Ian Gillan: The Autobiography of Deep Purple’s Singer

by Ian Gillan

  As for the new label, of course it had gone ahead despite my protests, and, although I was offered shares, I refused. Still, there was no time to get bogged down with all the pros and cons, including whether I should have taken the shares, because we were off to America, where we played three shows in New York, Virginia and Chicago, and it was in Chicago where it all nearly ended for me at the airport on 6 November, when I turned yellow and slid down a post.

  I’d been getting more and more ill as the touring went on, and had been throwing up frequently, a situation I’d put down to the tension of going on stage, and the fact that perhaps I was drinking too much. It was just that I seemed to need the alcohol to keep me in control. So I was waiting for my bags to come through when this appalling sensation came over me, a bit like leaping out of bed too quickly; and then I couldn’t hear or see too well, or articulate to people who were moving very slowly around me, staring. Finally, it was our tour manager Colin Hart’s voice that came through, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Ian, we’re getting you to hospital. You’ve gone a strange colour!’

  When I came to, a doctor told me I was very ill, and diagnosed hepatitis. I tried to explain I needed to be on stage that night, but, when he told me I was close to dying, I took that to mean he didn’t think my intention was likely! Still, at least Zoe, with whom I was at constant war, was with me, and so I told her to organise some tickets home. She said there was no way I could travel, and, when I looked in the mirror, I understood what she meant. I was yellow all over, including my eyes!

  As I recall, some minion from the record company kept looking in, but nobody came from management. I was poisoned to hell, and lost and lonely. The hospital people were very kind and attentive, and I was kept on a strict diet of boiled fish and water. Any dairy product was guaranteed to kill me within the day, and the same went for fatty foods. Otherwise, there was this black guy who always seemed to be walking around on his knees, and he kept coming over to inject me, usually at around four o’clock in the morning! Why always 4 a.m.? Could they not see I was upset enough? And why wouldn’t he stand up! Of course, it wasn’t until my senses returned that I realised he was a dwarf, just doing his job.

  After five days or so, I discharged myself, but the guy from the record company said there was no way they’d let me on a plane, looking the colour I still was, and being so ill. He said there would be a riot among the passengers if I turned up, but my mind was set on home, and so I got dressed, covered myself with a scarf, and we flew out of Chicago.

  I have no memory of the journey at all, and vaguely recall the doctor coming to see me at Hyde House. Having access to wonderful English papers and crossword puzzles, which I love, was a great treat. In fact, just having time was an indescribable joy! The tour was obviously cancelled at a cost of about $200, 000 to the band, whatever that meant, but, then, what was it I said earlier about priorities? For me, this was a time for peace and gentle recovery, so, after a few days, I got someone to take me to the sawmill, where we selected some planks of Japanese oak, which I had planed; and with that done I made a table, which I cherish to this day.

  Recovering from illness gave me the chance to look at life and try to find some kind of focus, as, along with the other guys, I went into solo projects, including producing an album for a band called Jerusalem, as well as developing a children’s musical, called Cher Kazoo. We were still Deep Purple, with a major schedule ahead of us, but the cracks were also there, both with the management and each other.

  Of course, the main issue within the band had become the failure of Ritchie and me to relate to each other, so, with our entrenched differences about our relationship with the fans, we now found ourselves dealing with his fixed belief in the pre-eminence of the lead guitar within the band, which didn’t square with how I saw things as its singer! Of course I know that confrontation between singers and lead guitarists is almost commonplace, particularly within successful bands, and I’ll admit to often being unyielding and pig-headed. It’s just that I wanted to deliver Purple at its best, and we didn’t seem to be doing that; although, in fairness, I suspect Ritchie would say the same, such that we just saw things dogmatically differently! As for the management, and to some extent the band, I was already seen as troublesome within the set-up, and, since Ritchie was the more forceful of the two of us, he was better able to catch John and Tony’s attention. In a sentence, I was the problem!

  Over a few beers at a pub in Stowe (Vermont) a few years later, Ritchie would admit to never having been praised as a child, and that his best could always be bettered. Well, perhaps this was at the heart of so much that would motivate him, and I’ve often tried to work it all out, including to question whether his journey through the music business itself might also lie at the root of his eccentricity. He’d had, by any stretch of the imagination, an incredible apprenticeship, going back to when he was sixteen, and playing with ‘Screaming’ (Lord Sutch), when he had to put up with the singer climbing out of a coffin and coming at him with a dagger, while Ritchie, the guitar player, had to play to his master’s bidding in a loincloth. And then (as already hinted at) being hired to back artists like Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent can’t have been easy, and I know Vincent put him through hell, as, in front of a packed house, the singer would tell the audience that he’d just ‘penned this little number, and it goes like this…’ So, while everybody’s thinking ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, and Ritchie’s given him an E chord, Gene would eye the guitar player for Ritchie to cue him in again. Occasionally the communication breakdown would continue for some time, until it dawned on Ritchie that this was one of those nights when Gene had been on the whisky bottle, and was therefore unable to remember what the ‘little number’ he’d ‘just penned’ was called, and perhaps how it also went! As a final slap in the face, the singer would end up going to his agent, Don Arden, to complain that the guitarist was trying to screw things up for him, and that the crowd didn’t like the way he dressed.

