18 Comments to “Living the Blues”:

1. 1
   MacGregor says:

   Nice to see Nick Simper is still going strong. Well played sir all these years later. Cheers.

   November 18th, 2024 at 09:25
2. 2
   Uwe Hornung says:

   On order, danke.

   November 18th, 2024 at 20:23
3. 3
   John says:

   One of the guitar players is listed as Peter Parks, perhaps he’s the same fellow who played along side Nick Simper on the Warhorse album Red Sea:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK7pM6uNr4s&list=PLDypqxaQT7ViGscj6uP_RfDB-8BLOzE3F

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ei0vg92zA

   They were never gonna be another Deep Purple, but they were a pretty decent heavy rock outfit.

   Captain Beyond with Rod Evans were quite good as well.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIQWu5YbCAA

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP69eewZwl0&list=PLbHHE6cZMWeq65mEL_YJqb4hs__SWps3-&index=10

   November 19th, 2024 at 02:57
4. 4
   Uwe Hornung says:

   John, that IS Peter Parks, Nick (Simper) and I spoke about him only earlier this year at Nick’s gig with the Nasty Habits in Vienna. He and Peter have been the continuous guitar & bass team in an endless series of bands since the early 70s: Warhorse, Dynamite, Fandango, Flying Fox and the Good Old Boys.

   November 19th, 2024 at 16:24
5. 5
   Georgivs says:

   @3 Captain Beyond with Evans was good? Just good?

   It was bloody awesome, if you ask me. It was the evolution of the trend started by Iron Butterfly which used heavy elements to add more energy and depth to the music rather that let heaviness be the music. Unfortunately, that trend lost out to the nascent heavy metal approach, which required musicians to base their music on riffs rather than harmonies and play ever faster and heavier. Now a lot of people regard bands like Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and Captain Beyond as mere footnotes in the history of the heavy rock. I say they were great, truly great in their own right.

   November 20th, 2024 at 08:24
6. 6
   Uwe Hornung says:

   Captain Beyond were early US PROG. A bit strange and quaint, but definitely something and compositionally certainly stronger than Warhorse. Rod’s voice was a better fit for CB than it was for Mk I. Everyone ever with CB agrees how he was the optimal singer for them.

   In an evolutionary sense, I’d put Captain Beyond between proto-PROG like Iron Butterfly and later US PROG bands like, say, Kansas. Capricorn Records, a label dedicated to Southern Rock, didn’t really know what to do with CB, they didn’t fit the mold of a band from the South (Lee Dorman was in any case a Midwesterner and Rod was of course no Southerner either). Their second album with Rod had a real West Coast flair (think very early Journey before Steve Perry arrived) to add to the confusion/misalignment with their record company.

   I never saw them live, but I did see their guitarist ‘Rhino’ Reinhardt and their bassist Lee Dorman (both with Iron Butterfly at one time) together with original IB keyboardist Doug Ingle (and a drummer I don’t remember) tour in a later Iron Butterfly incarnation in the late 70s in Germany. It was a good gig but by then IB’s music sounded dated and Rhino’s newer compositions like AOR.

   November 20th, 2024 at 13:28
7. 7
   DeeperPurps says:

   @6, I saw Iron Butterfly too about the same time….it was either very late 1978 or early 1979 when they were touring western Canada. I have tried to find documentation about those concerts / that particular tour, but no luck so far. Am glad you have been able to confirm that it was Rhino on guitar with Dornan and Ingle during that same period.

   November 21st, 2024 at 02:54
8. 8
   Uwe Hornung says:

   Dig into your feeble memory, Auntie, our lives are obviously intertwined: Did you see TWO BASSISTS that night, one Lee Dorman playing the vintage Iron Butterfly stuff and the other ex-Boxer (the band) Keith Ellis

   https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2014/116/128633285_1398638247.jpg?size=photos250

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ellis_(musician)

   playing and singing with Rhino the newer AOR stuff?

   Listen to this here from May 1978:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjIYC2HigDE

   You can clearly hear Doug Ingle singing the older stuff in his baritone, but there is also someone making announcements with a Brit accent (the way he says “dance”) and that is likely Keith Ellis (who would also play rhythm guitar when Lee Dorman was playing bass on the older songs).

