“I was always pushing him to go back to playing the organ through an amp for some solos… y’know, the sound that he had in the Machine Head days”: Steve Morse on why he loved writing with Jon Lord and the Deep Purple track that started with a cup of tea

Steve morse and Jon Lord play onstage together during a 1996 Deep Purple show in Amsterdam.

Once the ink has dried on the official history of Deep Purple, Steve Morse’s name will be right there as the band’s longest-serving guitarist. There must have been times when that seemed unlikely.

Joining the British rock institution in 1996, he had to follow one of the all-time greats, Ritchie Blackmore, who had already carved Purple’s name into rock’s own Mount Rushmore with his Fender Stratocaster, Smoke On The Water, Highway Star, Burn, and all that jazz.