Monday, August 16, 2010
Deep Purple Mk4 documentary on the way

Deep Purple’s 1976 break-up gets the documentary treatment with “Gettin’ Tighter: The Story Of Deep Purple Mark 4,” set for release in early 2011.

In ’75, the revolving door that is/was Purple continued to spin – EXIT: Ritchie Blackmore, who went on to form Rainbow - ENTER: hired gun Tommy Bolin, who had just left The James Gang and signed a solo deal.

DPMK4 featured Bolin, David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes, Jon Lord and Ian Paice; the lineup was intact for just one album, 1975’s “Come Taste The Band” - the band broke up following their 6-month tour to support the record amid a haze of drugs, death and despair.

At the time, Hughes was dealing with a cocaine issue, while Bolin had a hidden heroin problem; as a result, the tour was a rough affair, and performances were very hit-and-miss.

“Gettin’ Tighter” will feature footage of Purple’s infamous visit to Indonesia in December ’75; events surrounding the two shows at the Senyan Sports Stadium in Jakarta were surreal.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, 20,000 fans broke through fences to join the 35,000 paid ticket holders at the December 4 concert, without much organized interference from the police. Following the gig, Bolin’s bodyguard, Patsy Collins, died after a six-story fall down the elevator shaft at the band’s hotel, under suspicious circumstances.

Then - as a delayed reaction to the fence-jumpers on night one - the December 5 event was beyond heavy on police presence: 6000 police (and a pack of Doberman Pinschers) were on hand to forcefully muffle any of the audience’s enthusiasm and participation by clubbing and beating fans, seriously injuring over 200 people. Rolling Stone wrote that Jon Lord “recalled seeing one mammoth dog dragging a kid across the floor by his arm, its teeth sinking into the boy’s flesh.”

DPMK4’s final show was March 15, 76 at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre; things had gotten so bad that Coverdale reportedly resigned three days earlier, without knowing that Lord and Paice had already decided to pack Purple in and move on - the only two out of the loop were Hughes and Bolin.

Purple’s split wasn’t officially announced until July, and it was 8 years before Purple MK2 reformed to give the band another life.

Tommy returned to his solo career, opening for bands like Blue Oyster Cult and The Jeff Beck Group, following which he was scheduled to support Fleetwood Mac. The first night of the Beck tour was his last: on December 3, 1976, after extensive post-show partying in Miami, Bolin died the next day of a multiple drug overdose at the age of 25.

“Gettin’ Tighter” will contain interviews with all DPM4 members: exclusive new sessions with Hughes and Lord are featured alongside archival footage from the tour with Bolin, Coverdale and Paice. “Deep Purple Rises Over Japan” – the concert film of the December 15, 1975 show at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall – will also be included in the package.

The Mk 4 DVD is now being scheduled for late May 2011. It is now retitled Phoenix Rising, and is a DVD packaged with a live audio CD. The DVD has a documentary (titled Gettin' Tighter); this was originally a sort of 'making of' Come Taste The Band, with studio knob twiddling, interviews, and footage of Deep Purple Mk 4, but is now extended to tell the story of the Mk 4 tour. More live material has been unearthed but we still do not know exactly what will be included beyond the 30 minute Rises Over Japan film.

There are three editions planned, a CD / DVD pack in a CD sized case. A DVD / CD pack which will include a small book and be a limited edition. A blu-ray edition with both video and audio elements on one disc.
The DVD will offer surround sound on the Rises footage. The disc will be NTSC only. So, it will play in the US, and on most DVD players worldwide. However, we have no info on a US label release at present.

The audio CD will include tracks from the Tokyo 75 and Long Beach 76 Purple Records releases.

Looks like this finally got released today (6/28). Picked up a copy at 'Rama. Amazon link below:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050I2PQE/?tag=imwan-20

To bad the cd is all previously released. I have both of those concerts already.

Look forward to seeing this. I always loved Tommy Bolin. Of course, he was very sick already with dependencies but boy, was he a guitar slinger.

Rick A.

