You Fool No One: Deep Purple’s Burn Turns 50
Looking back at the blistering debut of the band’s celebrated Mark III lineup
Most classic albums don’t take a turn as this one did — one 21-year-old man answering a want ad.
So begins the saga of Deep Purple’s Burn, released 50 years ago today.
The band had become quite successful in the first part of the ’70s with their second lead singer, Ian Gillan, at the helm for In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head and Who Do We Think We Are.
But Gillan was becoming dissatisfied, having, and this would be a theme throughout Deep Purple’s history, disagreements with guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. The singer put in his notice, giving the band a letter while on tour in 1973.
“The letter from Ian Gillan was a dreadful shame,” keyboardist Jon Lord told Classic Rock in 2002. “He felt something wasn’t right, and I personally would have been happier if he’d stayed and fought from within. It was really just beginning to take off in the States in a big way, which is what we’d been working so hard for. Maybe if we’d taken some time off it might have been a different story.”
Blackmore had also toyed with leaving. He jammed with a three-piece dubbed Baby Face with Purple drummer Ian Paice and future Thin Lizzy superstar Phil Lynott on bass. The project fizzled because Lynott’s vocals and star quality far outstripped his bass skills at the time.
In any case, Blackmore’s flirtations hadn’t helped relations with Gillan. At one point, Deep Purple’s management secretly approached Lord and bassist Roger Glover with the idea of recruiting replacements to keep the band going should the other three leave.
At some point, Glover wound up on the outs. The target of interest was Glenn Hughes, who was in an up-and-coming band, Trapeze. He was loath to leave as he thought they were on the cusp, but the lure of Deep Purple money and the chance to work with ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers changed his mind.
As it turned out, Rodgers wasn’t particularly keen on the idea. Whether it was being peeved at reports that he’d already joined when he only agreed to a look-see, wary of Deep Purple intraband drama and already being into the just-starting Bad Company (or all three), he said “No.”
This brings us to the Melody Maker ad. Prospective lead singers had to send in a demo. Coverdale had a tape of himself singing covers of Joe Cocker and Bill Withers.
Applicants also needed to send in a photo, which was a challenge for Coverdale, who didn’t have headshots at that point in his musical career
His backup plan was as close to home as it gets.
“I got a picture from my mother of me saluting as a boy scout,” he said on the Rock & Roll High School podcast with Pete Garnbarg. “And she said, ‘You better make sure I get this back.’ And I wrote, ‘Dear Deep Purple, as you can see I am always prepared.’”
Paice recalled Coverdale’s demo tape to Classic Rock years later. “It was bloody awful! There were four songs on it and David basically sounded like Scott Walker. He was singing in that very… well, Scott Walker style. You can’t put it any other way.
“But there was this one song where he just jumped up an octave, only for three or four bars, mind you, and his voice started to happen. I just thought – well, there’s something there, you know. I thought there was enough there to get him down and check him out.”
Coverdale had put away a decent amount of whiskey before his audition out of nerves. The band put him at ease, which allowed him to quickly loosen up. He showed enough that August day that the band didn’t audition anyone else. Not that he knew at first.
Paice drove him to the train station so he could go back to Yorkshire.
“That was when I bought my first-class ticket back to Darlington,” Coverdale laughed to Classic Rock. “I treated myself. I came home and there was a streamer over the door of my first-floor flat, saying: ‘Welcome home, superstar.’
“And then of course I never heard anything for days; I could’ve fucking killed them. I started to make excuses to my friends. I told them: ‘Well, I’ve been thinking, you know, Deep Purple aren’t really my cup of tea…’ Ha-ha!”
But just as he thought he might still be working at a clothig boutique, after a rather long week, he got the offer.
The following month, the new Mark III lineup of the band began rehearsals. In early November, they went to Montreux to record the album with the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio.
For all of Deep Purple’s reputation for band drama, the actual recording process was devoid of it. They basically finished one track each day.
The new dynamic turned out to be a boon. Gillan was the classic lead singer for the band, but Coverdale’s background supplied a more soulful tinge while he still had the hard rock range.
And while Hughes was never considered to be Purple’s lead singer, his stint in Trapeze showed he could be used for more than backing vocals. He took his turns at the mic on the album, his style meshing well with Coverdale’s, a two-singer dynamic the band didn’t have with Gillan or first lead singer Rod Evans. If Coverdale was 1, Hughes was a capable 1A.
The opening title track is classic Deep Purple. Blackmore’s killer riff, Lord getting a keyboard solo and Paice’s drums (even if not pushed up in the mix) arguably the star of the show. That Coverdale-Hughes interplay pushed it forward.
The song did need a little work, as an early Coverdale version made him laugh decades later. “You can tell my stuff: it’s got blues-based lyrics, as it continues to have… but there’s another version of the Burn song that always makes Lordy crack up whenever we bump into each other,” he said. “I’d written a whole version of this song called The Road. It went [sings ear-splittingly]: ‘Take me do-o-own the RO-O-O-O-AD!’ So Lordy and me, when we meet up, we still fucking crack up about that.”
In the end, the final lyrics came from what Coverdale later called “science fiction poems,” his attempt to please Blackmore.
The bluesy “Mistreated,” kicked off with that phasing Blackmore riff, one Hughes characterized as the moment he knew he’d be at home in Deep Purple.
It would go on to become a standard, not just for the band. The ever-prickly Blackmore included it in Rainbow sets in his post-Purple years. Coverdale did the same with Whitesnake, understandable as it was a great vocal showcase for him, showing the soulful edge that differentiated him from Gillan.
