40 Year Itch: A Big, Groovy Holiday Picnic

    On April 6, 1974 nearly 250,000 fans, paying between $10 band $15, jammed the Ontario Motor Speedway to see Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Black Oak Arkansas, Seals and Crofts,  The Eagles, Earth Wind and Fire and Rare Earth. Don Imus emcee'd the show which actually began 15 minutes early and stayed on schedule.

ABC Television co-sponsored the event while LA radio stations simulcast the concerts. 

Cal Jam grossed $2 million and, despite massive traffic tie-ups ( 700 cars were towed away after all 42,000 parking spaces had been filled), it was heralded as a huge success. 

  There were only 25 arrests.The smell of marijuana hung in the air, but that seemed to add to the peaceful vibe. Said one concertgoer who hiked 4 miles to find his spot: "It's like a big, groovy holiday picnic." 

  50 foot speakers helped provide the most powerful concert sound system ever assembled. Good news especially for Deep Purple, then the loudest band in the world. 

     This is the show that introduced Deep Purple's new members to the world: the still chubby vocalist David Coverdale and bassist and screaming vocalist Glenn Hughes. Richie Blackmore, apparently not used to having a camera in his face when he solo'd, attacked a cameraman and then set his amp on fire.

Emerson Lake and Palmer finished the night with Keith Emerson spinning end over end 50 feet above the ground in his piano contraption.

40 Year Itch : Cinderella Coverdale

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    Despite outselling every other act in the US in 1973 ( at nearly 15 million albums), tour-weary Deep Purple could not stay together. It's the typical story of a clash of personalities that came down to either bassist Roger Glover and vocalist Ian Gilliam ( and their prog pop sensibilities)  leave Deep Purple or founding guitarist Ritchie Blackmore would go. The band chose Blackmore. 

Glenn Hughes, 1974

    Glover was replaced by Glenn Hughes of Trapeze ( despite rumors that Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott had the job). Hughes had one condition: that he become the lead vocalist of the band. It was an interesting idea but not one the other members of the band liked. They reached a compromise. Hughes would sing lead on some songs. 

   Finding the lead vocalist  was a tougher task. Blackmore tried to convince Paul Rodgers of Free to join the band but Rodgers was already recording demos with ex-Mott guitarist Mick Ralphs. Together, with Simon Kirke of Free and drummer Boz Burrell, they'd form Bad Company and hit the top of the charts with both their debut album and the single "Can't Get Enough".

David Coverdale, 1974

  On the verge of splitting up, Deep Purple ran an ad in the music trades. Cassettes began pouring in. Among them was one from future Whitesnake David Coverdale, whose band, The Government, had once opened for Deep Purple. He had the right feeling for Purple but when he walked into the studio to meet the band, he was an overweight, garishly dressed bundle of nerves. Still, the glass slipper fit and Coverdale went to Montreaux to work on the new album as a member of  Deep Purple Mark III .

 The result is Burn, only their second album aside from Machine Head to crack the US Top 10. Featuring the riff-heavy title track, Burn ventures into the hard rocking funky sounds of Led Zeppelin's "Trampled Underfoot", especially on Coverdale's "Sail Away". There are several moments on the album when Coverdale sounds just like Paul Rodgers. And many more moments when Deep Purple sounds like a boogie band.

  Of Burn, compared to previous Deep Purple albums, keyboardist  Jon Lord is quoted in Smoke On the Water: The Deep Purple Story as saying

    The basic difference is the use of the vocals. There is a different vocal approach. It's much freer and looser, a progression that's noticeable to us, though I don't know if it is for the audience. Also, no casino burned down during the recording.  

40 Year Itch: Top 20 Albums August 4, 1973

1. Chicago VI

2. Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

3. Carpenters Now And Then

4. George Harrison Living in the Material World

5. Seals and Crofts : Diamond Girl

6. Carole King Fantasy

7. Paul Simon There Goes Rhymin Simon

8 Deep Purple Machine Head

9 Sly and the Family Stone Fresh

10 Leon Russell Leon Live

11 Deep Purple Made In Japan

12 Jethro Tull A Passion Play

13 Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy

14 Al Green Call Me

15 Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin Love Devotion and Surrender

16 Curtis Mayfield Back to the World

17 John Denver Farewell Andromeda

18 Doobie Brothers The Captain and Me

19 Paul McCartney and Wings Red Rose Speedway

20 Diana Ross Touch Me in the Morning

Top 3 Single Debuts

1. Paul Simon "Loves Me Like a Rock" (US#2)

2. Elton John "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" (US#7)

3. Cher "Half Breed" (US#1) 

40 Year Itch: Just A Sea Of Air

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After singing on the first three Deep Purple albums, including the hits "Hush" and "Kentucky Woman", Rod Evans was dismissed from Deep Purple who went on to record heavier, more popular ( and more plodding)  albums. After recording a solo album he founded Captain Beyond with Edgar Winter Band drummer Bobby Caldwell and two former members of Iron Buttefly: bassist Lee Dorman and guitarist Larry "Rhino" Reinhardt. Reinhardt has played with future Allman Brothers Bandmates Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley and it was Duane Allman who convinced Capricorn Records to sign the band.