  As for Machine Head, well it must have justified every single penny put into the new Purple label that I was so hostile to. We’d made it with about two weeks’ notice, and although I was still in recovery, and under doctor’s orders, it was our biggest album, with classics like ‘Highway Star’, ‘Space Truckin’’, ‘Never Before’, ‘Maybe I’m a Leo’, ‘Lazy’, ‘Pictures of Home’ and, of course, ‘Smoke on the Water’. It sold 3 million copies very quickly, made Deep Purple one of the biggest-selling bands in the world and, as with so much of our work, it’s been selling year in and year out, having also been remastered and reissued, as has been the case with other albums. Touring was typically arranged to coincide with the album, and we were spared another trip to the States, when Ritchie became ill with hepatitis. Still, it was only a brief respite, and we were soon rescheduled, and on our way to play non-stop, as the itinerary shows:

  January

  13th Hollywood Sportatorium, Pembroke Pines, Florida

  14th Curtis Hixon, Tampa, Florida

  15th Clemson, Florida

  16th Cumberland Fayetteville, North Carolina

  17th Buffalo, New York

  18th Must have had a cancellation!

  19th Detroit, Michigan

  20th Montreal, Canada

  21st Bloomington, Minnesota

  22nd/23rd Chicago

  24th Kiel Auditorium, St Louis, Missouri

  26th Wichita, Kansas

  28th San Bernardino, California

  29th San Jose, California

  30th Long Beach, California

  31st Boise, Idaho

  Not long into the itinerary, the whole thing started to become another massive struggle, and we reacted badly. So there was the time when Ritchie didn’t arrive in reception one morning, although Colin Hart had woken him in good time for our departure. Of course, we were well used to the guitarist doing things like this, but Colin went upstairs to gee him up, only to find him in floods of tears in the corridor.

  It’s difficult to put any real spark into this
part of my life, because there was so little joy around. We were firmly stuck on a treadmill, trudging from venue to venue, while the ultimate crash must have surely been on the way – except that nobody seemed to notice or care. Where was the smile, where was the glint in the eye, where was the spirit? Indeed where was the rock ’n’ roll? I’d have swapped all the money, the first-class hotels, the limos, the personal helpers and rock-’n’-roll perks for just one gig in some club or pub!

  Thankfully, I found an unlikely saviour through meeting Buddy Miles, with whose band we toured, and in whose company there were many fine moments of nonsense and escapism, often at his expense. On many an occasion, Ritchie and I would behave like little kids, hiding behind pillars at the airport, waiting for Buddy to waddle through. He was a man of large bottom, with splayed-out knees, because his thighs were so fat, and, whenever he’d pass us by, we’d be cranking out a few bars of ‘Them Changes’, but done in a very irreverent way, so that Buddy would swing round, going, ‘Who’s zat? What’s zat?’ before giving up trying to source it, and moving on to check onto his flight.

  Also with Buddy, I had my first introduction to the other world’s peccadilloes, and it happened at one of the hotels where we arrived early, after three connecting flights. It was a Holiday Inn type of place, and we turned up before noon. I went straight to my room, but simply couldn’t get off to sleep, until, somewhere across the corridor, I became aware of the sound of Buddy and his band, doing what they seemed to do all the time, which was party! In fact they partied all day and all night, and the whole tour continued like that, both on stage and off! They showed no nerves at all, no pre-show butterflies – they just locked into their American groove, and stayed that way!

  So, with sleep looking to be impossible, I decided to go across to where the music was playing, wearing just a pair of jeans, no shirt, and barefoot. I whacked the door open, to be greeted by these wonderful smells coming out of the room. On the bed were these two chicks making love to each other, while this guy played his ’bone, as others just sat around talking and smoking joints. And then there was Buddy, lying out on a bed, all fat and hairy, and talking music. It was constant jive talk, which I didn’t begin to understand, but they were all cracking up and having a great time, until Buddy saw me and said, ‘What’s up, boy?’ I told him I couldn’t sleep.

  ‘Well, maybe you should take a tote of this,’ he said, and proceeded to roll a joint, which he passed to me. In fact it was my first joint, and so I took a puff, and then another, then one more, but then I became aware that all these hands were reaching out, and I realised, for the first time in my life, that you were supposed to pass it round! Meanwhile, Buddy was rolling another spliff (I’m learning the jargon!), and this one was quite large. He handed it over, saying, ‘Take this back to your bed, boy; that’ll send you off to sleep.’

  We had a show that night, so I drifted back to my room, somehow contemplating the fact that, apart from one experience with a hubble-bubble in Beirut, this was the first time I’d actually touched anything certain people might not have approved of. I turned on the TV, stretched out and lit the joint. Well, I certainly slept all right, and had an incredible dream, which I remember in the finest detail.

