Deep Purple In Rock

This was the album that originally introduced me to Deep Purple. My first-year college room-mate had a very battered and scratched up record of this, and since we often played each other's records, one day I was going through his stack and put this one on. "Child in Time" hooked me immediately. As I've said before, this is still one of my favorite pieces and back then the creepy and ominous organ music really spoke to me.

A couple of years later I came across a picture disk of this album and bought it. I don't remember exactly where. It doesn't seem like quite the kind of thing I would find at Hastings, but I may have found it at Sundance Records. It has some fairly cool cover art, a visual parody of the band being carved into Mt. Rushmore. Unfortunately, my picture disk was packaged only in a transparent sleeve, so I don't have any of the odd and humorous liner notes, which I sometimes used to quote on occasion. The only one I still remember (although one can probably find them on the internet somewhere) was one that I used to quote when one of the ditzy teenyboppers who worked at Mr. Gatti's back in the 80s did something stupid or funny: "It takes all sorts...support your local groupie."

This was the first album to feature the famous "Mark II" lineup: Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillian, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice. This was generally considered to be the best, or at least the most popular version of Deep Purple. The album is still a quintessential example of 70s-era hard rock, for whatever that's worth. It's still one of my favorites.