LONG LIVE ROCK & ROLL

The album was released on the heels of ‘Rainbow Rising’ and the powerful ‘On Stage’ live release that documented the supporting tour. The band still had the lethal trio of Ritchie Blackmore, Cozy Powell, and incomparable voice of Ronnie James Dio behind the microphone. That combined with the band’s popularity at the time made this a hard album to screw up, but the band delivered eight killer tracks anyway just to make sure.

I was in my late teens at the time and still screaming around the countryside in my V8- powered muscle car whenever I had the chance, and this was some great music to accompany such an activity I must say. I can’t really point to a bad track, and in my opinion several of them should be considered timeless metal classics.

The title track is a sort of headbanger’s anthem, very tight with power chords and piercing drums and just the right touch on cymbals to make you stand up and take notice. Kind of frivolous lyrics, but like the rest of the album this song was made for the live stage and for radio, and it accomplished its goals quite well.

Dio starts to warm up his pipes with “Lady of the Lake”, a pseudo-mystic kind of tune that still pops into my head like a tripping seventies flashback almost any time I’m driving with plenty of gas in my car’s tank and an open road in front of me. “L.A. Connection” is kind of the same, except just slightly more restrained and with Dio’s vocals not quite into the dog-whistle range.

The showcase pieces on this album are “Gates of Babylon” and “Kill the King”. The first one is another mystical-metal song with Dio in prime form and Blackmore laying down some absolutely nasty guitar licks and Dave Stone’s keyboards really sounding eerie like a good fantasy metal tune should. The latter was played on the band’s ‘Rising’ tour, but here it gets a little studio discipline applied to it which serves to highlight Blackmore’s incredible speed on the six-strings. Dio has the exact same vocal timbre he would use on Kansas alumni Kerry Livgren’s ‘Seeds of Change’ solo album a couple years later, and I kind of wonder if this is where Livgren got the idea to use Dio as the demonic symbol for his basically Christian rock album in 1980. Perhaps.

“The Shed” is another tune that was probably intended to be a live tour staple with its sweeping arrangements and rather simple rhythm, but it’s also another one that sticks in your head even years after you’ve first heard it, and you have to admire a song that does that.

Dio’s vocal peak comes with “Sensitive to Light” with a shrieking refrain and more torrid guitar by Blackmore. Frankly I think this one is too short and that the band could have developed it a bit with some of the keyboard/orchestral dressage that they put into the closing track “Rainbow Eyes”. I seem to recall a video of that last tune back in the seventies, or maybe it was a medley from this album – can’t quite recall. Anyway, this is a nicely complex arrangement with lots of percussion, keyboards and other fluff, but maybe could have had a minute of two trimmed from it. A minor quibble in any case.

I wore out both an 8-track and a vinyl version of this album back in the late seventies, but still have an aging Maxell cassette that I made from the old vinyl before it gave out. Many of these songs still pop into my head from time to time, and I can still get a rush from listening to this nearly thirty years later. I think the addition of Stone added the most to the band for this album, as he brought just a bit of studio discipline and some classical training that helps give the album a kind of timeless feel. But most of all fans of Blackmore or Dio should have this record because it showcases both of them at what may have been the peak of their creativity and technical skills. A truly great album, probably not essential since it was basically a commercial venture, but certainly worth four stars.

peace

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