Just how popular was Deep Purple really in the US in the 70s?

What do they want, synchronized dancing?

 

Of that genre, they would have been in a strong second place behind Led Zeppelin with me. Aerosmith probably would have been in third place. Hendrix died in 1970, but add in The Who and Eric Clapton, and things were still pretty good. Deep Purple's Machine Head and Made In Japan would both be in my Top 100 albums. They were especially on a roll with those two albums in the early '70s.



The one to get.

 

The Peter Mew version?

I'd call this "The one not to get".

 

Hendrix maybe greater than Zeppelin to me. Thats a hard one.

 

I agree with most of what you wrote but for the sake of argument, I would say that for the average teenager during the 70s Zeppelin were the mainstream, one did not have to dig too deep to find Zep. Zep may not have done TV, but they were still ubiquitous. Growing up during the 70s it would have been hard to miss them, even if you were a Wings, Abba, Am Radio fan.( Zep released 10 charting US singles). They dominated FM radio airplay, of which there were many more FM rock stations to choose from. They were constantly on magazine covers despite not speaking to the press: Cream, Circus, Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, Guitar Player, etc., Their albums and tours/shows were reviewed by most major cities newspapers at the time. The Song Remains the Same was a midnight movie staple. They toured large. It could even be argued that Jimmy Page might have been better known for his iconic look more than even Plant. We didn't have the same variety of distractions then, that we have now, and they loomed large in what we did have to choose from, which could be seen as overkill, same flavor of vanilla over and over.

Regarding the Grammys, hell they ignored the Beatles, Hendrix, Doors, etc., It was frustrating, but it probably would have been worse if they had won, because it would have seemed they were co-opted, sold out. We would have to wait till the 90s for that.

 

I think a band can be very popular and not be "mainstream".
I think bands like Led Zeppelin,Black Sabbath,Yes,Alice Cooper, demonstrate this non mainstream appeal.
If you were young and into hard rock you probably listened to these bands... otherwise no.
You couldn't get 1% of the U.S. population to name 1 song off of Led Zep albums like III, Houses Of The Holy, Physical Graffiti, Presence.
As someone said mainstream was Stevie Wonder, Three Dog Night, John Denver,Bee Gees ect.

 

I think Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones ushered in, if not invented, the rock mainstream. They took the torch from The Beatles at the end of the 60's and pushed to the front of the line. They both continually scored number 1 hits right along Elton, and John Denver, and Chicago. No, you didn't see them on American Bandstand on Saturday morning, and that was part of the mystique. They were too cool for stuff like that.

 

During the 70s, I am willing to wager, that because of Zep's ubiquity( and each major city having up to 4-6 rock stations) one could find 1% (about 2 million) of the US population, admittedly most of it teenaged or early 20s, that could name Zep tunes from the above albums. Now Sabbath is a different story, other than the Stooges, Sabbath was thee underground; managing to go gold/platinum with barely any radio airplay, Zep didn't have that problem.

 

I've seen posters for sale that look a lot like this before that were actually fake, but looking at setlist.com Aerosmith did indeed play New Haven Coliseum on March 14, 1974 with both Deep Purple and Redbone supporting. So even if it is a fake poster it is more or less accurate.

 

Smoke On the Water and Stairway To Heaven. If you couldn't play them on guitar in the 1975-82 era, you were nobody.

 

Does that 1% (or whatever small percentage it might be) represent the "mainstream"?
I'm just thinking maybe that term is not accurate.
The USA mainstream was a large demographic.
The audience from ages 20 to 50? (those with expandable income)
something like that.
To be truly mainstream I think you had to be on TV.
Cover of Time and People magazine.
A guest on the popular Variety shows ala Mike Douglas, or Sonny & Cher.

In say 1974 what was the age group listening to Led Zeppelin?
I doubt there were many fans over the age of 30.
I know my parents were around that age at that time and they hated hard rock, thought it was an abomination.
They liked The Carpenters.
So I guess what I'm saying is that as popular as Led Zeppelin was....can we really call them mainstream?
Or are we referring to a smaller demographic, that was born out of the late 50's and early 60's and came of age in the 70's?

 

But was Cher a fan of them?

 

I have my own doubts about Aerosmith even being there after running across this website of ticket stubs which I posted earlier in the thread.
Untitled Document

 

Is Setlist.com now considered a flawless reference point?

