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Shades of Deep Purple

SHADES OF DEEP PURPLE
 
 
Shades of Deep Purple  is the debut studio album by the English rock band Deep Purple, released in 1968.  Stylistically the music is close to psychedelic rock and progressive rock, two genres with an ever growing audience in the late 1960’s.  The single “Hush”, an energetic rock track originally written by Joe South, became very popular at the time, reaching number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.  Modern reviews of the album are generally positive and consider Shades of Deep Purple an important piece in the history of Deep Purple.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Now, on their website, Sundazed insists of the Stillroven that “their pedal-to-the-metal, frenetic version of ‘Hey Joe’ [is] still THE definitive version as far as we’re concerned”.  That’s a pretty strong statement considering that “Hey Joe” was one of the most recorded songs of the 1960’s.  Better-known covers include those by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Deep Purple (on their debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, they even claimed to be the songwriter!), Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, the Music Machine, and the Leaves. 
 
So, if you want to test that claim, here is the Stillroven on YouTube (audio only) performing “Hey Joe”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-0zMnkCYOE .
 
(September 2012)
 
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For me, most heavy metal bands sound pretty much the same; I say that not with any sort of snooty, snobby air at all but instead with a wistful sort of desire – had I been 13 or 14 years old when heavy metal was at its peak, I would have lapped it up like manna.  As it is, I was well into high school when the earliest heavy metal albums like the first albums by Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple came out; and I had already graduated from college when the first KISS album was released.  I like a lot of the best heavy metal – Led Zep is so good that I hardly even think of them as a heavy metal band.  I played that first KISS live album, Alive! a lot when it first came out for instance, and Shades of Deep Purple has been a long-time favorite.  I might have had a completely different sensibility about me had I grown up a few years later. 
 
(December 2012)
 
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Songwriting credits were not handled so scrupulously back then anyway, and those practices continued at least through the end of the 1960’s.  I have already mentioned in previous posts that Buffy Sainte-Marie showed her own name as the songwriter of “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond” on her debut album It’s My Way!; and that Deep Purple claimed to be the writer of “Hey Joe” on their 1968 debut album, Shades of Deep Purple (the musical bridge before the song was their work, but “Hey Joe” had already been a hit song several times by then). 

 

(February 2015)