Captain Beyond performing "I Can't Feel Nothin'(Part One)", "As The Moon Speaks (To The Waves of The Sea)" and "I Can't Feel Nothin' (Part Two)"


Captain Beyond's debut, released in July of 1972, offers listeners thirty five minutes of hard rock at its most powerful and precise. Like The Moody Blues albums of the time, songs effortlessly merge into each other.

 In an interview with Classic Rock Revisited, the late "Rhino" Reinhardt ( He passed away in January) talks about the time changes in the lead off track "Dancing Madly Backwards":


“Dancing Madly Backwards” is basically a blues song if you play it in 4/4. I switched it around to 5/4. It is a twelve bar but it has an odd meter to it. I had this riff and Bobby came up with that beat and when we played it together, the song was born.

Captain Beyond is also a blueprint for all the hard rock bands that followed. Some of the apparent Captain Beyond rules I've copped from listening to the album:

1. Don't worry about the lyrics; just sing them like a man.
2. Mix up the meters.
3. Mix up the guitar hooks. No fewer than three a song.
4. Give the guitarist some room!

I don't listen to a lot of hard rock but I hear Screaming Trees in some tracks. Unfortunately Capricorn Records heard a band that could boogie like label mates The Allman Brothers. But as "Rhino" said, that's not what Captain Beyond wanted to do:

We had a big problem with the record company. We put out the first album and they were calling us a ‘Super Group.’ It was just a term being thrown around. We were like “What Super Group? What are they talking about?” After the Allman’s came out with the Fillmore Phil (Walden) came to us and said, “I want you guys to start playing that kind of music.” A year before he thought we were the best thing since sliced bread and we were one of the best things that he had ever heard. I said, “That is not what Captain Beyond is all about. We can’t change from our first album to a second album where we sound just like the Allman Brothers. You’ve already got one of those.” But that is what happened; southern rock was taking over. We had a running battle with Capricorn. We have heard from people who worked at Capricorn over the years that Phil was under reporting how many albums we were actually selling so he could make it look like we were not doing anything, thus, he wouldn’t have to spend any money to pay us. We never even got the gold album that we should have. A lot of things went wrong. After the second album, it was over.


Too bad. But Captain Beyond left us with at least one classic album. Perhaps the best hard rock album of 1972.

Captain Beyond performs "Dancing Madly (On A Sea Of Air), "Armworth" and "Myopic Void"

Deep Cuts: Pictures of Home

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For all those hours we've spent trying to dissect lyrics and admiring musicality, sometimes we just want our music to be big and stupid. With Machine Head ( released March 31, 1972), Deep Purple is all riffs, banal lyrics and instruments turned up to 11. Which is about the age you need to let yourself feel to really enjoy it.





The album kicks off with "Highway Star" which , to me at least, signifies their ambition to finally conquer the United States. After all nobody in the UK often uses the word "highway". Like T-Rex's "Jeepster" and Alice Cooper's "Under My Wheels",the rumbling "Highway Star" interweaves cars and girls to the degree they might as well be the same thing: "Nobody gonna take my car/I'm gonna race it to the ground/Nobody gonna beat my car/It's gonna break the speed of sound" Then about two minutes in, keyboardist Jon Lord plays a little Bach-esque solo ( picture Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap playing his lovely "Mach" number on piano, "Lick My Love Pump").

This monster album also contains "Smoke On The Water" ( Number 4 on Total Guitar Magazine's Greatest Guitar Riffs Ever), the hilarious sci-fi themed "Space Truckin"(We had a lot of luck on Venus/We always have a ball on Mars) and , surprisingly the first single, "Never Before", for which Deep Purple made a promo video.




But my deep cut choice is Track 3 , the driving "Pictures Of Home". Recording in Switzerland, Ian Gillian was apparently not just homesick ( and recovering from hepatitis) but feeling paranoid when he wrote the lyrics."I'm alone here/ With emptiness, eagles and snow/ Unfriendliness chilling my body/And whispering pictures of home". As if to mirror Gilllian's unease, Lord, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore  and even bassist Roger Glover all play unsettling solos.




