Though he’s insisted he won't write a book about all his rock ‘n’ roll war stories, Ritchie Blackmore has done the next best thing: he’s started a new YouTube series, during which he’ll recall the tales he’s been telling his closest friends over the years.
The first episode finds the Deep Purple electric guitar legend look back on the time he first met Eric Clapton when his band supported Cream back in 1968 – as well as a far more awkward encounter he had with Slowhand and his security team some time later.
Though Blackmore had given Clapton a good first impression, a subsequent impression wasn’t quite so favorable, after Blackmore and his friend decided to protest some noisy hotel maintenance by cranking their Marshalls at 3am.
Unfortunately, Clapton happened to be staying in the room next door to them, and wasn’t especially impressed with the high-gain antics.
“We were in a hotel, I think it was Melbourne, Australia,” Blackmore explains. “What happened was, I knew that Eric was with his band in that hotel. We'd had three days there where we'd been woken up very early with hammering – the usual nonsense that goes on in hotels.
“We were so sick of it we actually threatened the front desk, 'If you wake us up again tomorrow we will bring all our amplification into a room and play at 3 o'clock in the morning, and see how your patrons like hearing this noise.
"Which we did. The next day the hammering started as per usual, they took no notice of what we said, so we went ahead and brought in some Marshalls, stacked them, and my friend actually started playing the guitar – he started playing some bad blues, actually.
“As soon as he started playing we were so loud we got a bang on the door and it was Eric's security.”
Unfortunately, Clapton wasn’t staying on a different floor of the hotel, as Blackmore had believed. He was, unfortunately, right next door – and Blackmore was left feeling embarrassed by both the loud noise and the unimpressive playing.
"Believe it or not, Eric was in the next room to where we were," Blackmore continues. “I thought Eric was on another floor way away from where we were. And that was embarrassing, so we stopped playing."
"The next day we had some words with his security and I said, 'I'm really sorry, I didn't realize we were next door.' That was embarrassing, especially to think that Eric might have thought it was me making this racket on the guitar.
“I was in there having a drink, but I wasn't playing. That doesn't get me off the hook – it was really my idea to make all this noise.”
Head over to Ritchie Blackmore’s YouTube channel to follow the ongoing series.
