The Loneliness of the Long Distance Music Lover
To my mind, one of the regrettable and not as insignificant as it at first may seem consequences of the otherwise modern brilliance of cheap and simple online accessibility to all forms of music is the death of the album. Perhaps that’s overstating things a little, but as music industry big wigs have frequently noted, fans are no longer willing to buy an entire album for the one or two tracks that they actually want to regularly hear. Album sales have as a consequence plummeted in direct proportion to the rise of online and downloadable music. In fact I predict that within a few years the term ‘album’ will be as meaningless as ‘wax cylinder’. The dominance of music streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora and a plethora of others only exacerbate the problem and rubber stamp the album’s inevitable demise.
Of course, on the positive side of things I entirely agree that for years we paid too much for albums, and that too many of those albums had far too many ‘filler’ tracks of no great musical worth. That however was the sacrifice one made in order to experience what appears to be rapidly disappearing from the industry; and that of course is the classic album. A classic album is, as the name suggests, a collection of tracks that is greater than the sum of its parts, and which epitomises that which made popular music so important for me, if not for everyone of my generation, during the three decades spanning the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
I’m not talking here only of concept albums, although perhaps that is the greater tragedy of the current trend in music. After all it’s hard to imagine how an album such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon or Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells could ever be conceived or recorded in this day and age, except perhaps for a niche market with far fewer sales and little to no air play.
No, I believe some albums are just a product of their time and the greatness of the bands that made them. Think, for example, of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, one of the greatest selling albums of all time. This was not a concept album at all, yet it remains a perfect package from a band at the height of their musical powers, all the while disintegrating under the strain of multiple relationship collapses with the band members only barely being able to remain in the recording studio together. And while virtually all of the tracks on that album were hits, still there is an extra measure of gob-smacking, ‘beat me about the head with a wet fish’ greatness about sitting down with a bottle of something nice and just listening to the entire album all the way through. If you are really taking the process to heart and maximising the nostalgic thrill of it all, you’ll also have to get out of your armchair half way through to flip the record over to side B, a musical tea ceremony that too few music lovers get to appreciate these days. There’s perhaps something shameful, and certainly at the very least disappointing for people of my age about reducing music to a tea bag in a mug; it’s surely better by far to choose music carefully and prepare its execution; to actually make the time to go through the ritual of cleaning the record; to read and appreciate the liner notes and to give the record the undivided attention it warrants. Sadly, it appears that life is too frantic these days to allow such prescribed rites and ceremonies. Rather, unless we go to an actual concert it’s rare that we get the chance at all to give music our full attention anymore.
For the runner however, there is a chance at least to absorb music whilst on the move, the two activities being mutually symbiotic, a little or perhaps a lot like dancing, maybe. This opportunity to focus on the music also lends itself brilliantly to the playing of whole albums, with the rhythmic nature of running enabling one to more properly appreciate the greatness of an album without all the other distractions of everyday life.
Specifically, for the purposes of running, there are many outstanding album choices that inspire, cajole and just plain motivate you to get through a difficult training session with enthusiasm and aplomb, whilst the physicality of the run also rewards the auditory senses by simultaneously enhancing the music.
Of course there are many great albums worthy of our attention whilst running, but today I want to mention just one band in particular that has done more for my running than any other artist: Deep Purple. If I had to limit my musical catalogue for running purposes to just one band it would be this one. In particular there are three Purple albums that have helped shape me and kept me on my feet for the last 13 or 14 years since I took up this life-extending and life-enhancing activity we call running.
Having finally been inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame this year, 2016, with their long exclusion being described by many as one of the greatest musical injustices ever, it seems appropriate to make mention of them at length, as they have influenced me heavily throughout my time as a runner.
It will be of no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Deep Purple that one of those three great albums that have influenced me so much is their 1971 release, Machine Head. For good reason this is their most successful album. Recorded in just three and half weeks (yes, three and half weeks), and featuring what many consider to be the classic Deep Purple line up of Ian Gillan on vocals, the indefatigable Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, the astonishing Ian Paice on drums, the unmatchable (and now sadly deceased) Jon Lord on keyboards, and bassist and lyricist Roger Glover on bass.
The sequence of events which led to this album is a fittingly tangled web of the weird, the wonderful and the frankly unbelievable, which includes the Montreaux Jazz Festival, the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa, the complete story of which is too long to tell here, but which is an astonishingly perfect storm of consequence and coincidence which is well worth discovering for yourself in an idle hour or two sometime.
