The Day After The Sabbath 73: Hammond Lord [hammond organ special]

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As most of you will know by now, Jon Lord, original keyboardist with Deep Purple, passed away recently. Sad and thought-provoking news as it always is when rock gods leave us, I realised it was the perfect time, by way of some tribute, to finish off the hammond organ and keyboard comp I've been formulating for a while. Having now received the inspiration for it's theme and last, fitting track, here is 73: Hammond Lord. A collection of tracks with wicked hammond organ.

No doubt many of the bands here would have sounded very different if it were not for Jon Lord, one of the founding and longest-standing members of Deep Purple. He took an instrument that was originally designed as a cheaper alternative to church pipe organs, and pushed it to the limits with classically-trained skills and mega-amplification. The guitar's total domination of hard rock was gone for ever.

TRACKS

01. Santa Barbara Machine Head - Rubber Monkey (1967)
       from album 'blues anytime vol. 3'
02. Birth Control - Buy! (1972)
       from album 'hoodoo man'
03. Aardvark - Copper Sunset (1970)
       from album 'aardvark'
04. Pocket-Size - Opus III (1970)
       from retrospective 'in one or another condition'
05. Waterloo - Why May I Not Know (1970)
       from album 'first battle'
06. Ruphus - Trapped In A Game (1973)
       from album 'new born day'
07. Tortilla Flat - Life (1970)
       single
08. Quatermass - Up On The Ground (1970)
       from album 'quatermass'
09. Sugarloaf - Hot Water (1971)
       from album 'spaceship earth'
10. Eyes Of Blue - Q III (1969)
       single
11. Murphy Blend - At First (1970)
       from album 'first loss'
12. Pacific Sound - Forget Your Dream (1971)
       from album 'forget your dream!'
13. Attila - Holy Moses (1970)
       from album 'attila'
14. The Trip - Caronte [Part 1] (1971)
       from album 'caronte'

Where better to begin than with the track that boasts the talents of the man himself? 'Santa Barbara Machine Head' were a band put together briefly to record some jams for Immediate Record's series of blues albums called "Blues Anytime". "Santa Barbara Machine Head" featured Jon Lord, Ronnie Wood (guitar), John 'Twink' Alder (drums) and Kim Gardner (bass). You are right to recognise those names, 1967 was the year and these guys were just starting their careers, or had already been in some successful bands by that time. Wood (later of the Stones) and Kim were both in The Birds and The Creation, Twink would go on to bands including The Pretty Things and The Pink Fairies.

Birth Control's track is taken from their third album, 1972's Hoodoo Man, and Wolfgang Neuser was the keys man here. Starting out as it means to go on with the sound of air raid explosions, plenty of rock solid hammond riffs follow. To me, this sounds like Tony Iommi playing hammond...which can't be bad!

Pocket-Size

The third track is from the UK band Aadvark. Early on they included Paul Kossof and Simon Kirke who later went on to Free, but when they recorded 'Copper Sunset' they had changed to a keyboard-lead prog act with Steve Milliner (previously of Black Cat Bones) providing the fuzzed-up hammond riffs. Copenhagen's Pocket-Size first appeared on my last comp and unfortunately there is very little known about them, their only recordings were retrospectively released by Frost Records in recent times and 'In One Or Another Condition' shows their solid skills with some big stoned chops, ably assisted by great hammond.

Waterloo were a Belgian band that have cropped up here before in my Belgian comp, and they more than deserve credit for their intricate multi instrumental hard prog, often lead by plenty of awesome hammond.

Gudny Aspaas (Ruphus)

Ruphus are a rarity for TDATS, as they are from Norway, a country quite severely lacking here so far. Rest assured that I will redress that balance at some time, and in the mean-time take in this blinding track featuring the amazing vocal power of songstress Gudny Aspaas, accompanied by some hard as nails prog riffs. Tortilla Flat were a German act who made one album, though the track I used here, 'Life', was first aired as a single in 1970. Guitarist Michael Koch would later be in Jeronimo who I used way back on Vol5.

London's Quatermass (taking their name from a BBC science-fiction series) had a link to Deep Purple. All three of them had and would play in Ian Gillan-related projects like Episode 6 and Gillan. Their prog sounds were confident and accomplished right from the off and were in some ways fairly ahead of their time for 1970. Plenty of innovative electronic embellishment went along with Peter Robinson's keys and hammond. Unfortunately they didn't market well and only made one album, but they definitely had the talent and scope to become established.

8 Track

Conversely, Colorado's Sugarloaf were a less interesting, radio-friendly band who had enough success from a couple of singles to make 4 albums. I guess there's a good indicator of the power of american radio. Their biggest hit 'Green Eyed Lady', while musically proficient and slick, played it pretty safe, and I was about to give up on researching them when the scathing guitar introducing 'Hot Water' suddenly jumped out at me from their second album 'Spaceship Earth'. The riff was followed satisfyingly by cool hammond and I was delighted to find another unexpected, worthy inclusion.


Eyes Of Blue were Welsh, and one of those incredibly important bands that seemed to be a breeding ground for an entire country's rock history, as I found making the Welsh Vol56. Q III was a single b-side from 1969 with lots of great psychedelic hammond.

Pacific Sound

Berlin's Murphy Blend made one album in 1970 and the excellently named Wolf-Rüdiger Uhlig was the keys man. Bass player Andreas Scholz would later go on to Blackwater Park, who recorded one of my favourite tracks of all time, the mind-numbingly epic "Rock Song". Pacific Sound, from Neuchâtel, emerged from the Swiss ballroom covers-band scene and managed to record one album of mostly originals before calling it a day. The hard-edged tracks like Forget Your Dream had a distinctive fresh sound, and were quite manic.

Attila just had to be included here! Some of you may know that it was a one-album band that featured a very young Billy Joel on heavily distorted hammond, along with friend Jon Small, after they had both left The Hassles. Definitely aiming for shock value, they had a kind of proto-Manowar album cover, with decidedly smaller biceps of course! Billy describes them thus: "End of the sixties, I was in a two-man group. We were heavy metal, we were going to destroy the world with amplification, we had titles like 'Godzilla', 'March of the Huns', 'Brain Invasion'. A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar... I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs. It was great, but we can't stay in the club."

The Trip

The compilation ends on another link to Deep Purple. The Trip were a London band, started by an Italian called Riki Maiocchi. They recruited Ritchie Blackmore right at the start and soon moved to Italy. Blackmore quit and came back to the UK in time to join Deep Purple. By the time they recorded their debut, most original members were gone (including Riki Maiocchi) and they had mutated into one of Italy's first hard progressive bands. "Caronte [Part 1]" features incredible use of hammond by the talented Joe Vescovi, as atmospheric in some parts as he is heavy in others.



*nb: this post contains the word 'hammond' 14 times.

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