  I was lying in a field in the wilderness, when this Amazonian-looking woman approached me. She was about six foot tall, lean and quite small-breasted. However, the strange thing about her was that her sex was not between her legs, but on the pubic mound. She had no body hair, and these two swollen lips protruded vertically, inviting what was now my fierce erection. I got up from the grass and walked slowly towards her. My being then entered her, as I became aware of other women who looked the same. The experience would be a constantly recurring dream of immense sexuality and dignity, although, when I became conscious, my condition was extremely painful, and I had to play four shows with a hard-on. Except my alarm went off, and reality kicked in!

  We’d released a single in March called ‘Never Before’ (‘When a Blind Man Cries’), and returned to the UK in early summer to find it had ‘stiffed’. So a meeting was called at the office to review things, and look at the accounts with Bill. When it was over, I asked what had gone wrong with the promotion of the single, and somehow the atmosphere suddenly became a bit hostile, until John said, ‘It was nothing to do with the promotion, Ian. It was just a duff record that nobody wanted to hear or play.’

  I said, ‘Well, John, as I see it, there was no promotion, and people didn’t even know it was out. It was a very low-key campaign.’

  John then began to wind himself up, beginning with, ‘There were full-page ads in all the music press, but of course you wouldn’t know about that because you’ve been in America!’

  Now it just so happened that Audrey had been keeping all the back numbers of the Melody Maker, NME and so forth, and I’d run through them all before the meeting. So I challenged him with, ‘That’s not true, John,’ and he must have realised that I’d caught him with his pants down. It was all very embarrassing, as he got up, sweating, and with eyes blazing with hatred. In fact I thought he was going to deck me, but instead he shouted, ‘Gillan, you always were a supercilious bastard,’ to which I replied, ‘Well, if you’re going to be formal, John, it’s Mr Gillan,’ before I took my leave to the sound of orchestrated mutterings.

  I later looked at a set of profit-and-loss accounts for the year end 1972, but the figures didn’t really help much. Our collective royalties were £63, 760. 64, and income from the European and American tours came to £155, 951. 13, making a total of nearly £220, 000. If I’d queried anything, I might have asked about the £6. 73 postage that year, but things were stressed out enough, without my pushing my luck any further!

  Back to the music, and, as the year progressed, the scale of gigs increased, putting us back into that now familiar routine, which Paicey described as ‘blurred together into one long stream, each one indistinguishable from the last’. He was right, and it brought back the time when Ritchie came away from an internal flight in America, where, having chatted with the boxer Joe Frazier, he promptly went down with hepatitis, for which the supremely fit and powerful fighter could not have been held responsible! However, because of cancellations from when I’d been ill, every effort was made to work through this schedule, and we tried to use Al Cooper, who I thought was fine, but he called in sick soon after and we had to cast the net again. Randy California stepped in for the gig in Quebec City, and we included ‘When a Blind Man Cries’ that night. Randy also played slide during ‘Child in Time’, and the audience went crazy. So, naturally enough, Randy was fired directly after the show, after which the remainder of the Canadian dates were shelved.

  A show in Germany without Ritchie went down quite well, even though we had previously offered refunds to the fans. However, most of them stayed but, unfortunately, many also stayed on after the show had ended and we’d gone. They smashed the place to smithereens, which made the authorities take our next gig (at full band strength) quite seriously. In fact, they brought in the army, which made me think, ‘Is all of this necessary, so five guys can do a concert?’ After that the half-mile journey back to the hotel took two hours, which reminded me of the adage: ‘You know you’ve made it when you get stuck in your own traffic jam!’

  Someone came on stage at Lüdenscheid and announced we’d be coming back shortly to do another set, and, when we didn’t, the crowd wrecked our gear, leaving John and Tony to successfully sue the city authorities for damages. All good stuff, you might think, but, in truth, I was beginning to find Deep Purple a machine over which I basically had no control, the more so because our label was expanding to take in other artists, and Roger was also showing an increasing interest (and skill) in the production side of things. He’d already cut his teeth on the album Razamanaz, which he produced for Nazareth, but, despite the now busier office with its new people to look after, and the fact that Ritchie had not yet recovered, we were soon on our way back to America, before returning to Europe for more gig
s and recording Who Do We Think We Are, which we made in Rome and Frankfurt in 1972, using the Stones’ mobile again. Including ‘Woman from Tokyo’, ‘Mary Long’ (my thoughts about the TV-clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the Christian social reformer and anti-porn campaigner Lord Longford) and ‘Smooth Dancer’, with its different thoughts on Ritchie, this was an unhappy album in the making, because Ritchie and I had basically had enough of each other.

  I often wonder whether the managers could have saved the inevitable from happening, by just calling a halt to the schedule and saying, ‘OK, lads, let’s take a break for a few months.’ But they didn’t, and so the day came when I sat down to write that famous letter to Tony Edwards. We were doing a short tour of America, and I was at the Imperial Hotel in Dayton, Ohio, whose notepaper had printed at the top, ‘Where Every Guest is King’. It was a nice touch, although I didn’t feel very ‘kingly’ at that moment, as I wrote: