RITCHIE BLACKMORE: THE TECHNICIAN
The Guitar God I Had to Learn How to Hear
There are musicians you hear.
And then there are musicians someone teaches you how to listen to.
Ritchie Blackmore was the second kind for me.
By the time I discovered what everyone else apparently already knew about the man, I was playing in my first little garage rock band. Nothing fancy. We played little family gigs, eventually some clubs, and had a hell of a lot of fun playing all kinds of music.
And I was already a Rainbow fan.
Not early Rainbow.
I was living in the “Street of Dreams” era.
Image: Rainbow album cover, Street of Dreams. Source: Wikipedia
That version of Rainbow was sexy.
There. I said it.
Joe Lynn Turner had a voice and a face, and those songs had a different feel from some of Rainbow's earlier, heavier work. Ritchie Blackmore himself would later say that after the original Rainbow lineup, he deliberately wanted the band to become more accessible and radio-friendly, and that Turner's more commercial voice suited the ballads they began writing together.
Image: Joe Lynn Turner. Source: IMDb
That was the Rainbow I knew.
Soulful. Rhythmic. Melodic. Moody.
And yes.
Sexy.
Then one day my band's guitarist said something that sent me straight down a rabbit hole.
We were working on “Smoke on the Water.”
Now, everyone knows “Smoke on the Water.”
Or at least everyone thinks they do.
That riff may be one of the first things a person attempts approximately eleven minutes after acquiring an electric guitar.
Dun dun duuun. Dun dun da-duuun.
Congratulations.
You're a guitarist.
😂
Except our guitarist told me the song wasn't as simple as people thought.
I asked why.
His answer:
“Because Ritchie Blackmore isn't a guitarist. He's a technician.”
Wait.
What?
Ritchie Blackmore?
He said yes.
And I remember looking at him like he'd just told me Darth Vader played bass for Parliament.
As in Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow?
Apparently everyone in the known universe understood that the man behind Rainbow was already a Rock God from one of the great bands of classic rock.
I had somehow missed the memo.
WAIT. DEEP PURPLE?
This is where we have to stop for a minute, because decades of classic-rock radio can do something strange to music history.
It can reduce an enormous band to the two or three songs that survived permanent rotation.
Deep Purple was not some little old band Ritchie Blackmore happened to play with before Rainbow.
Deep Purple was a major band.
Image: Deep Purple. Source: TheCurrent.com
They were part of the development of the hard-rock sound that would influence generations of musicians after them. Blackmore's playing combined blues-based rock with something else that would become increasingly important to his identity: classical ideas, scales and phrasing. Guitar World describes his work with Deep Purple as a mixture of raw blues and fluid, classically influenced runs, with “Highway Star” as one of the clearest examples.
Blackmore himself has described living somewhere between those worlds.
The blues could feel too limiting to him.
Classical music could feel too disciplined.
So he played somewhere in the middle.
That explains a lot.
Image: Ritchie Blackmore. Source: Guitar.com
But I didn't know any of that.
I knew two Deep Purple songs particularly well.
“Highway Star.”
And, of course...
“Smoke on the Water.”
And “Smoke on the Water” has become so familiar that we've almost forgotten how wonderfully ridiculous its origin story actually is.
Deep Purple had gone to Montreux, Switzerland, to record Machine Head. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing at the casino there when a fire broke out. The casino burned, smoke spread across Lake Geneva, and Deep Purple suddenly had both a recording-location problem and the makings of a song.
“Smoke on the Water” wasn't some mystical metaphor.
The damn place was on fire.
The band had been there.
They saw it.
They wrote about it.
Rock history sometimes really is that beautifully straightforward.
And out of that story came one of the most recognizable guitar riffs ever recorded.
But my guitarist had planted a question in my head.
Technician?
So I went back.
I STARTED LISTENING TO THE GUITAR
This may have been one of the first times in my life that I deliberately separated the guitar from the song.
I had always heard guitars.
Of course I had.
By then I had already been surrounded by guitar-driven music. I'd watched Brian May. I'd seen Rik Emmett. Guitar Gods were already wandering around my musical universe.
