Stargazer - 1977

Stargazer - 1977

The transition from pantomime guitar to the real thing was going to take some work. I am quite sure that without the inspiration of my childhood heroes, I would never have put the work in to become a real guitar player.

Although KISS were not considered virtuoso musicians, I give them as much credit in the inspiration department as Deep Purple or any of my later favorites. No matter what one may think of KISS, nobody can deny that those fuckers were rock-n-roll. The look, tunes, show, and sheer rock and roll energy of that band were very inspirational, and I know they were the spark for many aspiring young rockers in the seventies.

Around the same time Paulie and I got our instruments on the Magic Christmas of '76, I started listening to Deep Purple again. DP - Mk3 with David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes was happening by then, and I loved the Made In Europe live album. Burn and Mistreated became staples of the living room pantomime concerts I would do by myself after getting home from a long, dull day at school. I would burn a joint and then let my imagination run wild. I had a real guitar now too! It was heavier than the cut-out, but I needed to get used to the weight. I was sure I would figure out how to play it soon enough, there was never any question of that, it was only a matter of time and practice now.

I met a dude at Cameron that turned me onto a band called Rush from Canada, and I thought their album Caress of Steel was really cool. (Little did I know that they were hard at work on a little album called 2112 at the time.) Another guy named Drew turned me on to Master of Reality by Black Sabbath. I liked Sabbath, but I didn't like getting busted with Drew while skipping school one day. He had an ounce of weed on him, and I was lucky that I wasn't holding, I only got in trouble for skipping school. We were taken down to juvenile and everything. I can't believe mom and dad never found out he had weed on him. (Interesting side note: ELP's Nashville concert with the full orchestra was that night. Dad was excited to take me to this concert with my new open mind to other music, and even though he was pissed at me for skipping school, he still took me, LOL. Great show!)

I was listening to, buying, and borrowing records from friends. I listened to many different bands at the time. Pink Floyd Animals, Jeff Beck Wired, Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy, Lynyrd Skynyrd Two More From the Road, Jethro Tull' Aqualung,' and many others. Little did I know that my shit was about to be blown away one afternoon after school by one of Paulie's classmates, our new friend Mike Fischer.

The story goes that Mike bought the album based on the badassery of the cover art alone, not knowing anything about the band. He said later that any band that would put a painting of a gnarly fist coming out of the sea holding a rainbow had to be good. The album was Rising by a band called Rainbow.

When I looked at the back cover, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Ritchie Blackmore!

There he was in black and white, walking through smoke, fuzzy black hair flying as he wielded his Stratocaster like a broadsword.

He had a new band?

He had a new band! Holy Shit!

(I didn't know they had released an album earlier, Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. News traveled slowly in those days. Living and breathing KISS for a year probably didn't help.)

I had no idea what to expect as we put the album on for the first time. The singer guy Ronnie James Dio looked cool in the picture. We started with side two because the songs were ten minutes long, and that was the shit in my book.

The killer opening drum lick of Stargazer was a sign of what was to come. When the main riff kicked in, Paulie, Fish, and I all just looked at each other and smiled. Goddamn! This was Deep Purple on steroids! The riff was massive, and the musicians played with fire and attack that literally jumped off the vinyl. Then, like a meteor from the planet Bad Ass Vocals came the voice of Ronnie James Dio:

"High noon, Oh I'd sell my soul for water!"

FUCK!

As the song played through, it became apparent that this was the BEST SONG EVER WRITTEN! There were no other contenders. This was absolutely new, and it ruled from the first note until it faded out into oblivion. Nothing before could touch it, and it was doubtful that anything after would ever be able to, either. The parts were awesome and perfect, the lyrics were cool as shit, the vocals killed, and the solo was Ritchie at his best. It was so fucking heavy, yet it was melodic, powerful, and intricate at the same time. The verses were straight-up heavy metal, the definition of metal in fact, and the chorus was this excellent minor key classically influenced vibe like I had never heard before. Cozy Powell was just a beast on the drums! Ronnie sang with such power and passion, he had perfect pitch and incredible range. Ritchie burned in the solo with his signature double picking, killer slide work. Then he introduced some eastern sounding Phrygian scales, which made you see the Great Pyramids in your imagination. Nobody had ever played guitar like that before.

This was it, man, perfection.

We listened to it over and over that first day. We eventually heard the rest of the album, which is great, but Stargazer was the star of the show. I soon had my own copy of Rising, and I wore that record out. I could not wait to get home from school and smoke a joint, hold my guitar, and listen to Stargazer. I had a new all-time favorite song and a new all-time favorite singer. I still couldn't play guitar, but I had the air guitar solo down!

'Stargazer' stood as my favorite song for many, many years. (It probably still does.) Kill the King, which came out soon afterward, first on the live masterpiece Rainbow On Stage, then on the next studio album Long Live Rock and Roll, may have given it a run for its money on occasion.

By the way, any of you guys out there that are under thirty, and you think you know what metal is, and you wanna try to tell us old dudes what metal is, you may want to listen to these albums first. Some of the shit that passes as metal these days makes me laugh. I wish y'all would come up with another name for it. Look, don't try to tell someone who slept under a van in the parking lot after 16 hours of headbanging at US Festival '83 HEAVY METAL DAY, what is and is not metal, okay?

Where was I? Oh, yeah...

Whenever I talk about Rainbow, I am only talking about the version with Dio. It's okay if you liked Graham Bonnet or Joe Lynn Turner, I just couldn't get into it. (I have warmed to it a little now that I'm old.) There were some cool songs, but their direction went a bit too commercial for me. After Ronnie left, I believe Ritchie should have changed the name of the band ... I mean, I get it, but still, it was like going from a Ferrari to a Ford. Ritchie made some good records with Graham and Joe Lynn, but he made history with RJD.

I am confident that Rainbow is the reason I was inspired to finally learn how to play guitar for real. Everything was converging in the spring of 1977. I had the fire in my heart for rock-n-roll, I had the equipment, and now I had direction. I had heard the words' heavy metal' for a while, and I finally knew what they meant.

It was becoming clear what I was supposed to be. I did not want to go to college, I did not want a 'career,' I did not want to go to church, I did not want to play sports, I did not want to do anything except fucking rock the guitar with loud distortion and cool riffs with burning leads from hell.

I was going to be a heavy metal guitar player, goddamnit.

Now there were just two problems. I had to learn how to play, and I had to find some partners in crime and form a band.