News to me.

I can't believe some would still be questioning that bogus poster. Deep Purple would NOT have been OPENING for Aerosmith in 1974. This is not complicated. If the bands played that same date and venue, Aerosmith opened. Bet your last dollar on it. If I print up posters with Redbone as the headliner will that make it true?

 

Deep Purple did headline that show. It's unclear to me if Aerosmith even played, some tour histories have them in Baltimore that night. But if they did play...they opened.

 

and better than both

 

So can I , including me, as it was my first riff ever taught to me when I first wanted someone to show me something to play the beginning of a long love for guitar!

I recently got the DCC Gold Cd ($60.00) and worth e-v-e-r-y penny!!

 

I wouldn't disagree with much you say but I think that in my part of the continent---Pacific Northwest----Purple were bigger than Sabbath from the early 1970's until perhaps Tommy Bolin replaced Blackmore. Certainly, no Sabbath album ever got a fraction of the airplay that "Machine Head" or "Made in Japan" got in my neck of the woods. I have no data to back that up but Sabbath was a distinctly minority taste in my fairly typical group of hard rock stoners. Plus---and very importantly for us guys---Purple and Zep and the Stones appealed to both sexes, whereas I didn't know many 17 year old female Sabbath fans when I was 17. They may have more female fans in the 21st century than they did in their musical heyday.

 

It's true that Rolling Stone hated Zep, but it's worth pointing out that nobody---even avid Rolling Stone readers like me---gave a damn what the magazine thought of what was clearly one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Rolling Stone didn't like Cream either. That may have bummed Eric Clapton out (who should have ignored them) but had no impact at all on the general popularity of the band. The general quality of record reviews in Rolling Stone was much higher in the 1970's than it is today, but even then it was widely recognized that they got a lot of things catastrophically wrong.

 

re: the post mentioning that one of the reasons DP may not have been more popular than Zeppelin or Sabbath was due to the lineup changes: That is true, but Ritchie Blackmore was in the band from 1968-1975. Wasn't he, rather than the different singers, the "face" of the band? It was an era of guitar heroes like Page, Clapton, Beck, Hendrix (though dead by then), etc. Was Ritchie mentioned in the same breath as them in early 70s high school?

 

It's always interesting reading how certain bands were received in different parts of the world. In Europe however, in the years 1970-1974, Deep Purple were only a few notches beyond Led Zeppelin. Actually in my native country the Netherlands both groups were on a par. Whereas LZ was concentrating more on albums and only released singles as an afterthought, Deep Purple had a bunch of bona fide top 10 hits all over Europe, so they were not only beloved by the groovy longhairs and cool students (the target audience of, say, bands like Zeppelin or Pink Floyd), but Purple's music also attracted much younger kids. I was seven years old in 1970 when I first heard Black Night. We had it at home on a compilation that also included Lee Marvin's Wandrin' Star and Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, just to indicate how mainstream Deep Purple were in their prime. In Holland every year national radio is broadcasting a top 100 of all time, as voted for by the listeners, and for like 20 years in a row Deep Purple's Child In Time was voted no. 1.
Nowadays of course Led Zeppelin's legacy is much bigger, their music has dated better than Deep Purple. Although I think Jon Lord's hammond organ is one of the biggest assets, I get why younger generations consider Purple's sound now a bit old-fashioned.

 

My mom was a teenager in the early 70s and loved Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. If teen girls liked them then they must have been very popular.

 

I think this sounds sort of personalized.

Plenty of girls were into Sabbath in the 70's.

Not to the extent of Zeppelin but I suspect similar to or even more than Deep Purple. Instead of personalizing it about my particular experience I'll use a more cold hard reference: There are 70's Sabbath bootlegs which have girls screaming to the point of annoyance.

Or if we prefer the visual, this mid 70's Santa Monica crowd looks pretty darned "mixed" to me.

 

Deep Purple had a very misogynistic tone to their lyrics back then, so I can’t see how they would appeal much to to the females, whereas as Zeppelin, even though they had some randy moments, tempered it with things like Thank You, and Stairway. That’s why their popularity was so immense. Sabbath, was much more about writing about life, death, and what they saw in the world around them.

 

Back in the '76-'77 time frame I had a neighbor who owned a couple guitars and would always practice both those songs as well as "Wish You Were Here" on the 12 string.