But this was different.
Someone had challenged me to listen specifically to what the guitarist was doing.
So I did.
And suddenly I understood what he meant.
Blackmore was precise.
Not sterile.
Not robotic.
Precise.
Image: Ritchie Blackmore. Source: Guitar.com
He could drive a song with rhythm. He could establish a feel. He could create tension without filling every available inch of space with notes.
And then he could explode.
Go listen to “Highway Star.”
There's the technician.
Blackmore has explained that some of those rapid classical ideas came from hearing musicians take classical pieces and turn them into rock when he was young. He specifically connected that influence to the fast triplet passages in his “Highway Star” solo.
But then go back to Rainbow.
Listen to “Street of Dreams.”
Same musician.
Different job.
He doesn't need to attack the song.
He helps create the atmosphere around it.
That's when I started understanding something about great guitarists that had nothing to do with how many notes they could play.
Sometimes musicianship is knowing exactly what to play.
Sometimes it's knowing exactly what not to play.
The Guitar God doesn't always need to announce himself.
Sometimes he just quietly controls the room.
RITCHIE BLACKMORE, ROCK STAR
Image: Ritchie Blackmore. Source: BBC.com
Of course, there was nothing particularly quiet about the mythology surrounding Ritchie Blackmore.
We didn't have the twenty-four-hour celebrity cycle then.
No social media.
No cellphone video appearing online before the band had even left the venue.
Rock stories traveled differently.
We had magazines. Radio. Interviews. Tabloids of a very different variety. Other musicians. Friends. Somebody who knew somebody who had supposedly been backstage somewhere.
And stories.
Lord, we had stories.
By the time they reached you, you didn't necessarily know where fact stopped and Rock Lore™ began.
Blackmore had plenty of lore.
He developed a reputation for being temperamental, demanding and difficult. He fought with bandmates. Lineups changed. Relationships fractured. Even sympathetic retrospectives of his career acknowledge that volatile reputation, while Blackmore himself has readily described his personality as domineering and his desire to “steer the bus.”
There was ego.
There was attitude.
There was definitely some:
You know I'm Ritchie Blackmore, right?
😂
He was a rock star during an era when rock stars were practically presented to us as another species.
They smashed things.
They fought.
They quit bands.
They formed other bands.
They sometimes rejoined the first band.
Then apparently they remembered why they left and started fighting again.
And we heard the stories and basically went:
Rock stars.
🤷🏾♀️
But here's the problem with dismissing Blackmore's ego.
The man would pick up the guitar.
And suddenly the guitar started making a pretty compelling argument on his behalf.
THEN HE DID IT AGAIN
Blackmore left Deep Purple and formed Rainbow in 1975.
Image: Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Source: UltimateClassicRock.com
Think about that for a minute.
He didn't arrive at Rainbow hoping to become important.
He arrived already important.
That's what I hadn't understood.
I met the careers backward.
My generation inherited Deep Purple.
But Rainbow was happening in my time.
By the Joe Lynn Turner years, Blackmore had deliberately moved toward a more accessible sound.
And there he was again.
Different decade.
Different singer.
Different musical environment.
Still relevant.
Still recognizable.
Still that Stratocaster.
That's what makes Blackmore such an interesting Guitar God to me.
He sat at both tables.
He was at the classic-rock table with Deep Purple while some of the fundamental language of hard rock was still being written.
Then he walked over to the Gen X table with Rainbow and said:
Scoot over.
Apparently he wasn't finished.
THEN I SAW HIM
Meanwhile, I kept playing.
Little family gigs.
Clubs.
Nothing that was going to rewrite music history, but enough to change the way I listened.
Because once you've stood on a stage yourself, even a little one, something happens.
You begin to understand the work.
You understand keeping time.
You understand listening to the people around you.
You understand that knowing the notes and making music are not necessarily the same thing.
And then I did it.
I saw Rainbow.
I got to see Ritchie Blackmore play live.
The technician.
There is something I've noticed in photographs of Blackmore that became even clearer when I watched him myself.
Look at him when he's playing.
Really look.
