Deep Purple live in Denmark 1968 in Color – HELP! (Stereo Mixed from Mono)

Shades of Deep Purple is the debut album by the English rock band Deep Purple, released in July 1968 on Tetragrammaton in the United States and in September 1968 on Parlophone in the United Kingdom. The band, initially called Roundabout, was the idea of former Searchers drummer Chris Curtis, who recruited Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore before leaving the project. The Mk. I line-up of the band was completed by vocalist/frontman Rod Evans, along with bassist Nick Simper and drummer Ian Paice, in March 1968.
After about two months of rehearsals, Shades of Deep Purple was recorded in only three days in May 1968 and contains four original songs and four covers, thoroughly rearranged to include classical interludes and sound more psychedelic. Stylistically, the music is close to psychedelic rock and progressive rock, two genres with an ever-growing audience in the late 1960s.
The album was not well received in the UK, where it sold very few copies and did not chart. In the US, on the other hand, it was a success and the single “Hush”, an energetic rock track written by Joe South and originally recorded by Billy Joe Royal, became very popular at the time, reaching number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.The good sales of the album and the intense radio play of the single contributed largely to the attention Deep Purple would get in their early US tours and also during the 1970s. Modern reviews of the album are generally positive and consider Shades of Deep Purple an important piece in the history of Deep Purple.
Deep Purple’s members were experienced musicians with different musical backgrounds: Lord had trained in classical music and had played in jazz and blues rock ensembles,Blackmore and Simper came from session work in pop rock,Paice and Evans from beat bands.However, no one was an accomplished songwriter. The only one with experience in musical composition was Lord, who wrote the arrangements and the bulk of the music for the first album, with some guitar riffs added by Blackmore.The album shows the potential of the band but does not focus on a distinct sound.Clearly identifiable on the album are the musical styles which were developing in the UK in that period and that influenced the young musicians in Deep Purple, a mix of psychedelic rock, progressive rock, pop rock and hard rock,the latter mostly evident in Blackmore’s guitar parts.
Traces of the heavy sound that would mark the production of Deep Purple’s “Mk. II” line-up (when Evans and Simper were replaced by Gillan and Roger Glover) can already be heard in the opening instrumental “And the Address” and in “Mandrake Root”.The main riff of the latter is very similar to the one in the song “Foxy Lady”,a testimony of Blackmore’s admiration for Jimi Hendrix.The other original compositions, the ballad “One More Rainy Day” and “Love Help Me”, are pop rock songs that enhance the commercial appeal of the album, but are considered by critics less interesting than the cover songs.
The use of so many cover songs to fill up the album was a common feature at the time,because of the short time given to bands for songwriting and for the rushed schedules of production.The songs covered in the album were all treated with new arrangements to be considerably longer and sound more grandiose than the originals, in an attempt to emulate the American rock band Vanilla Fudge, which many Deep Purple members admired.”Hush” and “Help!” are clear examples of the “Vanilla Fudge style of slowing a song down and bluesing it up” to get a more psychedelic sound.The sound of the band was also heavily influenced by classical music: “I’m So Glad” is introduced by “Prelude: Happiness”, featuring an electric arrangement inspired by the first movement of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade;the cover of “Hey Joe” was arranged inserting parts taken from the Miller’s Dance, suite no. 2, part 2 of El sombrero de tres picos ballet by Manuel de Falla, on a rhythm reminiscent of the Boléro by Maurice Ravel.

#Deep #Purple #live #Denmark #Color #Stereo #Mixed #Mono

Originally posted by UCsi1PLkmQGbPfuIE67Hm1gQ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP8Nqx-iEI0