Wait For The Ricochet

Deep Purple — "Child in Time" (1970)

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And now on to today’s post, which was originally supposed to be a quick thing based on a brief but cathartic listening experience last week, but which sort of grew and expanded of its own volition. Hope ya dig it, regardless…

Whenever I think of Deep Purple, my thoughts immediately flash back to Greece — specifically, the grimy marble steps of the University of Athens in the late July of 1981.

I’d been kicking around the ancient city that day with Aristotle — my good friend from Chicago, with whom I was traveling — and Johnny, a kid from Connecticut we’d met the previous month while attending a three-week session at a summer camp for Greek-American kids. (I am not actually of Greek extraction, but the folks who ran the camp figured that having Italian heritage and a genuine interest in Hellenic history and archaeology was close enough to qualify me for enrollment.)

While most of our fellow campers flew back to the U.S. once the session was over, my odyssey with Aristotle had just begun. We spent the next month or so back-packing around Greece, reverently visiting ancient sites, hanging out with Greek Orthodox monks in remote monasteries, soaking in the incredible beauty of the Aegean coastline and islands, and nearly getting arrested on several occasions for doing really stupid shit. We were both 15 at the time.

Johnny was spending the remainder of the summer with his elderly aunt and uncle in their spacious apartment near Omonoia Square. Every time Aristotle and I stopped back in Athens on our way somewhere else, we’d meet up with him and wander the city together, excursions which always seemed to end with us all getting drunk in some outdoor café. Johnny was a year older than us, and seemed considerably more worldly; he wore mirrored aviator shades and a semi-full moustache, drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, and had a real knack for finding and befriending locals who were able hook him up with hash. (I didn’t smoke, but was impressed nonetheless by his resourcefulness.)

Johnny was also an expert on all things pertaining to hard rock and heavy metal, and seemed constitutionally unable to pass an Athenian newsstand without stopping to scan it for the latest British and European metal magazines. Johnny’s favorite band was Van Halen — he regaled us many times that summer with a blow-by-blow recounting of the VH concert he’d attended at the Hartford Civic Center — but his tastes also ran deeper and harder; the first time I ever even heard of Saxon, Motörhead or Tigers of Pan Tang, it was because Johnny mentioned them in the course of our conversations.

But Johnny was into older stuff, too. On this particular blazing-hot afternoon, he struck up a conversation with one of the many grubby-looking students who were selling things on the university’s steps. This informal flea market offered everything from books and records to clothing and handmade jewelry and artwork — anything that might raise a few drachmas for food or booze or whatever. Johnny, like Aristotle, spoke Greek fluently, and I figured he was feeling the student out about the possibility of obtaining some hash. Instead, he reached down to the blanket that the student had spread out on the steps, plucked a small pamphlet from it, and handed over a few crisp banknotes. He and the student both seemed very pleased with the transaction; they exchanged wide grins and a hearty “Efharisto!” as Johnny walked away.

“What’d ya get?” I asked, when he returned to me and Aristotle.

“Deep Purple lyric book!” he announced, proudly holding his new prize aloft. “One of a kind!”

The student he’d bought it from had made the booklet himself. On the cover was a hand-drawn rendition of the ridiculous Rushmore-ized band portrait from Deep Purple’s 1970 album In Rock, and its pages were filled with lyrics to about 20 of the band’s songs, all of which were painstakingly rendered in a sort of Middle Earthian calligraphic style that seemed incongruously fussy for such not-exactly-sophisticated statements as “Smoke on the Water,” “Into the Fire,” “Space Truckin’,” etc. But the whole thing was clearly a labor of love, and quite impressive in its humble, self-published way — and Johnny, ardent Deep Purple fan that he was, wasn’t going to just let it lay there on that grotty blanket.

Deep Purple promo photo, 1972

“Deep Purple… they turned into The Scorpions, right?” I asked him as we made our way to an empty table at a nearby café. Even after nearly two years of constant exposure to FM rock radio — and despite buying a reissue 45 of “Smoke on the Water” with the studio version on one side and the Made in Japan live version on the other — I was still almost entirely ignorant about Deep Purple, beyond a vague awareness that their membership was somehow interconnected with one or more of the many British and European hard rock bands that were still in steady rotation on Chicago’s WLUP.

“Nah, man,” Johnny laughed. “They had nothing to do with the Scorps. You’re thinking of Rainbow.” And over several rounds of gin and tonic, he proceeded to give us an impromptu seminar on the many incarnations of Deep Purple, the godlike brilliance of founding guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, and what happened to the various members after they left the now-defunct band. “And you know that guy Ronnie James Dio, who’s the singer on Rainbow’s ‘Man on the Silver Mountain’? He’s in Black Sabbath now,” he added helpfully, as I struggled to keep the players straight without a scorecard amid the combined effects of the heat and gin.

