#nick simper

Deep Purple, 1969.  

Better than Stones or Beatles

Deep Purple: Deep Purple (1969)

Deep Purple’s original lineup of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organist Jon Lord, vocalist Rod Evans, bassist Nick Simper, and drummer Ian Paice was running out of steam by the release of this eponymous third album, in 1969.

Amazingly, barely a year had passed since the London-based quintet’s debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, had turned a cover of Joe South’s “Hush” into a massive U.S. Top 5 single, basically making them stars-in-waiting ... in America anyway.

But, back home in the U.K., modest sales of both that first LP and Purple’s second, The Book of Taliesyn, colluded with mounting financial troubles at their U.S. label Tetragrammaton (co-owned by now disgraced comedian Bill Cosby, of all people) to put undue pressure on the sessions for this crucial third attempt.

Pressure that saw the band reaching for a hit with a tepid cover of Donovan’s “Lalena” and losing themselves in a transitional netherworld of psychedelic, progressive and hard rock with not-quite-there originals like “Chasing Shadows” and “Fault Line/The Painter.”

Sure, a dozen listens may convert you to the baroque ‘n’ roll of “Blind,” the bluesy thrust of “Why Didn’t Rosemary,” and certainly the album’s strongest number, “The Bird has Flown” (which, incidentally, bore no relation to The Beatles’ tune).

But Deep Purple’s greatest asset, at this time, wasn’t their confused songwriting, it was their stellar musicianship, with Blackmore, Lord and Paice, in particular, showcasing all of their skill on the ambitious, if commercially doomed, twelve-minute foray into symphonic rock called “April.”

This would, of course, lead to the next year’s career detour and dead-end, Concerto for Group and Orchestra, by which time Evans and Simper had been supplanted with new singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover, thus solidifying the legendary Mk. II lineup.

Together, these five longhairs would soon make Deep Purple’s ‘60s escapades a distant and/or forgotten memory, as they charged into the new heavy metal era with form-defining classics like In Rock, Fireball and Machine Head, leaving predecessors like this one in their dust.

p.s. -- Almost forgot to mention the gatefold cover’s nifty, black-and-white reproduction/corruption of the right panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, whose nightmare visions have of course graced many a heavy metal album over the years.

p.p.s. -- Some of these words were adapted from a couple of earlier pieces written about this album for Ultimate Classic Rock.