Hard rock and medieval music – guitarist Ritchie Blackmore: Magician on the fingerboard

Ritchie Blackmore shaped the iconography of the classic hard rock guitarist like no other. He celebrated a solo like an occult ritual, took the gripping hand forward, false around, wiped hectically with both hands over the fingerboard during the break, painted in the air like a fairly magician Arabesque, and all in harmoniously fluent movements that gave the impression that this was absolutely necessary for notes production.

Blackmore was born on April 14, 1945 in Weston Super-Mare, a seaside resort near Bristol when he was 11, he was given the first guitar from his father. He developed interest early on on the game. “I had classic guitar lessons for a year. That helped me because I learned to use my little finger, «he later said. “Many blues guitarists only play with three fingers so that they cannot run certain runs.”

At the latest from the middle of the 1970s, the heroic status is certain, and it can even be hardened in music theory. Blackmore has revolutionized the rock guitar game in an original way by mixing conventional blues pentatonic with classic church tone, especially Doric and Phrygian scales. For him, e-music was never the enemy anyway.

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As with many musicians in the early 1960s, Blackmore begins his professional career in a skiffle band. Even then he was quickly bored and constantly changes the casts. You can find it in the backing band by Screaming Lord Sutch, the Outlaws, the Wild Boys and the Crusaders. Plate producer Joe Meek becomes aware of him and covers regular studio jobs. This is lucrative and shapes his style. “Session work makes you much more precise,” he admits later. “If you can play well in the studio, you are also good on stage.”

Suddenly the big money waves. Financers are looking for investment opportunities in the pop business and beech treasures from various bands for a kind of supergroup that is supposed to sound like an English version of the US bombast psychdler Vanilla Fudge. On her debut “Shades of Deep Purple” (1968), Jon Lord is still ahead, which only changes with “Deep Purple in Rock”-BlackMores wild entrance improvisation in the loosely booted opener “Speed ​​King” shows what the baton has beaten.

“In Rock” came to the charts in 1970, the successor “Fireball” even lands in first place in England. They appear on television, their energetic live shows are sold out, the calculating solo duels between Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord absolutely meet the progressive spirit of the time. With the successor “Machine Head”, Deep Purple is already at the top of the young hard rock movement-not just because of “smoke on the water”, the nightmare of every guitar dealer.

But BlackMores egocentric will soon reach a measure that demands for its own band. At the beginning of 1975 he left Deep Purple and recruited vicarious agents that he can tyrannize and exchange according to Gusto. Rainbow is his tool, and the following albums of this band prove, which may sometimes be ignored in view of the radiance of the guitarist, that Blackmore was sometimes a great songwriter. Not only in the classic phase with Ronnie James Dio, in which Titellose debut, “Rising” and “Long Live Rock’n’roll” appear, all staged reference works for orchestral, the bombast of time sovereignly incorporated seventies hard rock. And that he can burn a fireworks live, the various live recordings, especially the great double album »on stage« captivated, the improvisational verve of the early formation around blackmore, dio and drummer Cozy Powell.

Blackmore may be an egomaniac, but he always kept his business sense. When a lucrative reunion of the classic deep purple line-up is in the room, he is of course included, and the “Perfect Strangers”, which resulted from it in 1984, actually reaches the great success from the early seventies. The following albums drop significantly, but their shows are still sold out, and so Blackmore remains until 1993. Then he revitalizes his Rainbow vehicles with completely new people, but the fun of the noise has now passed, and he is already bossing with his young girlfriend Candice Night on the medieval folk project Blackmoreʼ’s night.

The bomb will soon burst. Blackmore is aligning his Marshall stacks to intonate from now on with acoustic guitar, mandolin and hub for Mummenschanz for medieval markets. The community is horrified.

He has lasted for twenty years, then he has a few concerts persuaded – Blackmore acts as awkward and also listless as if he no longer understand his own songs. He finally sees that he chisks at his own monument and returns to the folk camp. Maybe the old fans should finally put up with it. There are still the archives, the live recordings, leaftovers, alternative versions, with a blackmore at the height of his art.