   Here’s also an interview snippet from that reunion period:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caWoyYqXQmA

   I actually saw Keith Ellis the night he died. Iron Butterfly played a club (Goldene Krone) in Darmstadt (a mid-size city near Frankfurt) in December 1978 when I was there and he overdosed after the gig – it was in the papers the next day “British rock musician dies on tour”. Keith was only 32 when he left us, but at the gig – for all his obvious rapport with Rhino – he had looked a lot older and very road-worn. At this point the two were obviously trying to get a band together and were quite upbeat about it as they presented their new songs (which sounded nothing like Iron Butterfly – or Captain Beyond for that matter) at the gig.

   This has probably been posted here before, but given the scarcity of Rod Evans vids post his Purple-split it’s worth putting it up again: Captain Beyond with Rod (sporting much longer hair than he ever had with Mk I), Rhino, Lee Dorman and Bobby Caldwell (= the original CB line-up) live in 1972.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wW61fw7Hd0

   It was an unusual music alright, somewhat defying common categorization. I can understand how Capricorn Records were baffled at what to do with it. That said, somewhere in Pasadena, California, two Dutch immigrant brothers and their blond Jewish singer were listening intently …

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv1OcoZz5fk

   Drummer Bobby Caldwell as the only surviving member still musically active (unlike Rod, wherever he is) was still at it a few years ago and they had someone who sang uncannily like Rod!

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp0aj4fQX8A

   November 21st, 2024 at 11:54
9. 9
   DeeperPurps says:

   Uwe @ 8….I have been racking my brain trying to recall exactly when I saw IB and have been trawling through the internet using a plethora of search terms to try to nail down exactly when they came through western Canada. Oddly, there is nothing mentioned anywhere about the dates the group did in Canada in ’78 (no tour posters, tickets, newspaper reviews, social media recollections, etc); but piecing the assorted jumbles of my life puzzle together back in that time, I strongly believe it was circa October, maybe November 1978 when I saw them with one of my friends.

   I recall that Rhino had a fox tail hanging from the guitar strap or on his belt. And I remember at one point Rhino had a confrontation with a heckler in the audience. I seem to recall that the band had not been going down all that well with the crowd that night. I can’t say for sure who the other band members were that night – I didn’t know the band all that well back in those days. All I knew about them was Inna-Gadda-Davida and recognized it when it was performed. Apart from that, it seems the memory of Iron Butterfly having floated through British Columbia is lost in the mists of time.

   November 21st, 2024 at 17:11
10. 10
    Uwe Hornung says:

    Oh, so you basically saw them a month ahead of me, that fits. And I remember that the newer songs written by Rhino and Keith Ellis which followed the late 70s/early 80s AOR script, didn’t go down so well in Darmstadt either (there had been no prior vinyl release of the new material, that was scheduled for the future, and there were a lot of old guard fans there who basically just wanted to hear material from the first two IB albums which by then were a decade old). I however liked the newer, more streamlined material which sounded a bit like Jefferson Starship meets Foreigner.

    Wikipedia writes this which seems to indicate that the Canuck gigs were perhaps warm-ups (the German tour was sizable with 11 dates, IB still had quite a following there, the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album had been a consistent seller for many years, it was Atlantic Records’ most successful record in Deutschland in those years, ahead of anything Led Zep had released there):

    “In the late fall of 1978, a German promoter made an offer for the band to tour. The Metamorphosis lineup (Ingle, Bushy, Dorman, Pinera and Rhino) made preparations, but just before they were to depart for Germany, Dorman’s father took ill and another bassist, Keith Ellis (formerly of Boxer), was brought in to cover for Dorman in case he had to suddenly return to the US. During the tour, Ellis died in Darmstadt, Germany on December 12, 1978.”

    The Canadian warm-up gigs would have especially made sense as Doug Ingle was perhaps a bit rusty, having left the music business for more than four years prior to his return to IB:

    “Between 1974 and 1978, Ingle managed a recreational vehicle park in the Los Angeles National Forest. He spent time painting houses in Oregon, Washington and California.”

    (Wiki, Doug Ingle entry)

    I also found this here which mentions two gigs in June 1978 in Montreal, so it’s not like they weren’t in Canada at all that year:

    https://www.tourdatesearch.com/tourdates/artist/43/iron-butterfly?p=16

    Also a gig in Connecticut which is not too far away – the US of A is after all nothing but “ONE NATION UNDER CANADA” as the Pledge of Allegiance distinctly says as I believe to remember … 😎

    November 22nd, 2024 at 01:01
11. 11
    Skippy O'Nasica says:

    @5 Georgivs, agree that Captain Beyond were awesome! At the least the first album.

