They’re a thankless, moody bunch those rock stars, aren’t they? Breaking up their amps and guitars when their mothers have worked their nails to the bone paying for them on the old HP month in and month out without so much as a word of thanks from any of them. As long as they’ve got enough pennies to spend down at the local salon come Friday evening for their weekly cut and blow they just don’t give a stuff about the consequences, do they? Take that Ritchie Blackmore. Nice boy, nice hair, nice finger-nails, ordinarily a very thoughtful lad, but get him with his mates and tell him and his lanky chums that they’re first band on stage that evening and you’d be hard pressed to get any sense out of him for a week. Smashing up guitars, turning over cameras. He lets himself down. He lets his mother down. And yes, he can bloody well stay down.
This week sees the release of ‘Deep Purple Live At The Californian Jam’ – an electrifying archive piece from 1974 catching Blackmore and the band at the peak of their popularity, when they were biggest selling album act in America and half-way through a tour that was to climax right here, headlining the Californian Jam Festival in front of a mosh-worthy crowd of 200,000 people.
Having recently replaced Ian Gillan and bass-player Roger Glover after prolonged internal disputes about musical direction, this is DVD features the second classic line-up of Deep Purple: Ritchie Blackmore, David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes, Jon Lord and Ian Paice (named after the famous cymbals of the same name, one can only assume). Only 12 months prior to this gig David Coverdale had been working in The Stride boutique in Redcar, in England’s North East, and his surprise is still palpable here as he storms through a set that includes perennial crowd-pleaser ‘Burn’, ‘Might Just Take Your Life’, ‘Lay Down, Stay Down’, ‘Mistreated’, ‘Smoke On The Water’, ‘You Fool No One’ and ‘Space Truckin’.
Although Blackmore’s crazy and ‘spontaneous’ outburst at the end of the set almost got the band banned from playing live in America again it’s a blistering climax to an enthusiastic show and is worth a place in everybody’s ‘100 Greatest Defining Rock Moments’ any day of the week. The accompanying commentary is worth an earful also.
The picture quality is sharp and the DVD comes with a number of audio options including 5.0 Surround Dolby Digital (or Dobly – the choice is yours) and 5.0 Surround DTS.
For fans and tantrum afficiados alike.