Still ‘Highway’ Stars: Deep Purple Plays Jiffy Lube Live to Celebrate 50th Anniversary of ‘Smoke on the Water’

WTOP’s Jason Fraley Announces Deep Purple at Jiffy Lube Live (Part 1)

Forget the political colors of red and blue during our heated election campaign. This weekend, Virginia will be Deep Purple.

“The last 50 years (have been) one big, wonderful, amorphous hodgepodge of shows with beautiful people and beautiful places,” frontman Ian Gillan told WTOP. “The band is just starting to come together now. It’s a mix of old, familiar stuff, new stuff, stuff that hasn’t been played on the radio but the fans are very familiar with, and the usual 25 percent improvisation. Half the time, we don’t know what the hell is going on! It’s the normal, crazy chaos of Deep Purple energy.”

Born in Chiswick, England, in 1945, Gillan ironically was not in the original band when it formed in London for its first three albums, Shades of Deep Purple (1968), The Book of Taliesyn (1968) and Deep Purple (1969). He was busy living in West London and performing with his own band, Episode Six.

“My grandfather was an opera singer, a bass baritone, and my grandmother was a ballet teacher, so Tchaikovsky was everywhere in the house,” Gillan said. “My uncle was a jazz pianist, and I was a soprano in a church choir, so it was just music, music, music, until I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ which changed my life so much. Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, all these incredible musicians… they were a big part of my formative years.”

Gillan even sang the role of Jesus Christ in the original 1970 recording of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, prior to the 1971 Broadway musical and 1973 film.

“I got a call from Tim, and I went to see him and Andrew, and he said, ‘We’ve got this project. We’d like you to play Jesus,’” Gillan said. “He gave me a piece of paper with the lyrics to ‘Garden of Gethsemane,’ and Andrew was sitting at the piano, and Tim said, ‘Andrew’s going to play you a melody, and we’d like you to interpret it in your own way and improvise around the melody.’ Andrew looked over his shoulder and said, ‘Yeah, but not too much, huh?’”

He first performed with Deep Purple in 1969 in a London bar, joining the band during their “Mark II” phase.

“Deep Purple were at the top before I joined, I thought they had something magical about them,” Gillan said. “I had no idea I was going to be in a band, but I got the chance and we joined forces. I joined the band with Roger Glover, who was in Episode Six with me, and we spent four years as a songwriting team, so we joined not just as a singer and bass player but as a songwriting team, and that took Purple in a new, more challenging direction.”

Indeed, with Gillan at the helm, the band moved away from psychedelic and progressive rock in favour of a harder sound on the albums Deep Purple in Rock (1970) and Fireball (1971). In fact, during an infamous 1972 concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre, the band set a Guinness World Record for the loudest band in the world.

“Some guy got a decibel meter,” Gillan said. “We had just got a Jim Marshall PA that was full of high-end, so it picked up a screamingly loud sound, it was awful. It’s a reputation we’re not particularly proud of, but hey, that’s history, we’re the loudest in the world. Fortunately, things have changed with the sophistication of equipment these days. Power has replaced intense volume, so everything sounds powerful without being painful.”

Gillan’s third album, Machine Head (1972), became their most famous, featuring the aggressive anthem “Highway Star”, which was originally written as a joke on a tour bus to Brighton.

“We had some ‘dirt’ on board – that’s what we called the music journalists – and these guys were drinking our beer,” Gillan said. “One of the smarter members of the press said, ‘So how do you write a song?’ Ritchie (Blackmore) was sitting next to me with a guitar and (played a riff) and said, ‘Yeah.’ We were driving down the motorway, so I started singing some crap and everyone said, ‘That’s a nice tempo, let’s do it tonight.’”

Of course, the album also included their hit “Smoke on the Water” with its catchy guitar riff, which became so iconic that young guitarists still imitate it when learning to play the instrument.

“It’s amazing that this song ever saw the light of day,” Gillan said. “We were recording in Montreux, Switzerland, and we were supposed to take over a casino. … Some guy with a rocket gun fired a couple of rounds over my shoulder into the ceiling and the place went up in flames. … We finished at the Grand Hotel. On the last day, the engineer said, ‘We’re seven minutes away from the album. … We did a pretty good soundcheck, maybe we’ll write a song from that.’”

In 1973, Gillan briefly left Deep Purple to form his own short-lived group, The Ian Gillan Band, and then another band called Gillan. Even drunk, he agreed to front Black Sabbath for a year in 1983 as the metal band searched for a replacement for Ozzy Osbourne, who had left in 1978 to record his first solo album in 1980.

“We were all disoriented, trying to grow up,” Gillan said. “It was very Spinal Tap, the same story that happens with almost every band, you’ve got five guys traveling around in a little van with gear, then you get success, you get a tour manager, then you get a proper professional manager, and then things get ugly. … Suddenly there’s 20 people in the band, all in different hotels because the girls don’t get along. The whole thing falls apart.”

Fortunately, Gillan reunited with Deep Purple from 1984 to 1989, and again from 1992 to the present.

“You grow up and start all over again,” Gillan said. “It’s never the same, but the ethos of the band was so strong that we managed to put it back together in ’84 with ‘Perfect Strangers’ and we’ve been together ever since, apart from the banjo player who flew away one day and never came back, but we’ve got another one. … I’ve never been happier than I am now. … It’s one of the best times.”

In 2016, he proudly joined Deep Purple for the band’s overdue induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

“You go and suddenly you realize what an honor it is,” Gillan said. “You see the light and the smiles on the faces of your family, your business contacts and your fans, and they feel this vicarious thrill and pride because you’ve received this award and they’re receiving it in person and it really means a lot, so you learn very quickly to accept these things with humility and grace because it’s on behalf of all these people.”

WTOP’s Jason Fraley Announces Deep Purple at Jiffy Lube Live (Part 2)

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