Thursday, February 12, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Down to earth

Fading Deep Purple eulogizes lost shuttle

By Newt Briggs

There wasn't much that survived the re-entry disintegration of space shuttle Columbia in February of last year. A few splintered circuit boards, some charred wads of insulation, a tattered wingtip and an assortment of the shuttle's 27,000 heatproof tiles: These are all that remained of the Columbia and its seven human passengers--these and a pair of Deep Purple CDs.

Carried into space by Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla and discovered at the Columbia crash site, the CDs somehow survived the 39-mile plunge to Earth, which could be considered a miracle or a cruel case of cosmic irony. After all--despite a near-constant flux of new releases during the last three decades--a Deep Purple album hasn't charted in the U.S. since 1974's David Coverdale-fronted Burn. As a consequence, the surviving CDs might either be interpreted as a symbol of Deep Purple's rock 'n' roll resilience or of the band's 30-year plummet into irrelevance.

"I'm not troubled by symbols," says bassist Roger Glover from his suite at the Four Seasons in Vancouver, B.C. "Many people don't realize this in America, but for the last 10 years Deep Purple has been working all over the world. We do sellout tours practically everywhere. It's a great time for this band. Unfortunately, people in America just aren't real aware of what's going on outside of the States."

Part of the problem, says Glover, is that Deep Purple has always been a little too sophisticated to really be appreciated by the American mainstream. Unlike U.K. contemporaries such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Deep Purple brought a polished musicianship to rock 'n' roll that defied the easy digestibility of ready-made guitar rock.

"Deep Purple was always a very musical band," Glover says. "We drew from a huge classical and jazz influence, and that requires a certain dexterity on your instrument. Not to take anything away from Jimmy Page or Tony Iommi, because their ideas were great, but what Deep Purple was doing was musically way beyond that. And I think to a certain extent, that's why we're held in less esteem than the other two, because we're not quite as simple or as easy to copy."

Nor were they ever technically a heavy metal band. Despite once being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for highest concert decibel level--a distinction later usurped by Van Halen--Glover insists that heavy metal belongs to a subsequent, less expressive generation.

"The term heavy metal didn't even exist when Deep Purple was popular," says Glover. "To me, heavy metal is hard rock stripped of its subtlety. There are elements in hard rock that are gentle, that are ballad-like, that are evocative, that are bluesy and that are also extremely violent--you get the loud bits and the screaming as well. That's hard rock. Heavy metal, on the other hand, is all anger. It's very one-dimensional."

Still, the massive pentatonic riff that opens "Smoke on the Water"--the familiar duh-duh-daah, duh-duh-dah-nah favored by Beavis and Butthead--has become the "A" in every heavy-metal guitarist's musical alphabet.

"Everyone thinks they can play the opening to `Smoke on the Water,' but it's not the easiest riff to play," says Glover. "Besides, there's a certain finesse that an accomplished player can bring to the tune that an average player cannot achieve. There's a little magic thing there. If you play something simple, and you're really good at what you do, somehow it imbues it with even more."

During Deep Purple's heyday, it was Richie Blackmore who lent his string-picking panache to the riff, but for the last 10 years ex-Dixie Dregs and Kansas guitarist Steve Morse has shouldered the band's guitar load. Morse was also the creative force behind the final track on Deep Purple's newest album Bananas--an instrumental tribute to the Columbia titled "Lost Contact."

Says Glover: "Three or four days into the flight, Kalpana actually e-mailed us from space, saying she'd gotten her space legs and was enjoying the views and all that. Oh, man, it was so special to have even a little connection with what was happening. And so that Saturday when we woke up, we were horrified, and when we finally stumbled into the studio, Steve was already there working on the song. In the end, we loved it so much--I mean, it was really moving--that we decided to add it to the record."