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Mesmeric on the audience
Roger Glover and Ian Paice appeared on the Consequences Uncut podcast talking to Greg Prato about the upcoming Machine Head remix. The interview itself starts at around 5’45” into the podcast and continues at 12’20” after a commercial break.
Listen from the source if our embedding does not work for whatever reason.
Below are a few selected quotes from the interview, courtesy of consequence.net.
RG:
A lot of people want to know what was our mindset at the time. Did we think we’d written the ultimate rock album?’ We just made an album. You can only really look at it from the point of view of time. And you look back at it and you go, ‘Well, yes it was.’ But at the time, it was just another album. We didn’t know what was ahead.
IP (regarding Smoke):
I thought we did two takes, but it might have only been one complete take. I remember the main thing about that – because it was so long ago and it was such a short period of time – was the road managers keeping the police out, because we were making so much noise in this sleepy little Swiss town. They’d come to shut us down. But I really don’t remember much about the riff before Montreux, I really don’t.
RG (regarding the role of Martin Birch):
What he brought to the band became really apparent when we were doing Deep Purple in Rock. We’d worked in a few different studios with a few different sound engineers, and it wasn’t until we met Martin that we felt we’d found the right guy. And we said right then, ‘Martin is going to be our engineer from now on.’ Because he was very good. ‘Production’ is a very odd word, because it’s all part of the process. And although Martin at that time was the sound engineer – and of course he did become a producer later on – in a way, he was becoming that.
IP (regarding Smoke):
Well, it was too long. It was five and half minutes or something like that – the original album version. It took some guy at Warner Bros. to say, ‘It’s a great song, but we can’t get radio play.’ And without consulting anybody, he just got it in the studio and edited it down to three minutes, sent it out to the radio stations, and they started playing it.
The more baggage you carry around with you and the longer you stay together, the more chances you have of personal differences becoming or seeming more important than they are. We were working so hard then, we didn’t really have time to think about anything else. We’d gig, gig, gig, gig, gig, a couple of days off, go in the studio, make a record, two days off, gig, gig, gig, gig, gig.
It was labor intensive. But you didn’t have time to think about what somebody else thought about the world, and if his opinion was different than yours. These are all little things. But over the course of a couple years, they can turn out to appear to be big things. They really aren’t, but you can’t go back. It’s a real sad thing – but once something is said it can’t be unsaid, and when something is done it can’t be undone.
Thanks to Yahoo for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Yo,
It’s funny to be only reading the replies / quotes, but there’s no doubting what the question was lol !
Always good to hear about Martin.
Enjoy the celebrations lads !
Peace !
March 15th, 2024 at 23:24work, work, work.making an album, out on the road again gig, gig, gig gig..No time to think….
March 16th, 2024 at 10:56you hear that quite a lot in interviews with the MK2 members… I just wonder if the other bands around at the same time..
LZ, BS, PF, UH Slade..and others had the same working load..cos I never hear anybody from those bands talking about or complain about the heavy work load at that time in the early 70:s… Or did Purple just work harder than anybody else?
Just wondering…
Cheers!!!
@ 2 – there certainly were other bands that were burnt out with that incessant touring of the USA at that early to mid 1970’s time. And they do talk about it plenty but I wouldn’t include Slade in amongst them as they didn’t break in the States at all. There were also plenty of other bands that you haven’t mentioned, but some of them appeared to have better management or didn’t allow themselves to be exploited as much or they were luck in that sense. Getting some time off was crucial for health & other reasons, however Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath & Deep Purple were three bands that paid the price big time. Not sure about Pink Floyd so much as they seemed to take it a little easier in certain aspects, but the Dark Side of the Moon success did also push them hard for a year or two. The hedonism & partying didn’t help at all with the heavier bands that you mentioned. Especially LZ, UH & BS. Cheers.
March 16th, 2024 at 21:34Yo,
Don’t forget ladies & gents, that from a managerial POV, bands in these times were difficult to manage because of politics, internal strife, future uncertainties, chemical infusion, creative stagnation & a number of other unforeseen complications…
So once you actually “had” a money-making-machine ( which is what it’s all about sadly ), you had to milk it thoroughly & quickly, before the milk went sour, & out-of-radio / public interest..Keeping a band busy at all times ensured the best “return for investment” for the investors, since you never knew how long you had before the aforementioned problems destroyed the investment.
The whole scene was evolving & growing back then, & now-days, seems to have destroyed those opportunities to exist for anyone & everyone.
Peace !
March 17th, 2024 at 06:31Purple toured considerably more than Led Zep throughout the 70ies. Zep concentrated on one market – the US – and played (except in the very early days) very large venues for maximum impact and audience sizes. Deep Purple could only pull crowds that size in the US by 1973/74. Before, to reach the same amount of people they had to perform more often due to smaller audience sizes. You could say that Zep were more economical and efficient in their approach.
Slade were saleswise a European phenomenon, true, but from 1975-77 (when their star began to wane in Europe due to their fans growing out of them – the fate of all teenybopper bands which tend to have a shelf life of three years + x before a new generation of teens wants new heroes) they did nothing else but incessantly tour the US,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqcpx2K2SVA
(Bassists playing lead riffs? Of course, at 10:30. Keyboard solos with Slade? Yup, at 17:33! Harmony guitar solos? Sure, at 18:40! Moody piano ballad intros? Yes sir, at 20:55. Slade winning over a laid-back, initially skeptic Californian crowd? Just watch at 46:15. By then their stage performance had matured quite a bit and been honed to maximum impact for Yank audiences.)
crisscrossing the nation, often in package bills as the band between headliner (Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, Kiss, Humble Pie) and opening act. They were booked regularly because they could work up an audience without having a roster of hit songs already too popular in the US which might endanger the headliner. But they could not translate two years of touring into increased radio play or hit singles though their late 1975 album “Nobody’s Fools” saw them Americanize their sound quite a bit and even ‘deglam’ their look – well, Dave Hill was still kinda persistent with it! 🤣 – as they realized that a ‘proper rock band’ was not supposed to do that in the US unless you were Kiss or Alice Cooper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lePrj_WrWgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFDdpH-TMBc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsSyt8nbOrM
Other 70ies big acts found tackling the US too daunting a task. Status Quo were by 1973/74 well-established in the UK, the European Continent, Japan and Aus/NZ, but couldn’t get arrested in the US. They made a few half-arsed attempts there, but one look at the map told them that they would have to play every shit hole for years to really gain a foothold in a heavily fragmented market where being huge in, say, Detroit, would not indicate you would mean anything in Indianapolis or Atlanta. Since they had already done grueling from the ground up touring for years to establish themselves in Europe on the live circuit, they did not want to repeat the exercise for the US market. Yes, the mighty Quo, that epitome of a working man’s band, were too lazy and saturated to give the US market a real go.
March 18th, 2024 at 00:03