ARTICLE ABOUT Rainbow FROM Sounds, July 24, 1976

You can`t get a much better concert review than this one so the guys in Rainbow should have been pleased after reading this. Now you can read it too. As always I am looking forward to a huge amount of people coming from thehighwaystar.com site. The fans there are the best and the reason why I will post every article related to Purple that I find. That is a tip to fans of other bands too… it helps to engage the fan club.
Read on!

Rainbow hit nirvana

Blackmore´s Rainbow
Beacon Theatre, New York

Concert review by Peter Crescenti

IT MAY be a few months before Blackmore’s Rainbow appears in Britain for the first time, but even if they have to wait until distant `77, Blackmore freaks, when they finally do see the band live, will no doubt decide that the wait, no matter how long, was damned well worth it. Rainbow, now in its second version, is simply one of the most dynamic and energetic heavy rock outfits in the free world.
Ritchie Blackmore is a happy man again, happy because now that he’s left Deep Purple, he’s once again free to make the kind of rock’n’roll he loves best — visceral and explosive, an atomic dose of chordal calamity — and by no coincidence, it’s the same sweaty brand of rock thousands of rockers have become addicted to over the last ten years, hooked, mainly, by fixes served up by the Main Man of heavy metal, Ritchie Blackmore.
The rowdy mob at Rainbow’s Beacon Theatre gig were Blackmore junkies alright. Not one wouldn’t have sawed off a hand for a piece of the Stratocaster Ritchie smashed during the encore of ‘Do You Close Your Eyes’, and the lucky boys in the front rows who shook the Man’s hand as he leaned out into the audience a few times probably still haven’t washed their hands. And their throats are probably still raw from all their ecstatic wailing… and smoking. Blackmore’s, ironically, is one of the dopeingest crowds going.
Opening with ‘The Temple Of The King’, a blues, and then ‘Sixteenth Century Greensleeves’, Rainbow simply knocked the crowd on their collective tails. People were running around the hall in delirious glee, but before the audience could slip from Rainbow’s grasp, they cleverly eased into the moody ‘Catch The Rainbow’, which featured some soulful, sensitive singing by Ronnie Dio and some of Ritchie Blackmore’s tastiest playing ever. When the guitarist walked to centre stage for his solo, the rest of Rainbow could have been transformed into porcupines, and no one would have noticed, that’s how transfixed everyone was, not only by Blackmore’s playing but by his overwhelming stage presence.
All the same, I kept my eyes on Cozy Powell a lot too. What a dynamite addition Cozy is to Rainbow, providing that ass-kicking back beat Blackmore’s high energy music so desperately requires. On his kit, Cozy’s easily Blackmore’s match, but they compliment rather than battle each other. Cozy pummeled hell out his drums all night, especially giving ‘Man On A Silver Mountain’ a drive it sorely lacked on the first Rainbow album. Blackmore himself was amazing during ‘Mountain’, shaking hands with his right hand while continuing to play with his left.
“I have done a little show, at certain gigs,” says Ritchie, “like breaking my guitar up. I felt the audience needed that. I haven’t done it for a year, but I felt that it was necessary because the audience weren’t that musical.”
“They wanted to see some violence, actually,” Cozy agrees.
Rainbow’s show is visually powerful as well. At the front of the stage, arching from stage left to stage right, is a mammoth rainbow, operated by a digital computer that sends waves of colours and shapes through the construct. Backdrops, huge blow-ups of Rainbow’s two album covers, are also used, the first during the first half of the set, and the ‘Rainbow Rising’ fist during ‘Stargazer’ and ‘A Light In The Dark’.
Add it all up, and it’s nirvana for Blackmore’s Rainbow fans. Just watch out for Stratocaster fragments when they come to your town.

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