Ritchie Blackmore with one of his Seventies Fender Strats. This one sports a Roland synthesizer pickup. Ritchie Blackmore’s stately residence has a view of the Long Island Sound and all the...
Ritchie Blackmore with one of his Seventies Fender Strats. This one sports a Roland synthesizer pickup.
Ritchie Blackmore’s stately residence has a view of the Long Island Sound and all the comforts of home—including a medieval dungeon.
“It’s a kind of studio-cum-bar,” he says. “Actually, it’s more of a bar, although I do all the records down there. It’s done up like a medieval dungeon. And when our producer, Pat Regan, flies in from California to do some production, we chain him to the equipment.”
This strange sanctuary was also the site of rehearsals for Blackmore’s newest project, the live retrospective set Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow: Memories in Rock II. Over the space of two CDs and a DVD, Blackmore and the most recent Rainbow lineup blaze through stadium-razing performances of classics from Blackmore’s years with both Deep Purple and Rainbow. On track after track, Blackmore’s legendary legato phrases and beefy tonal nuances reaffirm his status as one of the great architects of metal guitar. Which is pretty good for a 73-year-old who has certainly lived through his share of wild years.
The band Rainbow was named after the legendary rock and roll bar and grill on the Sunset Strip in L.A., where Blackmore was living in the Seventies when he formed the group. “I used to live right behind the ‘Riot House,’ ” he recalls, alluding to the infamous Continental Hyatt House hotel on Sunset—the setting for many epic scenes of rock star debauchery. “When the Rainbow would close at three in the morning, John Bonham would come over to my place to carry on drinking.”
Blackmore has outlived many of his hard-living classic rock contemporaries. Over the course of numerous Deep Purple and Rainbow lineups, he has worked—and frequently fought—with many of metal’s top singers and sidemen,