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2014 SUMMER CONCERT ROUND-UP

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August 6, 2014: Blue Oyster Cult and Deep Purple, Pacific Amphitheatre, Costa Mesa, California

For the past decade, concerts at the open-air, 8,500-seat Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, California, have been held only in conjunction with the Orange County Fair, which is held in the summer. I'll be honest: Whenever I think of a musical act playing a county fair, particularly a veteran act, my mind immediately visualizes the scene in the great mock-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap and the once-mighty Tap, now a middling metal act clinging desperately to relevance, forced to play as a sideshow attraction at a local fair, sharing billing with a magic act.

And each year, I've perused the listings to see who would be playing at the Orange County Fair, smirking like a self-satisfied snob as, one after another, that Former Big-Name Act has now been reduced to performing before a crowd that, only a short time previously, had lost thirty dollars trying to win a stuffed panda, had scarfed down a bacon-wrapped Snickers bar deep-fried in buttermilk batter and drowning in maple syrup, and had just thrown up said delicacy after an expensive yet all-too-brief—although not brief enough—kamikaze fling through the air in a dubiously inspected and -approved Tilt-A-Whirl.

Oh, sure. Each year I see a name or two that makes me pause before I move on. And last year I would have seen Roger Daltrey perform had I not already had a previous engagement on the one night that he was playing. But this year, after my pleasant reaction to the "fogeyfest" I'd attended at the Grove last year, I saw a few names that piqued my interest.

Two of those names happened to be listed on the same double bill: Blue Oyster Cult and Deep Purple. In terms of musical approach and legacy, both bands are heavyweights, hard-rock mavens in the 1970s while serious contenders for a Snub Award with respect to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Blue Oyster Cult is listed at Number 73 on this site's ranking of artists not already in the Hall of Famewhile Deep Purple tops the list. In fact, before the concert started I saw a man wearing a T-shirt that read, "Fuck the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." There was no other wording or symbolism to indicate if this was a general or a specific opinion—although the fact that the shirt was all-purple in color led me to suspect that he might have a particular act in mind. Unfortunately, he disappeared into the crowd before I thought to ask him about it.

Deep Purple has been on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot for the past two years, and in examining the ballot in both years, in 2013 and in 2014, I have stated each time that I do not think that Deep Purple deserves to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. I think the band's glory period of the early to mid-1970s was a short one, and with a couple of exceptions, even the band's albums from that period were hit-or-miss affairs. In other words, this is not a Hall of Fame act.

I say this as someone who as a teenager had been a Deep Purple fanatic: One summer job I had back then was working for the parks and recreation department of the City of Calgary, and every two weeks I would cash my check (although as these were Canadian dollars I should say cheque) and head to Sam the Record Man (remember them?) to buy records. In those days I bought a lot of Deep Purple LPs, and I've been hauling them around with me ever since. I still have them—well, most of them, but I do regret thinning a few—as I write this.

But as I've learned over the years, there is a big difference between liking an artist and thinking that the artist is worthy of the Hall of Fame. Apart from the nostalgia factor, part of the reason why I was curious to see both Deep Purple and Blue Oyster Cult was to help me come to a clearer understanding of each band's legacy—is each a Hall of Fame act? Now, I fully understand that the heyday of both bands was four decades ago, and I hardly expected either band to be at the form from their prime. What surprised me—pleasantly, as I soaked up the music of each band—was how impressive each sounded, although one certainly impressed me more so than the other.

Singers and guitarists Eric Bloom and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser are the only survivors of the Blue Oyster Cult that released its eponymous debut album in 1972; filling out the band now are guitarist Ritchie Castellano, bassist Kasim Sulton, and drummer Jules Radino. But if this was a band that was merely trading on past glory, or cynically expecting the near-capacity crowd to respond only to the hits, you could not tell that from the tight, seamless 45-minute set that opened the concert.

Sure, BOC had to deliver its big early-1980s hit "Burnin' for You" and the obligatory one-two punch of "Godzilla" and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." But BOC opened with "The Red and the Black," from its second album Tyranny and Mutation, possibly to test the crowd reaction, or simply because it is a terrific riff-happy rocker extolling, of all groups, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (even if it is essentially a re-write of the first album's "I'm on the Lamb, but I Ain't No Sheep"). Also delighting the hard-core was Buck Dharma's earnest drug-deal-gone-wrong ballad "Then Came the Last Days of May," while an extended instrumental provided him and Castellano the opportunity to trade nimble, fiery solos while Sulton rumbled behind them.

In fact, Sulton was something of the band's ringer. A talented bassist who first came to notice in Todd Rundgren's progressive-metal band Utopia in the 1970s, Sulton got the spotlight on the guaranteed crowd-pleaser "Godzilla." Not only did he get to deliver the iconic bass lick originally made famous by Joe Bouchard, he got to have Bloom recite his curriculum vitae during the extended vamp in the song's middle: You didn't know that Sulton had played with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts? BOC threw in a chorus of "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" to remind you. Remember that he started with Rundgren? Start bopping your head to the idiotically delightful "Bang the Drum All Day." And just before the band slammed back into the heart of "Godzilla," it worked in a few bars of Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" for good measure.

