Once the ink has dried on the official history of Deep Purple, Steve Morse’s name will be right there as the band’s longest-serving guitarist. There must have been times when that seemed unlikely.
Joining the British rock institution in 1996, he had to follow one of the all-time greats, Ritchie Blackmore, who had already carved Purple’s name into rock’s own Mount Rushmore with his Fender Stratocaster, Smoke On The Water, Highway Star, Burn, and all that jazz.
“The stuff I’d heard of Ritchie playing live was him experimenting,” says Morse, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “He would go off, He would go off and take it out, take it out and then bring it back. He led the way for that.”
Morse and Blackmore have quite different personalities, quite different styles, but they are kindred spirits in a sense. Like Blackmore, Morse liked to attack classic Purple material onstage, to take it to the edge. The problem was that not all of the Deep Purple fans appreciated such a cavalier approach.
They might have been used to the periodic revisions of the lineup, happy to see the band back in session, but this was too much. Morse chuckles at the memory, some of his best work… It didn’t always go down well.
“Now, the fans, when I played the Purple songs and took it out, some of them – a certain percentage of them about 30 per cent of them – just hated me,” he says. “And pretty much stayed in that position till 28 years later! [Laughs]”
Morse is joking on those percentages. He and Deep Purple were made for each other.
“I tried to incorporate my stylistic mixture with respect for what Ritchie did but with some of my own personality, too,” he says. “And the people there that hadn’t heard us yet. They had the old albums, of course – that’s why they came and bought tickets – but they got used to me being me and that was kind of new.”
Joining in 1994, the band looked to him during the writing sessions for Perpendicular. There was a sense that anything was up for grabs.
“The first album was magic because in the band, nobody knew what to expect, so everybody was open to ideas and open to experimenting,” says Morse. “and it was the best. It was just awesome.”
Morse felt free to cut loose. He was replacing Ritchie Blackmore but he didn’t have to be him. Thats not to say that all of his ideas were accepted.
“My job with Purple became providing ideas for the writing sessions, and one out of 20 might get used,” he says. “Ninety-five per cent of the time I was hearing, ‘That’s not going to work.’”
He didn’t hear that often from Deep Purple’s late keys/organ player Jon Lord. Lord was listening. He was the organist who played it like an electric guitar.
Morse loved pitting his instrument against this wall of sound. “I loved it. In fact, I was always pushing him to go back to playing the organ through an amp for some solos,” he says. “Y’know, the sound that he had in the Machine Head days.”
Lord liked what he was hearing from Morse. “Jon was the guy that listened to my ideas and thoughtfully added to them, rather than just saying, ‘That doesn’t sound like Purple,’” says Morse. “When Jon was around, he would hear something and say, ‘That’s a little bit leftfield, but what if we do this?’ And he would play it with a slight twist.”
During one writing session for 1996's Perpendicular, Morse's debut on a Deep Purple record, a tea break was called, and Morse played on for a bit. Like the others, Lord sat down for tea – but he was listening.
“It came from me just noodling to a guitar part, as a guitar solo piece. We were during a break, and you know how it is in the UK, everybody stops and drinks tea after so many minutes of doing anything,” says Morse, the only American in the band. “Jon sat down his cup and says, ‘Ah, that’s something there.’”
Morse demurred but Lord was hearing none of it. They went back to it, and that’s how Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming came together.
“I said, ‘I wasn’t thinking that that would be a tune for Purple. I was just practising an idea I had.’ And he said, ‘Well, I like it. Let’s do it. Let’s try ending on the four chord here.’ And by the end of the day, we had the song mapped out on tape because of Jon,” says Morse.
The Steve Morse Band's new studio album, Triangulation, is out now via Music Theories.
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