It was fascinating info (and, in retrospect, remarkably accurate for a teenager without the internet or Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees at his disposal), but I didn’t put any of it to use upon returning to Chicago that August. My musical tastes were already veering strongly towards the punk and new wave end of the spectrum, and the big arena rock stuff was starting to seem pretty antiquated to me by comparison. However, about eight years later — when I’d caught the hard n’ heavy bug again and started delving beyond the best-known “radio” cuts of adolescent faves like Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Rainbow, Rush, Deep Purple, Scorpions, etc. — much of Johnny’s Athenian café symposium came flooding back to me, serving as a road map for further musical exploration.

This time around, the Deep Purple cut that made the biggest impression upon me was “Child in Time,” the 10-minute bummer-rock epic that closes Side One of In Rock, which continues to be my favorite Purple LP. I remembered reading the song’s lyrics in Johnny’s book, and being struck by their profound sense of alienation and fatalistic dread — qualities notably absent from such dick-swinging Purple anthems as “Speed King,” “Highway Star” and “Woman from Tokyo”— though I don’t think I’d ever actually heard the song at that point.

Now that I was finally hearing those Ian Gillan-penned lyrics set to music, that sense of alienation and dread came across all the more powerfully, even if the words themselves — metaphorical musings about a “blind man shooting at the walls” and the resulting need to “bow your head and wait for the ricochet” — were never going to win any poetry prizes. As with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and “Electric Funeral,” the lyrics to “Child in Time” were written by Gillan with the ever-present fear of nuclear conflagration in mind, a fear that had been heightened in late 1969 by the escalation of tensions between the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and China, and what then seemed like a never-ending war in Vietnam.

from The Daily World (New York, NY), October 25, 1969

As with the aforementioned Black Sabbath songs, “Child in Time” wasn’t meant to be an articulate, mic-dropping critique of militarism along the lines of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” or a bold statement of defiance like Phil Och’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” — it’s simply an unvarnished howl of anguish and confusion from someone caught in the middle of a horrifying situation not of his own making. And just like with said Sabbath songs, the artless sincerity of “Child in Time”’s sentiments combines with over-the-top musical performances to create a piece of art that’s both genuinely cathartic and more than a little absurd. (Which is in no way putting it down — I celebrate absurdity in rock n’ roll like I celebrate hot sauce on my sandwiches.)

“Child in Time” starts out soft and spooky, with Jon Lord’s liquid minor-key Hammond melody — nicked, by his own admission, from “Bombay Calling” by San Fran psychsters It’s A Beautiful Day — and Ian Paice’s light cymbal taps setting the song’s somber tone. Ian Gillan, who usually sings as if he’s leaning back at a 120 degree angle to counteract the weight of his massive belt buckle, surprisingly spends most of his first minute at the microphone in low-key mode, only briefly unleashing the freakish power of his pipes as he nears the end of the fourth stanza.

Sweet child in time
You'll see the line
The line that's drawn between
Good and bad

See the blind man
Shooting at the world
Bullets flying
Ohh taking toll

If you've been bad
Oh Lord I bet you have
And you've not been hit
Oh by flying lead

You'd better close your eyes
Ooohhhh bow your head
Wait for the ricochet

Then the drums kick in, and the march of the damned begins, with Gillan wordlessly wailing near the top of his considerable range like a soul in deep torment. “I wanna hear YOU sing,” he suddenly demands, his voice descending to a lower, rougher pitch like some kind of lesser demon charged with prodding the latest arrivals through the concentric circles of Hell. As the music further builds in intensity, Gillan really starts shrieking; it’s as if the demon has just touched a white-hot pitchfork to the general region of his aforementioned belt buckle.

A brief tattoo of martial drumming gives way to a wonderfully bluesy Blackmore guitar break, and the band is off, galloping headlong into battle; you can easily picture Blackmore’s flaming guitar leading the charge, and future members of Iron Maiden and Metallica furiously taking notes. The next two minutes and change are loud, thrilling and at times blissfully messy, as Paice and bassist Roger Glover attempt to lock in together amid the breakneck rush, and Blackmore and Lord (as they so often did during the glory years of Deep Purple Mk 2 and 3) urge each other on to greater feats of musical derring-do. At the 6:07 mark, the song comes to an explosive halt — and begins all over again, with Lord back in church and Gillan back crooning into the mic…

Gillan doesn’t add anything new here — he simply repeats the same lines he sang at the beginning of the song. Maybe he couldn’t come up with anything else; or maybe he felt he’d already said all that needed to be said, and that further elaboration would dilute the power and feel of the message. Either way, it works; and the second “march of the damned” segment that follows is even more intense than the first, with Gillan’s savage shrieks threatening to pierce the fabric of Heaven itself.

Deep Purple, Mkand fee 2. Love Ian Paice’s personalized bass drum!

At this point, the music — which has resided in the key of A minor for the last nine minutes — makes a diabolical drop down to E, then climbs quickly back up the ladder like an evil dwarf as the band’s volume, intensity and chaos swells exponentially, and a double-tracked Gillan starts crying “No! No! OHHH NOOO!” like Arthur Brown coming face to flaming-headdressed face with his own demise. The whole thing finally blows apart with a thunderous boom, scattering stray notes and shards of wood and wire into the reverb-soaked void. In future centuries, archaeologists who plumb the resulting blast crater for answers will find only broken cymbals, bits of melted amplifier, and a gigantic scorched belt buckle.

