My first favorite guitar solo

When I was 11 and my LP collection consisted of Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends (the sound of what I imagined it was going to feel like to be 21, back then) and the first two Deep Purple albums -- that'd be Shades of Deep Purple and The Book of Taliesyn -- my favorite guitar solo was the one Ritchie Blackmore played on "Wring That Neck" (retitled "Hard Road" for the squeamish American market), which I first heard on the B-side of their "Kentucky Woman" single -- Neil Diamond as Mitch Ryder might have sung him. 

That's when I liked Purple best: when they were still a Vanilla Fudge simulacrum, playing (mostly) slowed-down, stretched-out covers of pop hits and songs associated with the Beatles/Cream/Hendrix. Even then I could hear how eccentric Blackmore's phrasing and note choices were, and the way his lines sometimes veered into atonality. Like Jeff Beck, he had a touch and attack that gave his lines a vocalized sound -- lots of bends and a wide vibrato. Also like Beck, he sounded like he was mad as hell at somebody and using his guitar to get back at them. I liked Purple less after they heard Led Zep I and got heavier, although I still listened to Made In Japan more times in the summer of 1973 than any other album besides Dark Side of the Moon.

I've been geeking out on YouTube, watching live versions of this song, which vary from the '69 Bilzen festival, where Blackmore just runs classical scales like mad (he and Purple organist Jon Lord had that ability in common), to the one from '70 Brit TV, where he seems more into throwing the guitar around than playing. As someone who earned his stripes sweating it out in Reeperbahn toilets and US military bases in Germany with the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, Blackmore knew how to "Mach schau!" There are also a bunch of live versions of "Mandrake Root" (another number from the "Mk I" lineup that survived the transition to "Mk II") from '69-'70 out there, if you've a couple of hours to burn.

Blackmore did studio work for the tragic innovator Joe Meek (if you haven't seen the 2008 biopic Telstar: The Joe Meek Story, in which there's a Ritchie Blackmore character, you owe it to  yourself), so he was familiar with the dimensions of mock and real dementia in pop music, and his playing reflects that. He had a different kind of melodic imagination than your average blues-based rocker, and liked to play over chord changes (rather than soloing over a drone like most rock players). 

There's video of Purple playing "Wring That Neck" in the studio where you can hear Blackmore working out some of the ideas he'd use on the take they kept. What he plays on the record is so well crafted that I've stayed obsessed with it for, um, over 50 years now. It took me awhile to transcribe, especially the last eight bars, because Blackmore can play faster than I can think. I realized that my tendency to phrase in triplets -- as Ritchie does near the end of this -- when I'm trying to play fast and not just using a lot of hammers and pull-offs probably comes from trying to emulate this solo. 

I tried playing it through the Seymour Duncan humbucker on Nick Girgenti's old Lone Star Strat, but the tone sounded too Clapton-on-Bluesbreakers. I wound up using the neck pickup for the rhythm loop and the middle pickup with my Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal (in homage to Ritchie's Hornby-Skewes treble booster) for the solo. After I'd done this, I read a Guitar Player interview with Blackmore where he says he never uses the middle pickup! We live, we learn. I probably could have gotten a better take, and was about to take another pass when I goofed and erased the loop, which I took as a sign from the Universe that this was done.