    Among my fave Purple-related acts, along with RJD-era Rainbow and 80s peak-era Whitesnake.

    “Sufficiently Breathless”, though very good, suffers from the absence of Bobby Caldwell. Whose precision, inimitable tone and incredible DRIVE are sorely missed. Bootleg-quality live versions of songs from the second LP, made after he rejoined the band, give us a taste of what the record might have sounded like with him on board.

    Also, strangely, there are moments on the second album when Rod’s usually smooth vocals devolve into bellowing. From the between-song patter on the live records, it seems that a lot of dope was being smoked in those days. Which may have begun to take a toll on his voice.

    @8 Uwe – always nice to see footage of Captain Beyond playing live.

    One notes that Rod’s pitch is pretty good. Perhaps because, sometime between his Deep Purple MKI days and 1972, he or the crew had figured out that the best place for his on-stage monitor was between him and the excessively loud guitarist.

    From early 70s photos, it seems that Purple’s crew never arrived at this solution. After some at-times pitchy 1969 live performances, Ian Gillan appears to have arrived at a different workaround for Blackmore’s inordinate volume: frequently covering his left ear with one hand.

    November 22nd, 2024 at 04:19
12. 12
    DeeperPurps says:

    Uwe @10, yes it all seems to fit….I am quite sure it would have been in the range of mid-October to mid-November of 1978 that IB came to town. I have continued to search through the internet for any indication of tour dates in British Columbia / Alberta in that time frame, but records are very scarce. I might be able to obtain access to a couple of community newspaper archives for those years, but that will take some time. I am sure there will be concert ads in them indicating the exact date(s), and maybe even a concert review. I’ll do some more digging and will let you know if I am able to find more info on it.

    November 23rd, 2024 at 03:39
13. 13
    Uwe Hornung says:

    Skippy, maybe Rod‘s pitching problem in Mk I (as claimed by his band mates) was in a reality a range issue? Rod was a baritone and it is more difficult to cut through as a baritone in harder music. Ian Gillan was a tenor with a seemingly endless passaggio range leading into the falsetto, his voice was made for harder music.

    Captain Beyond also left more space for Rod‘s voice. While they had harder parts, those often interchanged with more tranquil ones, their music was never as relentless as DP‘s.

    You‘re of course right: By the amount of available footage where Ian Gillan is holding his ear shut, he very often didn‘t hear himself properly in the early years of Mk II.

    November 23rd, 2024 at 14:13
14. 14
    Skippy O'Nasica says:

    @13 Uwe – doesn’t the MKI material sound like it is comfortably within Rod’s range? His pitching problems “during the louder passages”, as Jon Lord said, seem to be a result of Blackmore’s excessive volume.

    At least from the evidence of the Inglewood concert recording. On “Help” and “Hey Joe” he sounds relaxed and in control. Though slightly hoarse by the last number. Comfortable enough to improvise and play around with the phrasing, as he was wont to do during BBC recordings as well.

    Conversely, during numbers like “Kentucky Woman” and “River Deep Mountain High” where RB really cranks it, he can be heard struggling to find his note.

    One seems to recall Nick saying that by the final US tour of April-May 1969, a compounding factor was Rod’s decreasing interest in the group, leading to to less-enthusiastic performances. And that as a result he, Nick, would not have been averse to a change of vocalist.

    It would still be interesting to hear the surviving, but unreleased, show from that tour. Not least because that was supposedly the one during which Jon came up with the idea of playing his keyboard through a Marshall.

    November 24th, 2024 at 23:53
15. 15
    Uwe Hornung says:

    I dunno, but Rod never really sounded exciting or sexually charged when singing to me. He had a pleasant enough voice, but it was a crooner‘s not a rock vocalist‘s voice. It was neither sleazy nor androgynous. He won his audition with DP on the strength og singing an impromptu a capella version of Leonard Bernstein‘s Tonight, that kinda says it all, not that there is anything wrong with West Side Story, a great piece of work.

    November 25th, 2024 at 12:04
16. 16
    Svante Axbacke says:

    He never sounded like that when singing to the rest of us either.

