Rainbow - Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow

When Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1974 it seemed like a cruel blow to the English lads. After all, Ian Gillan was gone, and in his place was the competent, yet green David Coverdale long before he opted to make power pop music. Now Blackmore took his marbles to go home as well, but the result was the creation of one of the finer bands in music history.

Blackmore teamed up with Elf front man and walking legend Ronnie James Dio (whose band Elf opened for Purple on a few dates during the Burn tour), and with the exception of Blackmore it was basically Elf’s lineup that recorded this masterpiece. With Blackmore’s classically-influenced musical passages and Dio’s medieval lyrics seeping into the fray, the collaboration was a success, historically now if not commercially then. It’s one of the more important prog rock albums of all time.

While critics were not exactly singing the album’s praises then, it can’t be denied that “Man on the Silver Mountain” and “Temple of the King” are two incredible, though oft-overlooked rock anthems. While the Deep Purple years are classic years not to be denied or relegated to a footnote, Rainbow was a logical step forward. When you hear classic guitar chords like those in “Smoke on the Water” it’s reasonable that “Man on the Silver Mountain” should raise similar eyebrows upon hearing it. Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow is a classic through and through. The musical arrangements throughout the album are interesting progressive spells that even Neil Merryweather would have found intriguing. 

Lesser known tracks like “Self Portrait,” “Temple of the King” and “Sixteenth Century Greensleeves” are absolute instructional episodes in the rock classroom. When Mr. Dio croons about how “there’s only the devil to pay” in “Self Portrait” it’s understood just how magical his lyrical prowess was to become in both Sabbath and fronting his own unit. To be honest, there isn’t a bad track on this album. “Catch the Rainbow” is a beautifully somber, cathartic walk down a man’s lamenting about momentary contentment. It’s hard not to get the overall feeling of loss or nostalgia through such a serene track.

For 1975 the album may have been in the midst of the KISS uprising and Zeppelin’s ship still owning the skies, a sad event indeed, as the album was both sonically viable and musically epic. We see the formation of Mr. Dio’s incredible prolific output as well with his venture into the medieval, “castles-dragons-maidens” chapter we all know and love. Blackmore, of course, was free to channel his creative juices in a different direction that Purple either couldn’t grasp any longer or didn’t feel right with any longer. Either way, it’s their loss and our gain.

This album retains its power and importance thirty-five years after the fact because, quite frankly, it can. You can reasonably argue they might be no Dream Theater if not for this album and its devices.

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I’d be making up some fantastical tale filled with false anecdotes and flat-out lies if I said I remember where and when I first heard this album. The truth is I can only remember it was the early 80’s and I was already in the middle of my evil, post-Ozzy-Sabbath, bring-on-the-satanic-lyrics phase (which I’ve yet to outgrow). What I do remember is being over at a friend’s house and hanging out in his backyard around 1984 while “Black Sheep of the Family” vomited so loud from our boom box it stirred his gorgeous neighbor out of her sunbathing slumber for a hasty retreat indoors. We were callous little punks!

I also remember hearing “Catch the Rainbow” and feeling incredibly stupid as a wave of sadness overcame me for reasons I didn’t know or understand. What I realize now, some twenty-five-years after the fact is that music was finally hitting my “sweet spot,” that place in all of us that attacks us and our emotions so horrifically that we either turn into mass murderers or musicians. Thankfully, I’m here with you so you know which road claimed me.

Sometimes an album just hits you and you know that you’ll forever have it in your mental Rolodex. Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow is an album I have turned more people on to in my thirty-eight-years than I can remember; it is a beautifully-crafted, wondrous meandering through two incredible men that have given so much to music and metal over the years. It’s also an album of historical importance in that it is Mr. Dio’s uprising from the good, but otherwise stagnant Elf; while Carolina County Ball is a nice album laden with tunes that are otherwise lost to time and unwarranted mediocrity the collaboration between Dio and Blackmore is one of momentous proportions, hands down.

My favorite Rainbow track on any album is “Sixteenth Century Greensleeves” because it’s a terrific song and the opening line of “It’s only been an hour--/since he locked her in the tower--” simply screams “Mr Iommi, soon we’ll need each other!” As for the album as a whole, I find its potpourri of hard rock, cowbells, ballads and stripped down country-like rock fused in classical passages too hard to ignore or dismiss, and who would want to? Every song on this release is a champion, both in musical arrangement and lyrical order. When you need the easing of stress and confusion, you could pop on “Catch the Rainbow” and find a momentary serenity from a hauntingly beautiful vocal and amazing somber bass line thumping through your chest. 

When an album can recreate images and feelings from your past, either good or bad, the album has a special place in you. This album calls upon a time when I had the world by the proverbial short-hairs and life was an easy game that took a long time to play. Only now as we age at an alarmingly quick rate do we look to these little episodic moments of musical release as small windows to our pasts and recall what we were back then and how things were simplistic and free.

Rainbow literally has that pot of gold at its bottom for me; the small passage backwards that not only provides incredible music and joy, but a brief respite from the prospect of aging and passing through this desert café of life too fast for my liking. Until then, the music on this amazingly underrated album will get me through these last years as they did the last twenty-five or so.

They haven’t been so bad after all.

Release Date: July, 1975
Label: Polydor Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Man On The Silver Mountain
2.  Self Portrait
3.  Black Sheep Of The Family
4.  Catch the Rainbow
5.  Snake Charmer
6.  Temple of the King
7.  If You Don't Like Rock & Roll
8.  Sixteenth Century Greensleeves
9.  Still I'm Sad

Total playing time: 37:05

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Classic Review

June 4, 2010

Reviewer: Chris