I guess you had to be there. You should be glad you weren’t there. If you’re not glad you weren’t there you should schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist immediately. She won’t be able to help you, but she will take your money and urge you to come back so she can take more of your money.
The “there” I’m talking about was the Royal Albert Hall in September 1969, where Deep Purple collaborated with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on a concerto composed by organist Jon Lord with lyrics written by vocalist Ian Gillan. I will state from the outset that said collaboration was more than just a misbegotten child—it was a harbinger of worse to come from the likes of Procol Harum, Rick Wakeman, and Caravan. Deep Purple have a lot to answer for.
Rock music was moving in a classical direction at the time, a trend that would ultimately leave us cringing to the neo-classical abominations of Wakeman and, God help us all, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who dispensed with the live orchestras in favor of their own adaptations of classical chestnuts. But Deep Purple were the first, the pioneers of pomp and circumstance, and hence occupy a place of honor in the Museum of Musical Monstrosities.
The Concerto for Group and Orchestra is composed of three movements, or four too many in my opinion. You get exactly what you’d expect, pretension piled upon pretension to create a veritable mountain of pretension you’d be a fool to scale without harness, carabiners, and jackhammer-grade ear protection.
I’ve explored the rationale for such endeavors before—they’re the work of rock musicians who’ve surpassed (in their own deluded minds) the music of such plebeian primitivists as Chuck Berry and want to be regarded as “serious” artists of the likes whose names begin with Igor and Woflgang. Their fans (and they were legion) were of the type who longed to be regarded as sophisticated. For these benighted souls, roll over Beethoven had become roll over Chuck Berry.
I know absolutely nothing about classical music but I know far too much about Keith Emerson, and there’s no question Concerto for Group and Orchestra must have given him multiple orgasms. Or, far more likely, he and Jon Lord were following similar musical paths. Lord’s organ work is easily mistaken for that of Emerson’s, and Keith—in a paroxysm of pomposity—would later compose his very own “Piano Concerto No. 1,” which can be found on ELP’s 1977 album Works Volume 1. (Has he written subsequent concertos? I’ve always been afraid to check.)
The words I would use to describe the concerto are mock-Wagnerian, overwrought, and quite possibly illegal. I suspect that classical music experts who know about such matters would describe the Concerto for Group and Orchestra—to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes—as nasty, brutish, and not short enough. In any event, the LP alternates between the orchestra playing alone, the orchestra and the band playing together, and (finally!) the band playing all by their lonesome, which is where you’ll encounter the all-too brief tasty bits.
It’s a painful listen at best, and excruciating at worst, and would be utterly unlistenable were it not for the guitar work of Ritchie Blackmore, whose crazed playing seems to have been expressly designed to drive the orchestra shrieking from the Royal Albert Hall so Deep Purple could get down to the business of doing what they did best. Blackmore would later say, “I just wanted to play very very loudly and jump around a lot.” He added that he didn’t “respect the fact that we were doing it” and found the entire experience as “one big calamity onstage.”
I believe in certain things. I believe in the separation of church and state. I believe in the separation of myself and a 390-pound mama grizzly bear protecting her cubs. And I believe in the separation of rock and roll and classical music, which is why I’d sooner face off against that mama grizzly than listen to this album again.
I might be tempted to spare the album a failing grade on the basis of Blackmore’s guitar work alone, if only there were some way to separate it from its orchestral surroundings. But there isn’t. Calamity, to quote Blackmore, it is, and I’ve yet to encounter a calamity that deserves a passing mark. So there you are. Concerto for Group and Orchestra is more than just an abysmal album. It’s a stellar example of man’s inhumanity to man.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
F
