Monday, October 17, 2011

Deep Purple: Who do we think we are!



During the second semester of my sophomore year in high school (spring 1987), I really got into Deep Purple. The main reason I got into this band was because of I was a fan of the spinoff band Rainbow, who got a decent amount of airplay on MTV back in 1981-1983 or so. This was also the semester of school I spent a lot of time trying to earn money to buy my first guitar so I could learn that famous first riff: "Smoke on the Water". Machine Head is considered the classic Deep Purple record, but my favorite is Who Do We Think We Are.

In 1987, Deep Purple was pretty much viewed as a standard classic rock band amongst my peers. Most of school friends, who were rock fans, liked the songs "Smoke on the Water" and "My Woman From Tokyo" but no one was really a fan of Deep Purple, except me*. In a lot of ways it was more puzzling to my peers than anything else. Friends would say things like:

"I like Mississippi Queen"
"wow, I've heard of them but I never heard anything by them"
"they are really old aren't they?"
"are they psychedelic"
"my brother was into them"
"Bon Jovi!"

Another interesting thing happened when I talked about Deep Purple to guys who were 10+ years older than me. They were impressed that I liked the band, but also surprised since they were about a decade out of date. One person I remember in particular was the guy who drove the bus on our band trip that year. I remember getting into a long conversation with him about music for some reason. I also remember that he was an Aerosmith fan, which was still a little unusual in early 1987. Contrast all this to now when youtube is full of teenagers making videos of themselves playing 40 year old music and no one thinks twice about it. It's also amazing that my fandom with Deep Purple goes back 24 years, and that Deep Purple is still recording and touring, albiet on a very infrequent basis. Even more amazing is that the only consistant member is drummer Ian Paice. It's like a reverse Spinal Tap. Another thing about Deep Purple is that they have a much larger fan base in St. Louis, where I live now, than they have back home again in Indiana. Even better is the fact that the musicians around here also truly get Deep Purple.



I also spent a crazy amount of time obsessing over the various lineups of Deep Purple, the spinoffs and related bands. In early 1987 the same teenagers who had no clue who Deep Purple was, were about to become major fans of their most successful spin-off, Whitesnake.

Who Do We think We Are is my favorite DP disc based on the second side of it. There are only 3 songs on side 2 of WDWTWA: Rat Bat Blue, Place In Line, & Our Lady. Rat Bat Blue is a great lost classic. Great riffs, killer vocals and one crazy Jon Lord solo. Place in Line proved once again that Deep Purple could be a great blues-rock band, much like Lazy on Machine Head did. Our Lady is a musical outlier in Deep Purple's long career. It's almost a power ballad but not very atmospheric and ethereal. Who knows, maybe 40 years from now teenagers will still be listening to late 60s - early 70s rock.

*I think by the 1st semester of my junior year the second real Deep Purple fan showed up.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Kiss Unplugged & Blazefest




It would be nearly impossible to say something about Kiss that hasn't been said before either pro or con. Their influence on the industry is nearly unmatched. If you are a rock fan you are a Kiss fan, either directly or indirectly. Meaning, either you are a fan or some band you are a fan of has Kiss fans in it. And if you play rock or metal, and started playing after 1978 or so, either you are influenced by Kiss or one of your influences was influenced by Kiss. You cannot escape the influence of Gene, Paul, Ace, Peter or (INSERT NAME OF HIRED GUN MEMBER HERE). I'm not going to write about any of the classic discs, because I was way too young when they came out. I really didn't become a card carrying fan until the early 1990s. It seems a little strange to write about how a disc that came out in 1975 reminds me of 1992. So, in my life the two biggest Kiss related events were Blazefest(1994)and the official conventions in 1995.

Blazefest was a radio station sponsored show in suburban Chicago in 1994 and it was one of two shows that Kiss played that year. The CD is a bootleg. What is significant about this show is that it proved that Kiss was not just a gimmick. Kiss played a 100% request only show with no light show, no makeup, & no special effects in a small venue. Basically, you got to see Kiss as a "pure" rock band. They had nothing to hide behind and musically it stood up. It also proved that the Gene, Paul, Bruce K., Eric S. lineup was as strong as the original and could make the vintage Kiss music their own. I went with my old college bud Chuck K. It was the second show we had gone to together that year, the first being Rush w.s.g. Primus on the Counterparts tour. One of the opening acts at Blazefest was guitarist Dave Uhrich, who I have been a fan of ever since and I even became friends with him on Facebook.

