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Jon Lord
Tommy Vance: You were really at the beginning of the whole concept of Deep Purple. To the best of my recollection having cribbed all the books about it, it was a group that was put together, initially, to surround an ex-Searchers member. Which was a whole different concept and a whole different thing, 'cos it never happened that way at all, did it?
Jon Lord: No. It was very weird. What actually happened was... Chris Curtis was the guy, he was a drummer and sort of backing singer of the Searchers, and he had this very off the wall idea for the time. He was a very sixties man. The band should be called Roundabout and therefore there should be a nucleus of himself, Ritchie Blackmore, and me, and that that should be the center of the roundabout and other musicians could jump on and off the roundabout as they chose. A lovely, psychedelic sort of idea. (342k) And he therefore said: 'I know this great guitarist and he's living in Hamburg practising. So I'll put you together with him'. And that was Ritchie, so he [Chris Curtis] was responsible for introducing me to Ritchie. And Ritchie and I talked long and hard through the various nights in the winter of '67-'68. And then Chris just disappeared! He went and became a tax expert in Liverpool or something and worked for the Inland Revenue! And you very well know that the Inland Revenue and rock music don't go terribly well together. I don't know how he managed that! (149k)
So he left me and Ritchie in the spring of '68 with an embryo idea and nothing to hang it on. And then the guy that was supposed to be the money man for this idea of Roundabout called me up or sent me a telegram or something saying: 'Are you still interested in forming a band, because I'd still like to be involved in the music industry?' He made frocks for a living this gentleman, so you can see he was highly qualified to become a rock'n'roll manager. I think he was terribly surprised by what he got. I think he wanted something like Traffic, but he got this kind of... (281k)
TV: Two musicians and no singer!
JL: Absolutely nothing at all! But when we finally got it all together, what he got was a band that spent in actual fact over a year searching for an identity. Ritchie and I had vague ideas of what we wanted to be, and if you listen to the first three Purple albums you'll hear -- there's a famous play called 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' by Pirandello [Luigi, 1867-1936] -- well this was five musicians in search of an identity. We didn't really know what the band should be.
TV: But the identity that you initially got was a real Pop Band, it wasn't a heavy band at all.
TV: Because it was a cover of an American song anyway...
JL: Yes. A Joe South song, and the version we knew was by a guy called Billy Joe Royal, I think. (198k) And we heard it in a club somewhere and we thought: 'That's good!', so we bought the record and worked up our version of it. The strange thing about our version was that it was 4 and a 1/2 minutes long and it ended with a 1 and a 1/2-minute organ solo, and it sold over a million in the States! Which in '68 was very unusual.
TV: Were you essentially a Pop Band at that time. Or were you heavier live?
JL: Much louder than the records would lead you to suppose. Which is why we spent two years, really... almost, in America, in the wilderness. Our record company disappeared from underneath us -- they went bankrupt. They were not just a record company, they contracted to make films and such. But Warner Brothers had done something, like a contract with this company to produce films for them. And, in order to get back that contract, Warners had to buy this company, because they didn't want this contract to make films going to just anybody. So they bought the contract back, and in buying Tetragramatron, they found that they'd bought an English rock band called Deep Purple.
I well remember them phoning our management in England, and saying: 'What are you?' And this is when the first success in England was just happening with 'Deep Purple In Rock', our first real taste of getting anywhere close in England. And they suddenly realized that they'd got a band that was having a hit in England so they pulled all the stops and flew us over to America to have discussions about... you know those terrible sort of intense discussions that American record companies tend to have with their artists, you know: 'How do you conceptualize this Jon?' 'Sorry?', you know. (198k)
God bless them, they were lovely, they were very kind to us through those early years in America with Warner Brothers, they were extremely nice to us. But we, as I said, had two years in the wilderness. We were playing 500-seater clubs in America. And indeed our first gig in America was opening for Cream on their farewell tour...
TV: You were thrown off that tour though, weren't you?
JL: Yes! Because we went down very well...
TV: But also, I believe, the stated reason is that you were thrown off that tour because Ritchie Blackmore used to play little bits of 'God Save the Queen' or various other bits and pieces and funny other tunes in his long guitar solos, that Cream thought was not giving credence to the music as it should have been given. In other word he was taking the mickey.
TV: How much classical music do you listen to now because you are a classically trained man. You are probably the most trained person in the band, academically.
JL: Yeah, it doesn't actually make much more than a ha'p'orth of difference really. Except that I've got a few things to fall back on, that perhaps some of the other members of the band haven't. Ritchie also, has made himself very much aware of the traditions, particularly Bach -- he's crazy for Johann Sebastian. (198k) Mmm... Sorry, what was the question!?
TV: Do you still listen to classical music?
JL: Yes of course I do, yeah. I find it's a kind of a solve... it's a kind of a saviour, particularly on the road. If I've got back from the gig to the hotel and I'm buzzing, you know, just coming off stage in front of a lot of excited people. There's no real way I can get back into the hotel room and put 'Highway Star' onto my little portable stereo. It's got to be something that's going to help to calm me down. I can play, for my own enjoyment and the enjoyment of my friends, but I wouldn't dare to go anywhere near the stage at the Albert Hall with a solo piano. That is not the kind of 'classical' musician I am... (215k)
TV: One thing that has surprised me is, looking down the list of writing credits, your actual writing involvement is, frankly, minimal. And I just wonder why you haven't had such a hand in writing this material...
JL: I'll give a very quick and very honest answer. I got to Vermont with... I brought, you know, bits and pieces. Ragtag and bobtail stuff that I'd had trundling around the back corridors of my head, things that I thought might be useful. Ritchie arrived, bursting at the seams with fabulous stuff! I just threw what I had away, Tommy! I mean, I'm not a proud man on that level, (281k) I'm a proud man about what I play, but if I know that someone has written a better track than me, a better song idea than me, then I'd rather see that on the album than I lay an excuse for a track just to get me some money for publishing. And that's not what it's all about. You see I believe very strongly that Blackmore is the little microchip that when you plug it into the computer that is called Deep Purple it makes it work. It's an amalgam of the five people, but if it didn't have Ritchie in it, it wouldn't be Deep Purple. That's why I still think that the real Deep Purple stopped when Ritchie left. (182k)
JL: I wouldn't dare to fight that statement. (116k)
[ Jon Lord | Ritchie Blackmore | Roger Glover ]
[ Ian Paice | Ian Gillan ]
Transcription, sound clips and HTML by Benjamin Weaver