The greatest hard rock band in history

Nobody could touch Deep Purple in the early '70s. Nobody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W04-HBd2HXA&mode=related&search=

:headbang:

We all knew it at the time. Ian Gillian had a great voice but the band was a flash in the pan.

did you not understand? :P

Iron Butterfly were posers compared to Deep Purple. Ray Davies, of course, was a punk. The Who were just a dance band.

they had amps that went up to eleven.

If there's a hard rock song by a "real" band that could have been written by Tap, it's Knockin' at Your Back Door.

end of argument

Black Sabbath > Deep Purple

While I agree that Deep Purple were extremely influential-- especially the mega-gritty organ sound and the acrobatic vocals-- I don't think they were as powerful as the Who. The only song of theirs that really gets me pumped is "Highway Star," and there are dozens of Who songs with that much adrenaline.

Here's how I see it. (Stop me if you've heard this one before.) Heavy metal happened because white kids wanted a music that was all about power. They started to get it with the heavier British blues bands, e.g. Cream, Zeppelin, Ten Years After, but the hardscrabble, self-pitying aesthetic of blues wasn't quite right. So a number of bands came down the pike in the wake of Cream, using the roaring sound of overdriven Marshall amps, but mutating the "blues box" into more angular and scary scales, and singing lyrics that were explicitly about the rejection of everyday norms. Interestingly, many of these bands had colors in their names: Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Blue Oyster Cult, and yeah, Deep Purple fits in there too-- but not at the head of the queue, in my not so humble opinion.

But maybe I'm not the one to ask. Early Genesis, with Peter Gabriel, was the band that I thought did what Deep Purple wanted to do. If you don't know it, check out their first live album, and see if it doesn't make you think of a more sci-fi version of Deep Purple.

I'm the exact opposite of you regarding DP and the Who. There are a few Who songs i like a lot, but there are 3 or 4 times that by Purple for me.

I don't necessarily hear the Genesis connection, because Purple was so blues based. Jon Lord classical tinging of the organ gave it a completely new twist, but the chord structures are almost always blues based. I didn't hear that in early Geneis, but i do like the Gabriel era stuff a lot.

For the first few albums, though, Purple was showing more chops than almost any rock band in the world. Superb rhythm section with a terrific guitar player and the best rock organist alive. So, i would put them in my top 5, although my top 5 wouldn't necessarily be in any order. Just who i thought was the best 5 hard rock bands of the 70's.
The Professor

Except I do so all the time, and I'm not gonna stop now :-)

The Genesis/Purple comparison applies most strongly on the earliest stuff, specifically Trespass and Nursery Cryme (I don't remember Revelation well enough), and extra-specifically to the way the organ and the guitar work together. I think the texture of songs like "Hogweed" owe a lot more to Purple than to Procol Harum or Traffic or Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs or any other contemporary band with a heavy organ. Basically I asked myself the question, who would Genesis have been thinking of when they wrote and arranged "Hogweed?" If you've got a better answer than Purple, I'd like to hear it. I also think "The Knife" owes something to Jon Lord's choppy chord organ-as-rhythm-instrument approach in songs like "Hush," not that that's so unique.

By Foxtrot Genesis had certainly defined their own style, the prominent pedal point bass notes and the arpeggios that launched a thousand Marillions.

Why don't I get more into Deep Purple? I suppose I don't relate to Ian Gillan's intense vibrato-- sounds too much like grand opera, which I have a real hard time with-- and I never warmed to Ritchie Blackmore as a guitarist. And I know I'm way sick of "Smoke on the Water."

I just don't hear them. The Procol Harum reference i hear! Traffic, too. So, we're hearing the comparisons in reverse. Go figure.

You didn't warm to Richie as a guitarist, and his bandmates couldn't warm to him as a human being. For the day, he was special, but he stopped getting any better in about 1976, and he was a pretty bad person.

And, EVERYONE'S sick of Smoke On The Water! (Full discloure, however: When i was at a conference in Montreaux, Switzerland about 7 years ago, i went to the casino and the Grand Hotel, just to tell my friends i went to the places they sang about in SOTW! I know, i know. Obsessive and geeky!)
The Professor

the statement "EVERYONE's sick of SOTW" is truer than you know. I once got to interview Ian Paice, when they were touring to support that record with Tommy Bolin. One of the questions I asked him was what was hardest about all the personnel changes, and his answer boiled down to having to rehearse SOTW all over again each time!

The interview didn't go real well. He seemed to think I was faulting Deep Purple for not being the Yes, whereas I just thought I took the position that the trajectory from Fireball and Machine Head to Burnin' and Come Taste the Band was distinctly downward.

Traffic had the texture, but they generally didn't have the interplay. There wasn't anybody in the band good enough to play off against Winwood-- except Winwood himself, on overdubs. Are you thinking of some of the big productions on John Barleycorn (e.g. "Every Mother's Son") or the red barn LP (e.g. "No Time to Live")? Or are you hearing the organ timbre of, say, "Feelin' Good?" Re Procol Harum, I was gonna say that Matthew Fisher never did Jon Lord, until I remembered "Quite Rightly So."

Ah, I love talking about music recorded before most of DU was born :-)

Can we not agree they are they greatest band of all time?

in the '70s. They put on an awesome show. My favorite is "Strange Kind of Woman." That's because her name was Nancy, which is my name and I was pretty strange in the '70s.

Frome the Fireball album, right? I had that one as a kid.

I also love the song "Farmer's Daughter."

no band will ever beat them.

the originators.

best hard rock, the jimi hendrix experience.

Hendrix rocked.

you know I am right

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1jpQu6qR1E

This is a 90's incarnation of ABB doing Blue Sky, a great Dickie Betts tune. Duane Allman and Berry Oakley are of course long gone, but Dickie, Gregg, Butch Trucks and I believe Jaimoe are here.

Duane is replaced (not really, of course) on the slide by Warren Haynes here, and I don't care for his solo at all. Duane's solo in the original recording and live back in the day was much softer and understated, just impeccable. I do recognize that Haynes is very good.. I just don't like his solo here.

And they are not nearly as tight here as they were way back in the early years. I suspect there was stuff going on behind the scenes that screwed things up and eventually led to Dicky Betts being fired by Gregg.

Hard to argue that! :)

but Led Zeppelin is as deserving of the title as anyone. A great, great, band.

:P

;)

Long Way to LOVE!!!!!!!!!111!!!! :headbang:
:rofl:

they're all horrid

It's Elizabeth Reed.

It's Live at The Fillmore East, 1970.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0tAgAhbzRs&mode=related&search=

Perfection.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2gKIn02uCXs&mode=related&search=

Studio recording, with a cool video including footage of the original band. Gregg's a great blues singer. Nice.

Based on all the choices I've seen here, my vote would go to Cream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L58M88CweFg



:P