Roger Glover’s Firing From Deep Purple

US chart positions

Black Sabbath = 23
Paranoid = 12
Master of Reality = 8
Vol 4 = 13
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath = 11
Sabotage = 28

In Rock = 143
Fireball = 32
Machine Head = 7
Who Do We Think We Are = 15
Burn = 9
Stormbringer = 20

You could say the same thing about Deep Purple “only” having Gold albums during the 70’s....because the platinum album didn’t even come into existence until 1976.

 

You forgot:

Made In Japan #6

 

Yeah, I always thought Ritchie had Roger come back to Rainbow because he was a double asset: a good producer and a great bass player. I've never understood why there was an acrimony between the two. I saw them together in 1982 and they definitely understood each other's playing and were comfortable. It's almost like Glover was the conductor of the band while Ritchie was the wild ass soloist. That's the way it appeared.

 

Actually by '76, DP were finished. Both Zeppelin and Sabbath's best years were behind them by then. Maybe breaking up, was a blessing? Time to grow, heal and....well the rest is history.

 

By the way...In Rock and Fireball weren’t certified Gold until 2001....still not Platinum.

 

Well and good, but irrelevant to the point i have been making, Sabbath was underground because of a type of fan/"believer" they attracted that other bands just didn't. You had to be there. Peace.

 

I was there...from the very beginning. The vast majority of their fans were the same fans of all the other hard rock / heavy metal bands of the era. The air play they got was of the FM variety...not the AM. Most of it was from the Paranoid album, but I heard tracks from all of the first 5 albums. They were featured prominently in Circus and Creem year after year. That’s not something an underground band achieves.

 

WHAT a top 20 this is!!! We've never had it so good.

In passing, I'm sure that I've read that Purple were the biggest selling rock album act in the US in '74 (I can't relocate the source so am sure someone will either confirm or correct me). You might say that Burn arrived when there were one year gaps in Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath releases. They co-headlined the California Jam (above Sabbath), which was the highest paid attendance concert at that time. So, there might have been a moment when they were "it" but this soon passed. I suspect that this '74 success was largely the momentum of the Mark II lineup.

 

FWIW in my perception while Sabs got that post-grunge and doom metal respect and Zeppelin just succeeded in being remembered as Beyond the Beyond gods of rock, Purple never got ANY cool cred from later generations of at all hip musicians (though I'm sure like with everything there is some underground movement somewhere that venerates them, tho gotta say in my delvings into modern hip metal I don't hear much Purply.)

I think it's mostly that Jon Lord keyb sound to "blame," it never really got retrofitted into any 21st century sense of cool. Tho it will forevermore be cool to ME. (I'm an ecumenical Purplehead who finds some merit in pretty much everything the brand ever did.)

 

Thanks for the image of Blackmore enticing squirrels from their trees to listen to his lute playing, thats made my morning!

 

On the three studio albums I thought his vocals were superb, just as they were in Trapeze. On the many live Mk3/4 albums though I would agree with you, very irritating.

 

As a fan of all 3 bands I agree with you about the organ sound dating the band - but I'd add that changing fashions regarding lead vocals also played a part. Yes, we had a number of singers with differing styles in Purple, but Gillan is the one most people (who arent big fans) associate with the band, and in my opinion his vocals and lyrics (assuming he wrote them?) date the band as much as Lord's instrument. Sorry, I'm not an expert, its just my opinion. Ozzy had a unique voice - the voice of an untrained singer - and lyrics directed more to self enlightenment/self destruction which tied in VERY successfully with the musical tastes of the 90s onwards, whereas songs about Hard Lovin' Women have sort of become Passe. Plant seems to have avoided this, perhaps because LZ were/are SO huge that they transcend these fashions, but even then if you ask modern listeners they'd probably cite his vocals as the most dated element. I'm with you in that I LOVE the DP Mk 2 sound, but to my ears its a sound of a specific time.

 

Hughes always sounds extremely "refreshed" in those live recordings.

 

They were the biggest selling rock act in the US in 1973 on the strength of having numerous things out concurrently....all doing well.
Machine Head still selling
Made In Japan still selling
Who Do We Think We Are sold well at first and then tapered off quickly.
Purple Passages-a compilation put out quickly to take advantage of their popularity
Smoke On The Water single...by far the driving force behind all of this

But...the biggest selling album of 1973 was
War- The World Is A Ghetto (even though it was released in ‘72)

The World Is a Ghetto is the fifth album by the band War, released in late 1972 on United Artists Records. The album attained the number one spot on Billboard, and was Billboard magazine's Album of the Year as the best-selling album of 1973.[1] In addition to being Billboard's #1 album of 1973, the album is ranked number 444 on Rolling Stonemagazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[2] The title track became a gold record.

 

“But...the biggest selling album of 1973 was
War- The World Is A Ghetto (even though it was released in ‘72)”

Amazed by that. Have to confess that I’ve never even heard of it.

 

Interesting to note that Machine Head on original release in 1972 only peaked at number 34 in the US, then peaked at number 7 when smoke on the water was a hit in 1973

 

From The horses mouth - from the Quietus
The others decided that Ritchie should stay. And Ritchie’s condition in staying was that I had to go, so I became the sacrificial lamb, which didn’t go down very well with me, I might add. I’d worked very hard on the band, I’d loved the band, I’d written a lot of songs for the band, I’d been producing and mixing, unnamed and unpaid for, so I felt it was highly unfair but as the old saying goes, 'What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.' I came back from that Japanese tour a broken man to find that one of my outside productions was very high in the charts and that was Nazareth. I stepped into another career and suddenly became a well-known producer.

 

Glover’s ‘Butterfly Ball’ is worth a listen if you haven’t heard it. Features Hughes and Coverdale, and Ronnie Dio singing ‘Love Is All’ which was a big hit all over Europe. It came out again on RSD a year or two ago.

 

Roger Glover must be one of the nicest men in rock. Not the slightest whiff of scandal or bad behaviour about him and I've never read anyone say anything but lovely things. A great team player in the bands he was in and without a doubt the definitive Deep Purple bassist. I quite like DP Mark 3 but can't help but think if they had retired the name when Gillan and Glover left then Deep Purple would have a higher status as a band than they do these days.

 

agreed. Burn and Come Taste are both excellent imo. But they are that much better with Glover there in the pocket.

 

I never knew that Deep Purple was a corporate scheme but it makes sense and explains a lot!

 

Anno could you provide a link on this? Would love to read whole context...

 

I was one of those teenagers who loved Sabbath in the 70s and figured that, while each album sold a million copies, it was the same million people who bought each one.

 

I think I can see the truth on both sides of this Sabs argument --- yes, they sold a lot of albums in America in their heyday, so you couldn't say they were some underground secret --- but....their fans tended to be more outsider/edge of society/loner/stoner/weirdo/vaguely menacing types of kids....so underground outsiders fan base...just America had, and has, A LOT of those types of underground outsiders....

 

Two cancelled US tours due to hepatitis didn't help!

Yet from: Deep Purple - Wikipedia

"The band hired Midlands bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes, formerly of Trapeze. According to Paice, Glover told him and Lord a few months before his official termination that he wanted to leave the band, so they had started to drop in on Trapeze shows." (emphasis mine)

If you thought someone was thinking of leaving, maybe you would want certainty before embarking on a new album/tour, etc.