The Kiss conventions of 1995 are what spurred the reunion tour in 1996, and the rebirth of Kiss as major stars. Kiss conventions gave fans the chance, for the bargain price of $100.00 a ticket, to
 *see costumes/instruments up close
 *interact with other Kiss superfans
 *see never before seen Kiss footage from the 1970s on
 *see a tribute band
 *see Eric and Bruce give clinics on their respective instruments
 *have a candid no B.S. Q&A session with the band
 *see/participate in an unplugged Kiss concert, which became the basis of the Kiss Unplugged CD.
 *see Paul Stanley's real personallity. a/k/a Stan Eisen
 *meet & greet Gene, Paul, Bruce, & Eric, get pictures & autographs.

Compared to what concert tickets cost today, it was a HELL of a bargain. And a once in a lifetime experience. I even had 3 seconds of a conversation with Paul Stanley. It's too bad this happened before the days of cheap digital cameras/recorders. I wish I had more than just a few snapshots and memories of this event. I went with my musical co-conspirator Greg C, who has been a major Kiss fan since the late 1970s. This was also during the early stages of forming our first band together, Primal Faith. In retrospect Primal Faith was almost the perfect storm of "striking while the iron is cold". We lived in Indianapolis, IN which is totally dominated by country and blues music, and it was the mid 1990s, which was totally dominated by corporate alternative, rap and country. Timing is everything in the industry.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

4 for 1994!





Dream Theater: Awake
Queensryche: Promised Land
Savatage: Handful of Rain
Fates Warning: Inside Out

1994: A year of transition. Movies were still generally speaking original ideas, not remakes of old TV shows, comic books or other movies. The TV landscape was still 3 big networks, 1 smaller network and a few specialty cable channels, not like today where there are dozens of single subject cable channels. "The Simpson's" were really starting to enter their peak years with great humor and almost true to life characters. The internet was taking baby steps towards becoming mainstream. Grunge/Alternative was at its peak but the boy bands were beginning their 15 minutes of fame. The guitar solo was beginning to die off entirely. Shred was dead. Classic metal was dead too. Hair bands were double, super dead. MTV was transitioning out of playing videos and into showing reality TV shows. But somehow 4 major label releases by progressive metal bands hit the shelves in the fall of 1994. My life was in transition too, from college to post college.

1994 was the year that these bands were transitioning too. All four of these discs represent in my mind the closing of a chapter. "Handful of Rain" was the last CD Savatage would record as a set of unrelated songs. The next 3 discs would be rock operas and in 2 years a little side project called Trans-siberian orchestra would record their debut Christmas album and become a world wide sensation. Savatage eventually became absorbed by Trans-siberian orchestra and hasn't been heard from since 2001. I consider my self lucky that I got to see them live, and meet them, before they made the transition.

Queensryche's "Promised Land" sold a fraction of what "Empire" did 4 years earlier. In my view, it's the last Queensryche disc that sounds like Queensryche. In 1997 they recorded their first alternative rock disc and in 1999 they gave us their first genuine grunge CD, "Q2k". Fates Warning's "Inside Out" proved to be their last (so far) disc recorded as 2 lead guitar quintet. Musically, this disc is hit and miss. Hits are "Island In the Stream", "Monument", "Pale Fire", "Inward Bound","Outside Looking In", and the weird ballad "Afterglow". The rest isn't bad but, compared to their earlier work mostly forgettable. I really do miss the old Queensryche and Fates Warning!

Dream Theater's "Awake" is my favorite of these 4 discs and also, but alas, DT was also "in transition". Keyboard player Kevin Moore recorded the disc with the band but left shortly thereafter. I know Jordan Rudess is the definitive keyboard player for DT, but Kevin Moore is still my favorite. I don't think DT has ever sounded as good as they did on they disc. Part of the reason was Kevin Moore's heavily distorted keyboard tone. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of classic Jon Lord. I remember buying and listening to this disc on its release day. I was working at National City Bank at the time and didn't quite have the resources to move out, which put a huge damper on my romantic life. Within 6 months, I got my first place on my own and was perfectly willing to work 2 jobs to pay the bills, buy CDs, and have a good, but frugal post college life. Things weren't perfect for me, but I was willing to work and be self reliant, a strategy that worked well ever since.