Blue Oyster Cult in Concert

Blue Oyster Cult knew not only how to command the stage, it knew how to work the crowd. Its sleek progressive metal was an influential sound of the 1970s, although it may have been too brainy—and at times too pretentious—to have been fully appreciated until later. It took post-punk (the Minutemen, for instance, were BOC devotees) and stoner metal to really perpetuate the legacy of Blue Oyster Cult, a talented band ahead of its time. My only regret about its performance was that it was much too short—I was just getting set for an extended rock-out when the band left the stage. And, yes, I was the dolt in Section Five screaming for "'7 Screaming Diz Busters'!"

By the way, there was some serious cowbell going on in "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." This band knows how to laugh at itself.

But Deep Purple was the headliner, and thus it got the lion's share of the time. Of the band that first formed in England in 1968, drummer Ian Paice is the only one remaining although the Purple that took the stage this night included singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover, both of whom were featured in the "Mark II" version of the early 1970s band that had the greatest success. Rounding out the quintet were American guitarist Steve Morse, who joined the band in 1994, and keyboardist Don Airey, a British music-industry veteran who has been filling the shoes of band co-founder Jon Lord since 2002, when Lord retired from the band. (Lord died a decade later.)

Even though Purple kicked off with the evergreen "Highway Star," the band sounded a little shaky; it was hard to hear Gillan, but the sound mixer managed to correct that problem. Or perhaps Gillan simply wasn't enthused to be trotting out an old chestnut despite the crowd's excited reaction, because he seemed to be only partially engaged throughout the first few songs. Those songs included ones from the band's most recent album, Now What?!, which it has been touring in support of since early 2013, as well as the classic Naughty Nancy tale "Strange Kind of Woman."

Then an interesting attitudinal shift occurred. After "Strange Kind of Woman," Gillan announced that that was the end of the "avant-garde segment," but in actuality it was just getting started. The keynote was a new song, "Vincent Price," which was an indeed a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the legendary horror-film star, and one that showed that the band was hardly recycling its old formula—in fact it had been paying attention to succeeding generations of hard rockers. While Airey supplied the haunted-house atmospherics reminiscent of early Ozzy Osbourne—no surprise as Airey had played on Ozzy's debut album Blizzard of Ozz (check "Mr. Crowley")—the rhythm team propelled those atmospherics with tight, staccato bursts while Morse pumped out distorted metal chords that reminded these ears of Alice in Chains circa Facelift or Dirt.

But the biggest change was in Gillan—starting with "Vincent Price," he became engaged and animated from playing the new material and not simply recycling decades-old songs. This was apparent in other newer material, such as "Hell to Pay," also from Now What?!, a game social-comment number, while the collateral effect was an energy boost for the entire band—with Gillan now roused, Deep Purple finished its second half in fine form.

1024px-Deep Purple at Wacken Open Air 2013 27

Of course, classic hard-rock convention was not completely abandoned. Although we didn't get a drum solo—had there been time, I'm sure "The Mule" would have raised its overblown head—we did get an extended guitar solo from Morse. Not that this is a bad thing—after all, this is the guy who made his bones fronting the 1970s fusion outfit the Dixie Dregs (later simply the Dregs), and Morse's seamless blend of power and agility was hardly gratuitous.

Nor was Airey's solo turn at the keyboards, where he provided a pastiche of his musical education including all those classical-piano lessons he took as a kid. Again, hardly out of character: Jon Lord, the band's original keyboardist, was also classically trained—he even penned an early Concerto for Group and Orchestra when Purple was closer to an art-rock band. And in fact, Deep Purple's "walk-up music" for this concert, the music played over the PA system before the band took the stage, was the "Mars" movement from Gustav Holst's The Planets suite, which was a little pretentious and a little hackneyed, although it could have been worse—it could have been Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," and how cliché would that have been?

However, it was with a trio of signature songs that Deep Purple finally won over the Pacific Amphitheatre audience. Don Airey's magisterial organ playing, channeling Jon Lord, prefaced the bluesy "Lazy," on which Ian Gillan's harmonica added a rustic flourish. Then came the two-fisted blow from a pair of Purple sledgehammer masterpieces: "Space Truckin'" and "Smoke on the Water." The former has cheerfully goofy lyrics that belie the brutal rhythmic punch that hits like a full-blast Saturn V rocket—although listeners expecting an extended progressive-rock excursion such as the one found on the classic live set Made in Japan would be disappointed—while the latter sports an archetypal guitar riff, its thunderous simplicity contrasted by a fairly vivid tale of their travails trying to record Machine Head, the album that first contained the song. And since everybody who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 40 years knows the chorus, Gillan encouraged the audience to sing it (he's probably sick of it by now, anyway), and thus the bond between band and listeners was finally forged.

Called back for the encore, the instrumentalists vamped with "Green Onions" before Gillan re-emerged, and if the thought of a hard-rock band playing that Booker T. and the MGs signature instrumental seems incongruous, consider that it was a warm-up for the first song of the band's encore: "Hush," the charmingly low-key Southern pop song written by Joe South that was Deep Purple's first hit back in 1968—and, significantly, it was a hit here in the United States while failing to chart in the United Kingdom. Then Roger Glover unspooled an extended bass solo as prologue to Deep Purple's final number, the hard-rocking "Black Night," appropriately enough the band's first hit in the U.K. (it peaked at Number Two) although it failed to crack the U.S. Top 40.

It may have taken a few songs for Deep Purple to be able to slam it into top gear, but this is certainly a band that not only has the experience and the firepower still at its command but, if its commitment to its new material is any indication, also the wherewithal to keep going—although whether that destination is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not certain.

Last modified on Monday, 23 March 2015 17:53

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