Both as performance and listening experience, “Child in Time” is, as the kids say, a lot. During my days behind the counter at Chicago’s See Hear Records & Tapes, my co-workers and I would occasionally crank the song up to deafening levels at closing time in order to clear the store of slow-moving shoppers. “You could just ask us to leave,” one annoyed customer huffed at me as I mimed along with Gillian’s haunted howling, and it’s true that I could have — but it was just so much more fun to do it this way.

Last week, furious over my country’s latest GOP-abetted lurches into fascism, inhumanity and general self-destructive stupidity, and feeling fried from 10 hours of writing and doing research for my latest book project, I was in desperate need of some musical therapy. While my initial instinct was to pull out something articulately angry like Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man or something soul-balming like Earth, Wind & Fire’s Open Our Eyes (a recent and long-overdue pickup on vinyl), I soon realized that something louder was required to unclench my jaw and shake me from my funk. A Facebook friend had recently posted something about In Rock, reminding me that it had been way too long since I’d given that fine album a spin. And since my landlords were out of town, I wouldn’t even need to put on headphones…

Blasting In Rock on vinyl at chest-cavity-thudding volume was maybe even more of an exhilarating experience than I’d remembered, and it once again triggered a flurry of images and memories from my long-ago summer in Greece. I remembered how stuck in the early 1970s so many of the younger Greeks I encountered seemed to be — and not just the longhaired students I saw on the steps of the University of Athens, who could have been dead ringers for the University of Michigan students I saw hanging out on “The Diag” a decade earlier. Many of the record stores I visited in Athens and Thessaloniki had American LPs from the Woodstock era on prominent display, and the clothing stores I passed in those cities seemed to indicate that the hottest fashion trend in Greece circa 1981 was… unisex bell-bottom jeans?

At the time, I just figured that it took a while for US/UK pop cultural trends to find their way to Greece. Which may have been the case, but in retrospect it occurs to me that so many of the clothing styles that were being worn by young Greeks in 1981 — and so much of the music that they deeply revered — originated during the period of 1967 to 1974, which also happened to be the years where the country was ruled by a right-wing military dictatorship. As Greek travel writer and historian Matt Barrett writes on his A History of Greece website, this was no coincidence:

…at the time this music was the primary opposition to the Junta within Greece. Kids are growing their hair, smoking hashish and listening to western music coming into the country through the US Military Radio station AFRS, and the huge number of small clandestine radio stations. In 1971 the movie Woodstock is shown in Athens, causing near riots. For young people it is one of the most exciting events of the period and when the recently deceased Jimi Hendrix appears on the screen the glow of a thousand bic-lighters and candles fills the theater. The youth of Greece see there seems to be a world of peace, love and music outside and their country is a prison in comparison. The colonels want to keep western pop-culture out of Greece and keep the youth isolated so they might fully embrace their Hellenic-Christian values. Their police raid the clubs, taking away long-haired young men, cutting their hair and sending them to do their military service. But the junta find it is impossible to keep the spirit of young people bottled up... From this point on for the youth of Greece it is simple: The government is the enemy and this is war.

From the Fort Pierce Tribune (Fort Pierce, Florida), December 9, 1974.

By the summer 1981, it had been seven years since the military junta had collapsed, and six and a half since Greek citizens had overwhelmingly voted to ditch their 142 year-old monarchy in favor of a republic. But for someone who had grown up under the “Regime of the Colonels” and chafed under its xenophobic rule, the junta must have still felt like painfully recent history — and the youth music and fashions of that period must have still seemed like inspiring totems of freedom, resistance and rebellion.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the student who’d made Johnny’s Deep Purple lyric book simply loved the band’s music… but it’s also not to much of a stretch to imagine the Cold War lamentations of “Child in Time” resonating with him on a far deeper level, either during the military junta period or in the years immediately following it — a time when tensions between Greece and Turkey were newly heightened, and many Greek citizens and politicians were advocating for the closure of US military bases on the country’s soil. The Greeks hadn’t forgotten the U.S. government’s formal recognition of their military dictatorship, and the recent election of Ronald Reagan wasn’t making them breathe any easier about the possibility of being caught in the middle of a nuclear showdown between Washington and Moscow. Wait for the ricochet, indeed…

A high-volume dose of In Rock turned out to be exactly the dose of medicine that I required on this particular evening, but the truth of the matter is that I already felt fully refreshed and restored by the end of Side One. I still went ahead and played Side Two, of course; but the supremely therapeutic one-two-three punch of “Speed King,” “Bloodsucker” and “Child in Time” was all I really needed to feel like myself again. And as the explosive final notes of “Child in Time” track rang in my ears, one thing felt especially clear: I may be instinctively bracing myself for more ricochets from the present madness, but I damn well won’t be bowing my head as I wait.

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