In the late summer of 1975, 20-year-old Sounds writer Geoff Barton journeyed to the US to write an on-the-road piece about Deep Purple.
Little did he know what he was getting himself into, as internal bickering, jealousy and addiction began to tear the band apart. In 2003, he revisited the trip for Classic Rock.
“I must say that the las tour for me was horrendously wrong,” Glenn Hughes says today of Deep Purple’s infamously doomed Mk IV line-up world tour.
“Regardless of whether Tommy was a good choice as a replacement for Ritchie, there was a total line drawn around Deep Purple.
“It was me and Tommy, it was Coverdale sort of in the middle, and it was Lordy and Paicey on the other side – the two guys who were definitely not happy with our behaviour. I don’t know, man. Something happened when Tommy joined the band.”
Tommy Bolin had been playing guitar with Deep Purple for maybe four months when I noticed the first cracks in his relationship with the rest of band beginning to appear.
It’s early afternoon on a fine Indian summer’s day in September 1975. A 20-year-old cub reporter from British music weekly Sounds – that’s me – is standing in the foyer of London’s Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn, hanging on the house telephone, trying to call Bolin’s room.
Eventually, after several rings, a hoarse voice answers. Bolin apologises, says he’s only just woken up, and complains about a throbbing head – the result of an encounter with Newcastle Brown Ale the night before. Nevertheless, we arrange to meet in the lobby in just 15 minutes’ time.
Bolin arrives pretty much on schedule and, to his credit, looks only slightly bleary-eyed. He’s wearing a plain, pale-coloured T-shirt – there’s no ‘The Ultimate’ slogan emblazoned across it, that would come later – and dark blue, crushed-velvet trousers with the merest hint of a flare at the bottom.
Tall-heeled snakeskin cowboy boots add a good couple of inches to his height, pushing him close to the six-foot mark.
His trademark white peaked cap is perched at a jaunty angle on his head, and his long, blond-streaked, freshly showered hair frames a disarming baby face.
We decide to adjourn to the hotel bar, where Bolin immediately orders up a vast green salad. He devours it in seconds and comes up for air looking suitably refreshed (although to this day, I must admit I’ve never found a heap of crisp-leaf lettuce to be a particularly effective hangover cure).
Next he gets a huge shandy with lots of ice and a swizzle stick with which to swirl the mixture around. Eventually, finally, we get down to business.
Bolin has just finished recording the album Come Taste The Band with his recently acquired Deep Purple chums, marking the beginning of the Mark IV line- up of the band. Naturally I’m curious about how Bolin thinks the new record will be received.
Some commentators in the music press are already portraying him as a flamboyant Yankee interloper who has no right to be a member of an archetypal British heavy rock band.
So how comfortable is Bolin in filling the dainty patent leather shoes of his predecessor, Ritchie Blackmore – to many fans the man who effectively was Deep Purple? And won’t people miss the taciturn Man In Black’s distinctive, Strat-slingin’ style of guitar playing?
Bolin remains unabashed. “I think they’re going to love it, he predicts, that gravelly voice I heard on the telephone now replaced by slow, lazy, measured tones. “
The new album is more sophisticated than the old Purple stuff, but I don’t think that’ll matter. The kids are more clued-in than they were a year ago, so I think it’ll be accepted. Highly. Very highly.”
Bolin pauses to take a sip of his super-cold shandy. “During Ritchie’s last days with the band,” he continues, “most of the members were so fucked off with everything. I think bringing in a new guitar player has made a hell of a difference. I honestly believe that we should keep some connections with the past, not sever them all, but at the same time begin to progress in our own direction.
“Everyone in Purple has brightened up,” he adds, stirring aggressively with the swizzle stick, the vortex causing lumps of ice to clatter loudly inside the glass.
Apart from receiving accolades for his fiery, fluid playing on Spectrum, a highbrow jazz-rock fusion album released by renowned drummer Billy Cobham, Bolin is pretty much an unknown in the UK at this point. He therefore takes a little time to bring me up to speed on his career to date. He was born on August 1, 1951, and christened Thomas Richard Bolin.
“What happened was, I developed a fixation for Elvis Presley at an early age,” he smiles, imitating The King’s famous surly curled-lip movement.
Bolin says that seeing Elvis in concert when he was just five years old was a defining moment. With the strains of Jailhouse Rock ringing in his infant ears, he just knew he wanted to be a singer or some kind of musician when he got older.
So he badgered his parents into buying him a guitar and, as he grew up, began to learn how to play the licks to Elvis songs such as All Shook Up.
“From there I started playing in Denny And The Triumphs and A Patch Of Blue – just a couple of little covers bands from the local neighbourhood.
But the turning point probably came when I was kicked out of high school in my home town [Sioux City, Iowa] for having long hair.”
Bolin’s hippy parents didn’t push their son to return to school. His mother, Barbara, told the principal: “If you can’t accept him, he can’t accept you.
” Despite being only about 16 at the time, Bolin quit the family home and travelled west to check out the burgeoning music scene in Denver, Colorado.
He had a brief stint playing in a band called American Standard, then upped sticks again and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to take up the job of backing blues guitarist Lonnie Mack.
But before long Bolin returned to the state of Colorado – this time to the city of Boulder – and there he formed a band called Ethereal Zephyr with ex-American Standard keyboard player John Ferris, drummer Robbie Chamberlain and the husband and wife duo of bassist David Givens and singer Candy Givens, a Janis Joplin soundalike.
“We shortened our name to Zephyr and released an album on the ABC label [Zephyr, 1969] and one on Warner Brothers [Goin’ Back To Colorado, 1971],” Bolin reveals. “We were like this psychedelic blues band.” Zephyr enjoyed some success locally, and their first album scraped into the US Top 50. Their second record, however, was a flop.
(A quick aside here. While researching this story and delving into Zephyr’s past a little more deeply, I discovered that the band recorded a third album, without Bolin, before splitting.
I also came across the first significant reference to drugs: a quote from David Givens has him admitting that Zephyr had something of a reputation in this department.
He mentions that Bolin dabbled with THC (aka tetrahydrocannabinol), the main mind-altering ingredient in cannabis. Much later, in 1984, Candy Givens suffered a drug-related death – after a marathon drinking session, she gulped down a handful of Quaaludes, or downers, and drowned in the bath. But enough of that for the time being. Let’s return to the main feature.)
Bolin shrugs, as if Zephyr’s failure was no big deal. “So I left the band and started getting very much into the jazz-rock fusion scene – Weather Report, Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, all that kind of stuff. I formed a band called Energy and played alongside guys like Jeremy Steig, the flute player, and drummer Gil Evans.”
But Energy struggled to get a recording contract.
“We were playing really free-form, improvisational stuff. That was probably why we didn’t get signed; I think we frightened off a lot of record company executives.
Anyhow, Jeremy persuaded me to set up base in New York for a while. And that’s where I met up with Billy Cobham. He’d just left the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and he invited me to play on his Spectrum album.”
When Spectrum was released, in 1973, people really began to sit up and take notice of Bolin. Because Spectrum is one of the definitive jazz-rock fusion albums.
It certainly sounds just as miraculous, enthralling and bewildering today as it did back then. To call Bolin’s playing on tracks such as Stratus (later the basis of Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm) and Quadrant 4 mind blowing is like saying the people whose heads exploded in the 1981 movie Scanners were simply suffering from tense, nervous headaches.
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