’s ever tried it have proved they’re pretentious dicks with no shame. I’m surpised Emerson, Lake & Palmer never did it.
The guys in Deep Purple were show-offs—Blackmore, Lord, and (in spades) Gillan were big on flash and theatrics and playing speed metal fast, and none of them would be denied their chance to take solo turns as often as possible. The idea of playing a song through without giving the boys the opportunity to demonstrate their virtuoso chops was absolutely unthinkable. Sometimes exercising their egos came at the expense of the song and sometimes it didn’t.
What they REALLY liked to do was let Blackmore and Lord duel it out, in a kind of call and response that formed the song’s midsection and, if lucky, didn’t kill the song’s momentum deader than dead. The best songs on In Rock are mostly good enough to withstand such treatment. Because the best songs on In Rock are driving, hard rock, kick-ass demonstrations of pure burnished metal power. There’s nothing on as lunkheaded and turgid as “Smoke on the Water,” and Lord and Blackmore restrain (for the most part) from going semi-classical baroque the way they do on, say, the otherwise incendiary “Burn.”
“Speed King” is right up there with the best of the Purple’s most supercharged numbers: “Highway Star,” “Burn,” “Stormbringer,” and I could go on. It opens with some real cool chaos and guitar feedback and then Lord plays a blessedly brief organ homily like we’re in church or something, and we are—the Church of Little Richard! As Gillan makes clear, tossing off all kinds Little Miss Molly and tutti fruitti as the song burns down the track. Would be cooler if the song didn’t slow down some to give Lord and Blackmore the opportunity to engage in some jousting, but they don’t do it forever like I expect they’d love to do, and things speed up soon enough until Gillian delivers this half-laugh, half-scream and returns to Richardizing. Blackmore plays like he’s possessed by the Devil, Gillan gives another little laugh like he IS the devil, and everything descends again into the chaos from whence it came.
“Bloodsucker” is straight-up heavy metal thunder—not as fast as “Speed King,” but by Deep Purple standards startlingly direct and straight to the solar plexus. Lord is conspicuous for his absence, only coming in for a couple of very brief slowdowns until he joins in the inevitable back and forth with Blackmore. Towards the end of the song Gillan decides he’s going to invent speed-rapping, and it’s almost scary. This is Deep Purple with a minimum of bullshit—it’s like someone forgot to remind them that they were the flash kings of rock ’n’ roll and the result’s a song as close to stripped down as they ever got.
Or maybe they were saving it all for “Child of Time,” which is so over the top in every respect I can’t help but laugh at it and be awed by it at the same time. What’s hilarious about it are Gillan’s vocals. It’s the one progressive rock track on the album, which is to say its pretentiousness levels are in the red and it switches gears too often for its own good. It opens with some real mythopoeic atmospherics over which Gillan sings about a blind guy shooting the sun in the eye or something, then he goes into operatic mode and delivers a series of high-pitched ululations that get more and more outlandish you begin to think he’s going to spontaneously combust.
At which juncture the song suddenly jerks into high gear and Blackmore plays a solo that I suspect he recorded on the Bonneville salt flats. That’s the awesome part. Then he’s joined by Lord, which is even more awesome. Until they finally run into a wall and the song starts over, and it’s deja vu all over again. You get more banshee wail and organ pomposity followed by, this time, lots of Paice drum thrash and Gillan orgasmatron moan, like he’s out to beat Robert Plant’s world record or maybe it was the other way around because I’m not sure which one of ‘em went multi-orgasmic first. Either way it’s kind of embarrassing.
The amazing thing about “Flight of the Rat”? It’s even more unencumbered by grandiosity than “Bloodsucker” and a harder-driving number than “Speed King” and it never takes its foot off the pedal. Lord plays fast and then faster; Blackmore plays hard and then harder, and the boys don’t even engage in any back and forth—it would slow things down. There is a brief, very brief, section where Paice does some crazy shit on the drums, and he does come in at the end to play what comes horrifyingly close to a solo, but this one is what heavy metal played fast should sound like.
“Into the Fire” is organ-heavy and what heavy metal all too often sounds like—a drag. It’s not as much of a drag as “Smoke on the Water”—it teeter-totters back and forth, Gillan pounding out his words in time to the ponderous beat, sounding like a real macho man. Blackmore’s there, but other than for a restrained solo you wouldn’t know it—this one is all bludgeoning beat, song as blunt murder weapon. And “Living Wreck” is pretty much the same thing. Almost sounds like a warm-up to “Smoke on the Water” at times, except Lord plays these really fast organ runs here and there. As for Blackmore, his solo is boring. There’s no other word for it. Lord’s solo, which comes later on, is overly flashy, as if to make up for Richie’s boring solo. Maybe they had an arrangement.
Closer “Hard Lovin’ Man” is a groovy gallop with lots of Lord playing organgrinder without the monkey while Paice pummels the drums. The whole thing feels almost like a jam. Not much song, per se—they’re just pounding along, with Lord and then Blackmore pushing things to the limit. Blackmore in particular cuts loose, while Gillan contributes a few screams. Towards the end they incorporate chaos without even slowing the thing down, which is my idea of cool. A nice one to go out on—it’s like they decided to become the MC5 for a moment, and they do a stellar job of it.
In Rock is an indispensable metal staple, as indispensable, in its more ornate and flashier way, as Black Sabbath. Deep Purple haven’t aged as well as many of their contemporaries, I suspect because Lord’s organ theatrics fell out of favor in metal world and now sound undeniably quaint. But at their best, and they’re at their best on much of In Rock, Deep Purple opened avenues that their metal descendants would follow until the present day.
Literally defacing and re-facing Mt. Rushmore may have been an epic act of hubris, and tourists have been mistaking Ritchie Blackmore for Jefferson ever since, but it says something that it’s Deep Purple up there and not Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or anybody else. It’s a pity the rock Lumpenproletariat will always associate Deep Purple most with “Smoke on the Water.” I blame that stupid with the flare gun. Who may well have been me, because I still can’t remember the name of the guy on Mt. Rushmore who wasn’t Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln. I want to say FDR. Or Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