    November 25th, 2024 at 20:30
17. 17
    Uwe Hornung says:

    🤣 Right!

    Well, not quite. I really liked him with Captain Beyond. That band was so weird and idiosyncratic in sound that anything and nothing fitted, including Rod’s baritone voice. He co-created an atmosphere there.

    Willy Daffern aka Willie Dee (when he was with Gary Moore’s G-Force) had a higher-pitched voice more attuned to American hard rock (I could have easily imagined him singing with late 70s Ted Nugent or Molly Hatchet and that is not meant as a knock), but the mystique in sound wasn’t quite there:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x89UBamTAS0&list=PLzGotn8LeP0fbIgdea5uSeRkYsAzNb1Qv&index=2

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gbdgBrh2Cs&list=PLzGotn8LeP0fbIgdea5uSeRkYsAzNb1Qv&index=4

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voQ1yUyj13A&list=PLzGotn8LeP0fbIgdea5uSeRkYsAzNb1Qv&index=1

    That said, Captain Beyond’s third and final (also first and last without Rod) album is anything but bad. Thinking about it, the music bears parallels to Mother’s Army, the Appice/Daisley/Turner/Watson studio project, a bit thinking man’s hard rock with a touch of prog though the commonality is likely coincidental. Willy Daffern can even sound a bit like Joe Lynn Turner in places and has a similar melodic sense:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyTCh2pgzxA&list=PLzGotn8LeP0fbIgdea5uSeRkYsAzNb1Qv&index=8

    November 26th, 2024 at 05:20
18. 18
    Uwe Hornung says:

    It came yesterday, just giving it the second spin.

    Blues records by middle-aged & (very much) beyond musos are a dime a dozen, but this album is pleasant (not: spectacular) in a good way, sort of like the Bill Wyman solo albums of the recent decades. It’s an example of finely aged Brit Invasion Blues. The production is sympathetic to the music, neither glossy nor intentionally low-fi to ape a vintage sound.

    Let’s get the trainspotter stuff out of the way first: Nick is on all eleven songs, his eternal buddy Peter Parks on ten, so you hear that reliable tandem of Warhorse, Dynamite, Fandango, Flying Fox & Good Old Boys pedigree nearly all the time.

    Most songs are sung by either one of two ladies Alice Armstrong (who reminds me of Zephyr’s Candy Givens/Janis Joplin in places) and Emma Wilson who are modern Blues artists in their own right.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16smALnAsc

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMT1M3vd6wY

    Both do a great job.

    I’m not really the guy to be able to judge how good a sax player is, but Terry sounds very tasteful, melodic and even pastoral/lyrical to me. He also resisted temptation to be all over the album just because he was the one to pay for it. He plays the darker sounding tenor sax, not the more popular higher-pitched alto sax (or God forbid – Kenny G! – soprano sax),

    https://www.yamaha.com/en/musical_instrument_guide/common/images/saxophone/structure_p02_01.jpg

    so if alto-sax gets on your nerves quickly or reminds you too much of late 80ies/90ies style Andrew Blake elegant porn flick soundtracks,

    – 😔 No, I will absolutely not link to an Andrew Blake video here, with Ian Gillan always raving about the high percentage of teenage fans still showing up at DP gigs today, there might be minors watching! –

    then Terry’s tenor sax playing will be pleasantly non-squeaky for you.

    Finally, Nick is today (and has been for a while) a much sparser player than he was with Mk I or Warhorse, but that doesn’t mean his playing lacks a nice bluesy feel and that he isn’t good for the occasional overt “Simperism” when the mood strikes him.

    The various guitar solos are pretty wild and hefty in places (no one is obsessed with getting every note rhythmically just right or avoiding bum notes under all circumstances) which gives the recording an exuberant “sweaty blues club” live quality.

    So if (largely) 12-bar blues doesn’t automatically bore you to tears, feel free!

    This is one of the strongest numbers, sung by by Alice Armstrong and I’m extremely reminded of Zephyr’s Candy Givens:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQAIvUpdx0

    Most people here will probably know this song

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPyTl1hc6pw

    – in a slower version – from Ten Years After (or in this vid ‘Later’):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdPicAzRPYc

    Some rhythm going on on the record too:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEPe9RXEoH0&t=48s

    December 1st, 2024 at 01:44

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