Deep Purple - Hush
Formed in February 1968, Deep Purple was the brainchild of ex-Searchers drummer Chris Curtis. An early-to-mid-'60s Merseybeat group whose popularity in Britain once rivalled that of The Beatles, The Searchers had built their success on covers of American hit songs. The Drifters' "Sweets For My Sweet" was their first #1 hit as well as "Love Potion Number Nine", a huge hit in the U.S. By 1967, a combination of the psychedelic explosion brought about by the release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album and the devastating effect of the appearance of Jimi Hendrix on the scene, had led to a rash of brilliant heavy-rock outfits.
Free expression was the order of the day, and by 1967, Curtis had already broken away from The Searchers and had a hit with "Let's Go To San Francisco" under the alias of The Flowerpot Men - essentially Curtis and a bunch of session guys. Now he wanted to go one step further and form a proper band.
Curtis was "a very '60s man," Jon Lord recalls, "who had this very off-the-wall idea for the time." Namely, that he and Lord should form the nucleus of a band, along with a dazzling new guitarist named Ritchie Blackmore, whom Curtis had recently unearthed. That, as Lord puts it, "[we] should be the center of the roundabout and other musicians could jump on and off the roundabout as they chose." It was "a lovely, psychedelic sort of idea," he adds.
Born June 9, 1941, in Leicester, Jon Douglas Lord was a classically trained pianist who appeared to give up classical music entirely - much to the consternation of his father - when in 1960, he moved to London to study drama. It was there that Lord began listening to jazz. Lord also plied his trade behind the scenes as a session musician; his biggest claim to fame before Deep Purple was his piano work on The Kinks' 1964 #1 U.K. hit, "You Really Got Me." Lord readily agreed to Curtis' proposal to form a more experimental group.
And so it was that the embryonic Deep Purple first came together as "Roundabout", with a loose line-up that included Blackmore (guitar), brothers Chris and Dave Curtis (vocals), Lord (keyboards), Nick Simper (bass), and Bobby Woodman (drums). Woodman was a veteran skinsman who, under the name Bobby Clarke, had played in '50s rocker Vince Taylor's backing band. At age 22, Simper was less experienced but had played in a number of short-lived '60s beat combos, most notable of which was Johnny Kidd & The New Pirates. But when Kidd died in a car crash in October 1966, Simper found himself back doing session work.
No sooner had Curtis talked everyone else into his "lovely, psychedelic sort of idea" than he himself got cold feet and dropped out of sight, taking his brother Dave with him. Blackmore was not impressed, and it wasn't until Lord and Simper had organized suitable replacements and set up a string of practice dates in Denmark that the errant guitarist agreed to "stay long enough to see what happened."
Richard Hugh Blackmore was ten when his father bought him his first guitar and paid for him to have classical lessons. A gifted student, Blackmore was still in school when he began playing electric guitar in local outfits and by the time he was 17, he was cutting records.
By 1967, Blackmore was living in Hamburg, Germany. Like Lord, after years of playing other people's music, he was itching to try something different. When the invitation to join Roundabout arrived, he was ready. With Curtis gone and Woodman deemed too out of touch with the new psychedelic scene, vocalist Rod Evans and drummer Ian Paice completed the line-up. Evans and Paice had met and played together in The MI5, which later changed its name to The Maze and released a couple of (flop) singles in 1967. In fact, when Evans auditioned for Simper, Lord, and Blackmore in March 1968, Paice tagged along, unaware that the band also needed a new drummer. Invited to sit in while Evans auditioned, Paice was surprised but delighted when the band then offered them both jobs.
Evans' contribution to the early Purple sound has been unfairly overlooked. By the time he joined, the band had already auditioned a number of different singers, including Rod Stewart, who, according to Simper, "was pretty awful." They had also asked Mike Harrison of Spooky Tooth to take the mic, but, as Blackmore recalls, "he didn't want to know."
Just 21 years old, Evans' only previous musical experience was with small-time outfits such as The Horizons, and The MI5/The Maze. But as Simp
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