Sounds like a very interesting DVD. I never did get Come Taste The Band and don't know the Mark IV band's music, but the story sounds like great rock and roll soap opera.


http://ultimateclassicrock.com/deep-pur ... vd-review/


Deep Purple, ‘Phoenix Rising’ – DVD Review
by: D.X. Ferris


Kayos Productions
Deep Purple‘s new DVD ‘Phoenix Rising,’ is a hell of package. This impressive collection documents the group’s “Mark IV” lineup — the short-lived, post- Ritchie Blackmore version of the band, which featured future Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale, recently added singer-bassist Glenn Hughes, keyboardist Jon Lord, drummer Ian Paice and often-overlooked guitar ace Tommy Bolin.
Few legendary bands receive such a thorough retrospective, and this collection does a real service to an underrated incarnation—one contemporary headline called it “Shallow Purple”—that warrants a closer look.

The DVD case is jam-packed with a DVD, CD, and two slick booklets that present a vintage tour program and press clippings from the ‘70s. With a running time of over two hours, the DVD itself is similarly dense, with a mini-concert film and an 82-minute documentary, ‘Gettin’ Tighter,’ which documents the band’s final year before its 1976 breakup.

‘Getting’ Tighter’ does an excellent job setting the stage for Mark IV: As it begins, Deep Purple is Billboard magazine’s top-selling artist. Then lead singer Ian Gillan is out, Hughes joins the band, and rookie Coverdale also climbs aboard, admirably filling stadium-sized shoes. Blackmore’s days are numbered, but we still get festival footage of him at the guitar-smashing height of his powers. After Blackmore’s departure, recalls Hughes, none other than David Bowie convinces the band to continue.

Enter Tommy Bolin, who’d recently escaped the post-Joe Walsh James Gang and landed in the Los Angeles jazz-fusion scene. The fashion plate guitarist had the charisma, style and sadly, bad habits that allowed him to effortlessly slide into a band that was quickly succumbing to the grip of drugs — all of this, the players note, takes place in an era where cocaine was regarded as a non-addictive, socially acceptable party drug.

The band quickly assemble their single studio album, 1975’s underrated-but-respectable ‘Come Taste the Band.’ It’s a promising start, but things get bad and stay there. The group launch a world tour that starts in Hawaii, hits Jakarta, and stops in hell. Around $750,000 goes missing, but money is the least of their problems. When a roadie dies under mysterious circumstances, the band themselves are detained and accused of murder. Deep Purple never recovers. Bolin feels straitjacketed by the band’s classic rock style and quits—and not long after suffers a fatal overdose.

The centerpieces of the documentary are two new interviews with Hughes and Lord. Both discuss the band’s entire career with exceptional frankness. Hughes unflinchingly recounts his descent into cocaine madness. Lord evaluates ‘Come Taste the Band’ with balanced honesty: “It is, to me, not a Deep Purple album,” he says, but later adds, “If you listen to it now, it’s a surprisingly good album.”

The documentary consistently uses side-by side dual frames, and while the approach keeps the story moving along, it still won’t get a hook in non-fans. The second frame is a parade of endless teaser clips, an appetizer for ‘Deep Purple Rises Over Japan,’ a half-hour live film of mysterious provenance from 1975.

As presented on the DVD, the ‘Rises Over Japan’ clips are far cleaner than the footage that’s been floating around for decades. The five-song sampler features the Mark IV band running through a cross-section of Purple favorites. Coverdale — sporting in Skynyrd-style facial hair — leads the band through ‘Love Child,’ arguably the lineup’s strongest song, as funk creeps in around the edges via Lord’s keyboards. Awash in red and blue lights, the band close with a fierce, but oddly toothless, version of ‘Smoke on the Water.’

The bulk of the CD features endless live versions of Coverdale-era material, including the Bolin showcase ‘Homeward Strut’ and a surreal medley that morphs from ‘Smoke on the Water’ to Hughes’ high-pitched take on ‘Georgia on my Mind.’

There’s also two tacked-on bonuses: 1975 interviews with Hughes and Lord, and a new electronic press kit for ‘Come Taste the Band.’ With some overlap from the documentary, it’s basically just a commercial, but then again, it’s for an album that deserves the plug.