Still ‘Highway Stars’: Deep Purple rocks Jiffy Lube Live to celebrate 50 years of ‘Smoke on the Water’

Forget the political red and blue of our heated campaign season, this weekend, Virginia will be Deep Purple.

“The last 50 years (has been) one big, great, amorphous blob of concerts with beautiful people and beautiful places,” frontman Ian Gillan told WTOP. “The band is cranking right now. It’s a blend of old familiar stuff, new stuff, stuff that wasn’t played on the radio but the fans are very familiar with, and the usual 25% of improvisation. We don’t know what the hell’s going on half the time! It’s the normal Deep Purple manic-energy chaos.”

Born in 1945 in Chiswick, England, Gillan ironically wasn’t in the band’s original lineup 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 granddad sang opera, he was a bass baritone, and my grandmother as a ballet tutor, so Tchaikovsky was all over the house,” Gillan said. “My uncle was a jazz pianist and I was a soprano in the church choir, so it was just music, music, music until I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ that changed my life quite a lot. Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and all of those amazing musicians … were a big part of my formative years.”

Gillan even sang in the role of Jesus Christ in the original 1970 recording of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber before the 1971 Broadway musical and 1973 movie.

“I got a call from Tim, 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’ on it, Andrew was sitting at the piano and Tim said, ‘Andrew will play you the tune, we’d like you to interpret it in your own way and improvise around the tune.’ Andrew looked over his shoulder and said, ‘Yeah, but not too much, eh?'”

He first performed with Deep Purple at a London speakeasy in 1969, joining the band for its “Mark II” phase.

“Deep Purple was hot before I joined the band, I thought they had something magic going,” Gillan said. “I had no idea that I’d end up in the band, but I got the chance and we hooked up. I joined the band with Roger Glover, who was with me in Episode Six, and we had spent four years as a songwriting team, so we joined not only as a singer and a bass player but as a songwriting team and that took ‘Purple’ in a new, harder direction.”

Indeed, with Gillan at the helm, the band shifted away from psychedelic and progressive rock for 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 as the globe’s loudest band.

“A guy got a decibel meter,” Gillan said. “We just got a Jim Marshall P.A. stack that was full of high end, so it registered screamingly loud, it was horrible. It’s a reputation we’re not very proud of, but there you go, it’s history, we’re the loudest in the world. Fortunately, things have changed a lot with the sophistication of equipment these days. Power has replaced intense volume so everything sounds powerful without the pain.”

Gillan’s third Deep Purple album “Machine Head” (1972) would become their most famous, featuring the hard-driving anthem “Highway Star,” which was initially written as a joke on a tour bus to Brighton.

“We had some ‘filth’ on board — that’s what we called the music journalists — and these guys are drinking our beer,” Gillan said. “One of the smarter members of the press said, ‘So how do you write a song then?’ Ritchie (Blackmore) was sitting next to me with his guitar and (played a riff) and said, ‘Like that.’ We were going down the highway, so I started singing some gibberish and everyone said, ‘That’s a cool tempo, let’s do that tonight.'”

Of course, the album also featured their career hit “Smoke on the Water” with a catchy guitar riff that has become so iconic that young guitar players still emulate to this day when learning to play the instrument.

“It’s amazing that song ever saw the light of day,” Gillan said. “We were recording in Montreux, Switzerland, and were going to take over the casino. … Some guy with a flare gun fired a couple missiles over my shoulder into the ceiling and the place caught fire. … We ended up in the Grand Hotel. The last day the engineer said, ‘We’re seven minutes short of an album. … We did a pretty good sound check, maybe write a song over that.'”

In 1973, Gillan briefly left Deep Purple to form his own short-lived group, The Ian Gillan Band, followed by another band simply called Gillan. He even drunkenly agreed to front Black Sabbath for a year in 1983 as the metal band looked to replace Ozzy Osbourne, who had left in 1978 to record his first solo album in 1980.

“We were all confused, trying to grow up,” Gillan said. “It was very ‘Spinal Tap,’ the same story happens with almost every band, you get five guys traveling in a small van with equipment, then you get some success, you get a road manager, then you get a proper professional manager, then things turn nasty. … Suddenly there’s 20 people in the band all in different hotels because the girls aren’t getting along. The whole thing falls to pieces.”

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

“You grow up and you start all over again,” Gillan said. “It’s never quite the same, but the ethos of the band was so powerful that we were able to put it back together again in ’84 with ‘Perfect Strangers’ and we’ve been together ever since, well, apart from the banjo player who flew off one day and never came back, but we’ve got another one. … I’ve never been so happy as I am at the moment. … It’s up there with the best of times.”

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

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

Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:

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