So often he is focused completely on that guitar.
Not posing with it.
Not simply looking at it.
Focused.
Almost meditating.
There's something deeply inward about it, as though a private conversation is happening between the musician and the instrument and several thousand people just happen to be standing nearby.
And suddenly I was back in that garage.
“Ritchie Blackmore isn't a guitarist. He's a technician.”
Oh.
Yeah.
Now I understood.
THE TECHNICIAN
The word can sound cold.
That's the funny thing.
When we call somebody a technician, it can suggest someone who knows all the mechanics but has somehow misplaced the soul.
That's not what I mean when I use it for Blackmore.
I mean control.
I mean understanding the instrument deeply enough to know what you're asking it to do.
Blackmore spent decades tinkering with the physical relationship between himself and the guitar. He adopted the Fender Stratocaster, experimented with scalloped fingerboards to change how his fingers contacted the strings, pursued very particular amplifier sounds and developed a style that could move between classical ideas, blues, hard rock and improvisation.
That matters to me now because I understand something I couldn't have articulated in that garage.
Precision isn't the absence of feeling.
In the right hands, precision gives feeling somewhere to go.
Blackmore could play fast.
He could play loud.
He could play dramatically.
But what fascinated me once I learned to hear him was the intention.
The rhythm.
The space.
The attack.
The phrasing.
The moment when he steps forward.
And the moment when he doesn't.
That's the technician.
THE GUITAR GOD I HAD TO LEARN HOW TO HEAR
When I started talking about Guitar Gods recently, I wrote about the spectacle.
The spotlight.
The hair.
The axe.
The guitarist stepping forward while an arena prepared to lose its collective mind.
That absolutely existed.
And Blackmore belongs in that pantheon.
But I'm beginning to realize there were different kinds of Guitar Gods.
Brian May felt like a magician.
Rik Emmett showed me the craftsman who could simply walk onto a stage and earn your attention.
And Ritchie Blackmore?
He made me listen.
That's his place in my story.
I didn't decide he was extraordinary because somebody put him on a list.
Actually, someone gave me something much more valuable than a ranking.
They gave me a question.
Why did another guitarist call this man a technician?
So I went looking for the answer.
Rainbow led me backward to Deep Purple.
“Street of Dreams” led me to “Smoke on the Water.”
“Smoke on the Water” led me to “Highway Star.”
Listening to songs led me to listening to the guitarist.
Then eventually I stood in the same room with him and watched him disappear into that Stratocaster.
And the answer was right there.
I had heard Ritchie Blackmore for years.
Someone taught me to listen to Ritchie Blackmore.
There's a difference.
And once I learned how to hear him, I couldn't unhear him.
That guitarist from my first little band?
He knew something.
Ritchie Blackmore.
The bad boy.
The rock star.
The legend.
The Guitar God.
But underneath all of it...
Yeah.
He was right.
The technician.
Sources & Further Reading
Guitar World — “Ritchie Blackmore on Deep Purple and his Rainbow revival” — Blackmore discusses his classical influences, the origins of his approach to “Highway Star,” the breakup of the early Rainbow lineup, his self-described domineering personality, and his decision to pursue a more accessible sound with Joe Lynn Turner.
Guitar World — Ritchie Blackmore on Deep Purple, classical music and his playing style — Useful background on Blackmore's relationship with classical music, improvisation, and his approach to guitar.
Montreux Jazz Festival — “Smoke on the Water” 50th Anniversary — Excellent first-party history of the December 1971 Montreux Casino fire during Frank Zappa's concert, Deep Purple's plans to record Machine Head there, Claude Nobs, and how the incident became “Smoke on the Water.”
Deep Purple — The Story Behind Machine Head and “Smoke on the Water” — Includes Ian Gillan and Roger Glover discussing the casino fire, the smoke over Lake Geneva, and the unusual circumstances surrounding the recording of Machine Head.
Deep Purple — Roger Glover Interview — Glover recalls Blackmore creating the famous riff, the band quickly arranging it, and how “Smoke on the Water” developed from the events surrounding the Machine Head sessions.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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