Deep Purple: Έχουν μόνο 2½ καλά τραγούδια όπως λέει το Vulture; και μόνο το 1 είναι ακόμα ζωντανό;

Στην λίστα με την αξιολόγηση των 214 ονομάτων που έχουν μπει στο Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame στο Site Vulture, o συντάκτης της δεν δείχνει να συμπαθεί ιδιαίτερα τους Deep Purple και έχει αντιρρήσεις για την εισδοχή τους στον θεσμό. Δείτε τι γράφει:

More ‘70s lumpen rock. Deep Purple had two, maybe two-and-a-half, good songs. Their reputation today rests on just one (“Smoke on the Water”). (Without it, what are they? Uriah Heep?) And the band immediately lost all its interest after the departure of Blackmore. Even among ‘70s warhorses, I don’t quite get why a band like Deep Purple are in before, say, the Doobie Brothers, who, leaving aside their name, had a fierce guitar attack early on and quite a few strong singles before almost accidentally falling up into superstardom as Michael McDonald’s pop instincts came to the fore.

The mystery is why all of a sudden the hall seemed to be inducting these ‘70s bands. The obvious theory is that it’s all about putting keisters in the seats for the annual induction ceremony. Laura Nyro, N.W.A, and Cat Stevens weren’t going to do it — but Kiss and Journey sure could. Also, there had been a persistent criticism that the hall had been unkind to progressive rock, and members of the nominating committee are said to have formed a subcommittee to work on getting the genre more representation. This work, if it was successful, undoubtedly culminated in the induction of Yes, in 2017, and seems to have gone a bit overboard the last two years, with Purple and the Moodies.

That said, here’s another theory, one that doesn’t involve corruption. The voting membership — the group, totaling just over 1,000 now, that votes on the nominating committee’s list each year, deciding the actual new members — includes among other people every previous hall inductee. That’s great, you think — Joan Baez, say, or Paul McCartney, certainly deserves a vote, right? But what about the all the members of Deep Purple, Dire Straits, and the Moody Blues? These folks have been flooding the hall of late — more than 50 new members, only a handful of them anything like a household name, just in the past two years! What could possibly go wrong? Consider: Right now a not-insignificant percentage of the voting membership of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is former drummers in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns N’ Roses. Says Wenner: “[Inductees like] the fifth drummer from Guns N’ Roses don’t vote. They don’t turn in their ballot.”