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How In Rock was made
Louder Sound (née Classic Rock) is celebrating the 50th anniversary of In Rock by reprinting in fresh electrons a feature that first appeared in issue 83 of the magazine on the occasion of the album’s 35th.
Heavy rock, hard rock, pomp rock, space rock, heavy metal – they’re all genres that today’s average music fan would regard as part of the vocabulary of everyday life. There’s no getting away from rock in all its forms – even if you wanted to.
Acts as disparate as, say, Coldplay, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Audioslave all fall under the mantle of rock, a term we associate mostly with big guitar riffs, powerful vocals – and a broad array of (sometimes questionable) sartorial styles and hairdos. Everybody knows what ‘rock’ means. But it wasn’t always so.
More than a third of a century ago the death of the 60s had landed the world and its groupie with a colossal cultural hangover. The decade of free love, peaceful protest and sticking flowers in soldiers’ guns was over, and the grim 70s – oil shortages, over-generous sideburns, Margaret Thatcher, punk – was just getting into its stride.
The Beatles had just waved farewell to the world after arguing themselves into dissolution. Jimi Hendrix, the man thought most likely to bring guitar music to the masses, had recently checked out; The Doors’ Jim Morrison, the lizard king, had mere months to live. Cream and Blind Faith had been and gone in a multimillion-selling flash. Loud music from blokes with generous facial hair and a fondness for lots of drugs and/or girls (usually both) was an endangered species.
Luckily, however, three British – yes, British, not American – groups weren’t about to take this lying down…
Continue reading on Louder Sound.
Thanks to Gary Poronovich for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
A good article on a classic album, one of the greatest rock albums & a huge influence on me personally. I enjoyed reading it & reminiscing also, as we do as we grow older & wiser perhaps? Well older at least, he, he. Cheers.
June 4th, 2020 at 21:50du vrai deep purple pas celui de maintenant qui n’en a que le nom mais pas le niveau musical….
June 5th, 2020 at 06:24Greatest hard rock album ever made, along with Rainbow’s Rising album.
June 5th, 2020 at 12:38It needs a decent remix/remaster. It’s criminal that this has not been taken care of yet. Where is Steve Wilson when you need him?
June 5th, 2020 at 16:44“Ritchie was phenomenal in what he was doing in the late 60s and early 70s.
June 8th, 2020 at 18:56He did things that you wouldn’t even think of.
He was a magnetic, dynamic writer. I don’t think he could have done it in a vacuum by himself, it did require the rest of us.
But I’ll certainly give him his due. He was the motivating character in the band.”
@ 4- That would depend of course on the master tapes being available & I don’t think Steve Wilson remixes anything he wasn’t influenced by in his youth. I could be wrong on that though, but I remember reading a similar comment from him years ago when he commenced early King Crimson albums. Mind you, I am not sure if he was ‘influenced’ by DP In Rock, he probably could have been, like so many of us! It would be grand though as In Rock does have that muddy sound to it. Would a remix & remaster improve on that? We can dream. Cheers.
June 8th, 2020 at 21:41Steve wilson did all the remixes on the Opeth albums and produced with Mikel Ackerfeld, and Mikel is very much influenced with Deep Purple and all the seventies bands.
June 17th, 2020 at 12:39