Machine Head reached number 1 in the United Kingdom and stayed in the top 40 for 20 weeks. It reached number 7 in the United States, remaining on the Billboard 200 for 118 weeks. Heavy metal fans can all thank Deep Purple for this big, loud and dumb album. A true classic!

40 Year Anniversary of Frank Zappa's Worst Week ...Ever

DECEMBER 4, 1971 MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND - In the middle of Don Preston's synthesizer solo on "King Kong", someone in the Montreux Casino audience decided to shoot off a flare gun into the rattan covered ceiling. And so Frank Zappa's worst week began.
Frank told the story like this:

There were between twenty-five hundred and three thousand kids packed into the room- well over capacity. Since more kids were outside, trying to get in, the organizers had cleverly chained the doors shut. When the fire began, the audience was left with two ways out: through the front door, which was pretty small, or through a plate-glass window off to the side of the stage.

I made an announcement- something like: "Please be calm. We have to leave here. There is a fire and why don't we get out?" You'd be surprised how well people who speak only French can understand you when its a matter of life and death. They began filing out through the front door.

As the room was filling with smoke, one of our roadies took an equipment case and smashed the big window. The crew then began helping people to escape through it into some kind of garden place below. The band escaped through an underground tunnel that led from behind the stage through the parking garage.

A few minutes later the heating system in the building exploded, and Some people were blown through the window. Fortunately, nobody was killed and there were only a few minor injuries- however, the entire building, about thirteen million dollars' worth, burned to the ground, and we lost all our equipment.

From across Lake Geneva, members of Deep Purple watched the fire. Together they wrote their most famous song,"Smoke On the Water".




They burned down the gambling house/ 

It died with an awful sound/

Funky Claude (Nobs--director of the Montreux Jazz Fest) was running in and out/

pulling kids out the ground

On the live album version of "Smoke on the Water", Deep Purple's Ian Gillan yells "Break a leg, Frank". It's not really that funny a line.

DECEMBER 10, 1971 LONDON, ENGLAND - That's because six days later, a deranged member of London's Rainbow Theatre audience attacked Zappa on stage. In the melee, Zappa fell ( or was pushed) off the stage:

"The band thought I was dead." Zappa wrote  in The Real Frank Zappa Book. "I had fallen fifteen feet down into a concrete-floored orchestra pit, my head was over on my shoulder and my neck was bent like it was broken. I had a gash in my chin, a hole in the back of my head, a broken rib and a fractured leg. One arm was paralyzed."

Howard Kaylan of Zappa vocalists Flo and Eddie writes about the night in his brilliant memoir Shell Shocked:

We had already taken our group bow and I was happily leaving the stage, feeling fulfilled and exonerated. As I reached the wings, I heard the audience suddenly stop applauding and gasp as one. There was a shocked silence in the Rainbow. I ran back to the stage, but I couldn't see anybody. Band and roadies were standing on the apron at the edge of the platform and gazing down into the darkness of the orchestra pit below. I ran over to see what the lack of commotion was all about. It sure didn't sound good.  

   There, at the bottom of the pit, lay Frank Zappa. He was unconscious and silent, his twisted body fallen below in the shape of some anatomical swastika. His arms and legs were bent at bizarre angles and I couldn't tell if he was breathing or not. Humans aren't supposed to bend like that. There was no reason to believe that Frank Zappa was still alive. 

This had been a very deliberate act. It seems that an audience member named Trevor Howell, who was very, very high indeed either a) didn't feel as if he had gotten his money's worth or b), more likely, was responding to his girlfriend articulating her crush on Frank at the end of the concert. For whatever reason, this maniac jumped onto the stage just as Frank, his back to the audience, was placing his guitar in its stand. He pushed Frank in such a way that he first hit his head on the wall of the orchestra pit before falling to its bottom. We all thought Frank was dead.
Howell tried to get away, but the audience restrained him and brought him to the front of the theater. Here, official accounts vary. But I was there, and I know. Before Howell was delivered to the local authorities, Herb Cohen personally beat the shit out of him. Newspaper stories through out the years have attributed this beating to angry roadies, but in fact, it was Cousin Herb who took control of an out-of-control situation. We were ushered out of the theater and back to the hotel before anyone with authority could tell us anything. Sure, why tell the band anyway?"-

As a result the rest of the Winter European tour was cancelled. Zappa spent most of 1972 in a wheelchair and endured chronic back pain for the rest of his life. The fall also crushed Zappa's larynx which is how he came to acquire that mysterious deep singing voice. The next several albums, Waka Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo,  would feature a jazz fusion sound but almost no vocals at all.

Here's Zappa and the band performing at The Roxy in 1973