Machine Head is one of those near-perfect albums for lovers of hard rock and heavy metal. Like the previously mentioned Fleetwood Mac album Rumours, it is the rare coming together of talent, circumstance and karma which defies explanation at the rational level, yet which, if you connect with it at a deeper, subconscious level, will leave you humming with an inner satisfaction like nothing else can. And for the running fan, this is deeply significant for reasons I can’t properly explain without first subjecting you to a big gob of athletic pain and suffering, and tinged perhaps with a melancholic, deep, yearning nostalgia.
There are also some surprising things about the band and this album which help the fan and the runner, and especially the fan who also runs, to appreciate just how important this album is. The first, and perhaps most surprising element is that Ritchie Blackmore, the lead guitarist for one of the most successful and certainly one of the most influential heavy metal bands in the history of music, is in fact deeply shy. Influenced heavily by Mozart and with a massive collection of renaissance music he nowadays shuns the limelight and is relatively rarely seen in public. Despite these renaissance influences and his shyness, Blackmore likes to play ‘vicious’ guitar and left Purple because he saw ‘too much funk’ infiltrating the band.
It frequently absorbs my mind as I run as to how he and Ian Gillan, surely one of the most flamboyant of heavy rock front lines, ever actually hit it off and worked so well together. Yet, clearly they did. Their symbiosis is near-perfect on Machine Head, as oddly unlikely as that may seem in hindsight. Eventually, and inevitably perhaps, that union had to crack and it did (although Blackmore denies this), but not before they recorded the second album which also quite literally changed my life, which was Made In Japan, their live album recorded in Osaka and Budokan at the end of 1972 and still considered by myself and a great many others as the greatest live album ever made, and by some distance. Even now, over four decades since its recording it stands alone as a prime example of what live music can achieve. It absorbs the listener in a way no other live album manages to through the sheer majesty of their performance; it sounds easy and natural and utterly engrossing. If I should one day, somewhere, somehow, actually meet someone who was there at the actual performance I fear that I will likely kill them in an insane fit of jealous rage.
The odd thing about this album is that Ian Gillan was already completely fed up with the band and where it was headed, not that you would ever know that from his performance which is as great as it gets. As great as he was and still remains as a singer, his time with Deep Purple in the early part of the 1970s marked his zenith, perhaps never so great as on Made In Japan.
For some bands, greatness seems to come at a price, and so it was with Deep Purple, and by the mid 1970s their two most prominent members, Blackmore and Gillan had quit the band, Gillan joining Black Sabbath for a spell, and Blackmore leaving to form Rainbow.
Much in the same manner that Brian Johnson replaced Bon Scott as lead singer for AC/DC, so the virtually unknown David Coverdale, as great a singer as he was struggled to be quite the same member of the band. When Ritchie Blackmore finally pulled the plug and walked away from the band, Deep Purple seemed about spent, and yet somehow out of the mess came the third of the albums which mean so much to me. Roger Glover, the bass player and lyricist had also left by this time, replaced by Glenn Hughes, and now in place of the seemingly irreplaceable Blackmore, with the persuasion of Coverdale came the genius and sadly short-lived wunderkind guitarist Tommy Bolin, tragically soon to die of a heroin overdose not long after joining the band at the age of just 25.
There are, in anyone’s musical life, undoubtedly a few albums the first hearing of which lives on in the memory, with a very clear recall of where you were at the time, in the same way that people remember where they were at the time of some great event such as the moon landings or the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks. I have a very vivid memory of eagerly listening to a cassette tape (this is way back in 1975) a friend had sent me of side one of the then newly-released Deep Purple album Come Taste The Band. It is not one of their greatest selling albums to be sure, but to my mind, it is one of their most impressive if only for the opening track Coming Home, having as it does all the heart, soul and musicality that Coverdale and Bolin could thrust into it. It was a cry, if you like, that said Purple was not finished and indeed were very far from it. To put not too fine a point on it, it was a revelation to me, and I still love that track, and indeed the entire album to this day.
And on that point, it is entirely appropriate that such albums for me also spell out the notion that I am not spent, and that my days are not numbered. I may be slower (but not that much) and perhaps a little less confident as aches and pains serve to illicit a little caution against doing too much at too great a pace, but the music keeps me going, and without it I suspect the running may have dried up long ago.
Anytime I waver, I only need to plug in Space Trucking and I’m off again. It’s infectious, it’s wonderful and impossible not to run well to.
Maybe Deep Purple isn’t your bag, but there’ll be some other artist that is. Get into it. It might just save your life, and can certainly save your sanity.
And buy the album. On vinyl, for when you’re not running.
Yep, make the effort and just play the damned record!
RackOfftober
