How Tommy Bolin Passed His Interview with Deep Purple
“This strange being was amazing to see.”
How do you replace the guy who wrote the iconic “Smoke on the Water” riff, contributed significantly to the success of albums like “In Rock,” “Machine Head,” and “Burn,” and impacted countless guitarists throughout the years? Dave Coverdale, bassist Glenn Hughes, keyboardist Jon Lord, drummer Ian Paice, and singer David Coverdale boldly chose to continue when Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1975 to form Rainbow.
And in Purple, who would take over for Blackmore? It was none other than Tommy Bolin, the guitarist who had once been seen with the James Gang and who had proved himself a formidable opponent to both Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham on the fusion masterpiece “Spectrum.”
Furthermore, both Coverdale and Hughes were open to reminiscing about how Purple eventually welcomed its first non-British member, Tommy Bolin, who was from Sioux City, Iowa, in the 2008 book “Touched by Magic: The Tommy Bolin Story.”
Coverdale recalled, “My top three recommendations were Jeff Beck, Rory Gallagher, and this guy called Tommy Bolin, who no one had really heard of.” “I had heard Tommy Bolin on two albums: Alphonse Mouzon’s “Mind Transplant” and Billy Cobham’s “Spectrum.” His work truly impressed me, and I was unaware that he was an African American man in his seventies. Everyone then exclaimed, “Whoa, he’s pretty good!” Therefore, we spread the word.”
It came out that the enigmatic guitarist lived close to Coverdale’s Malibu, California, residence at the time. Bolin accepted an invitation to jam with the band at Pirate Sound as soon as it was sent to him.
As the singer recalled, “This guy walks in with multi-colored hair, lime-green Arabian knight… They weren’t trousers, they were like pre-Steven Tyler floating pants. And on four or five-inch sole platform…they weren’t platform shoes, they were kind of platform sandals!” “I saw he had the Echoplex set up on a stand, his Hiwatt’s, and just the way he picked up the guitar, he was going to get the job,” said Hughes. “I particularly wasn’t looking for a Ritchie Blackmore clone. Let’s just say that if Yngwie Malmsteen would have been present at that time in the ’70s, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to go for a clone of Blackmore. As we didn’t clone [Ian] Gillan and [Roger] Glover with Coverdale and Hughes. So I think getting him in, we weren’t interested in jamming old Purple songs that day. We wanted to just forge ahead.”
“He was a sight to behold, this exotic creature,” added Coverdale. “He walked up to this line of amps, which had been pretty intimidating to whoever else had been there, and turned them all to eleven. Hit a chord, and the chord got everyone off their smug ass and started jamming immediately. All his guitars were in hock, for whichever reason, so he had borrowed a guitar for the audition.”
According to Hughes, everything automatically clicked into place musically.
“And lo and behold, I think we started coming up with stuff immediately, that first day. For me, Paicey, and Lordy, that’s what we liked to do anyway — jam a lot. We probably shouted out some chords and drifted off into some jazz stuff. And then we probably picked up the tempo and played some really intense rock stuff. It was a very brief audition because we knew he’d probably got the gig.”
Coverdale perhaps summed it up best by simply stating, “It was quite an extraordinary, explosive audition.”
However, the “Bolin era” of Purple would be a fleeting one: the quintet managed a single studio album, 1975’s oft-overlooked “Come Taste the Band,” and would split the following year after the album’s supporting tour had been completed.
Sadly, Bolin passed away on December 4, 1976, at the age of 25 from a drug overdose.
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