Deep Purple wouldn’t be mistaken for the Ohio Players, but “Sail Away” was decidedly funky in a way the band wasn’t before. It’s a direction they’d explore further, to Blackmore’s consternation, on their next album.
It was an appealing changeup. Coverdale worked the lower register of his vocals on the verses, trading off with Hughes to nice effect.
For his part, Coverdale disagrees, telling Classic Rock, “That was one of my first, really forceful lyrics – but I still think it should have been either me or Glenn who sang the whole song; it throws the sentiment and the atmosphere of the song by having dual singers. Either one of us could’ve done it justice.”
There’s also Blackmore’s solo on the outro, which sounds like it influenced the Ozark Mountian Daredevils’ hit “Jackie Blue,” which was recorded later that year.
The guitarist wasn’t always the driving engine. Lord’s organ riff on “Might Just Take Your Life,” a bluesier trip over “My Woman From Tokyo” terrain, was something he came up with to work with Coverdale’s voice.
The first of the album’s two singles (“Burn” would be the second), it’s another Coverdale-Hughes effort both tag-team and in tandem, but it’s Lord who steals the show.
Paice’s quick precision propels “Lay Down, Stay Down,” which, musically at least, sounds the most like a Gillan era track of anything on Burn.
The predominant keyboard being piano gives it a different sound and Blackmore flies in with some of his best soloing on the album.
Had it been a hit, “You Fool No One” could have been the subject of SNL’s “More Cowbell” sketch.
Paice’s percussion skills are front-and-center again. Hughes thought it had a Zeppelin influence, but it also wouldn’t have taken much to nudge it into Santana territory.
“I was messing around with a rudiment involving the cowbell and the bass drum, and as I was playing Ritchie came in with his riff and they just went together,” Paice told Classic Rock. “Basically it’s a drum paradiddle between the cowbell and the bass drum and the snare drum, but it’s a wonderful four-four meter that you can play this rudiment in.”
Vocally, it shows that Coverdale and Hughes could harmonize well.
“What’s Going on Here” is Deep Purple doing boogie woogie 12-bar blues with Blackmore’s work elevating it. As loath as he’d be to play this style of music in later years, he’s damn good at it.
The closing “‘A’ 200” is the filler track. An instrumental showcase for Lord, who gets some nice synth sounds, it doesn’t go anywhere. It feels like a song intro that stretches too long, even with one last terrific bit of Blackmore soloing.
The tour went well, but one of its shows became the subject of rock lore. They were booked to play California Jam ’74, with Blackmore getting talked out of his reluctance to play festivals.
His attitude soured when the band was called upon earlier than he wanted. The set was being filmed by ABC. The guitarist, at one point angry at a cameraman, eventually smashed his Stratocaster into the camera.
Blackmore wasn’t done destroying his setup on that April night. One of his roadies agreed to pour gasoline on his dummy Marshalls, with Blackmore, post-solo, throwing a guitar, which would be on fire, into the amps.
Now, you might be thinking, “This is a terrible idea.”
You would be right. But then you aren’t Blackmore or his roadie in 1974.
Perhaps expecting something closer to Hendrix at Monterey, he didn’t get fire, he got an explosion that blew a hole in the stage. He and the rest of the band eventually fled by helicopter to avoid the police, though no charges were filed. They did, however, upstage headliner Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
As Blackmore said on his YouTube channel in 2017, “It looked great, but it was just overkill. I didn’t realise it was going to just explode. It was supposed to catch fire, but it just went boom!”
The lineup, as often happened in Deep Purple history, didn’t last. Stormbringer, the follow-up later that year, wasn’t up to the level of Burn overall. Blackmore, dissatisfied with its direction, would quit the band.
His replacement, Tommy Bolin, was a talented young player who also had a massive heroin addiction. 1975’s Come Taste the Band, received mixed reviews.
The tour was often a mess. Hughes was also an addict trying, not always successfully, to avoid cocaine. Bolin’s habit affected his playing, which fed into a vicious cycle with some fans already predisposed to hating that he wasn’t Blackmore. It was something he’d already dealt with once, having replaced Joe Walsh in the James Gang.
VIDEO: Deep Purple “Might Just Take Your Life”
Coverdale, for one, had grown tired of the internal drama and conflicts over musical direction. The band broke up in the summer of 1976.
Hughes would go on to a solo career mixed in with various other projects (including a brief iteration of Black Sabbath) and get clean. He did his own shows celebrating Burn in the UK and Europe last year.
Bolin put out a solo album, but died of an overdose on tour that December.
After Rainbow’s success, Blackmore would get back together with Gillan and the rest of the Mark II lineup for the successful comeback album Perfect Strangers, but the lineup only held together for one album after.
He mostly eschewed rock from then on. At this point, Blackmore has almost as many albums with his Renaissance folk ensemble Blackmore’s Night (11) over the last 27 years than he did in his two stints with Deep Purple (12). In fact, his ’90s replacement, Steve Morse, has become the band’s longest-serving lead guitarist.
It took Coverdale a while to find success again. He formed Whitesnake, which didn’t connect in a big way at first.
Things clicked with the success of 1984’s Slide It In, then even more with the band’s multi-platinum self-titled seventh album three years later.
It’s a shame, even as inevitable as it now seems, that Deep Purple’s Mark III lineup didn’t last.
Burn, with its stellar playing and dynamic lead vocals, is the band’s last great album of the ’70s. It’s one of the unsung hard rock albums of the era, a showcase of the capabilities of this extraordinary lineup.
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