Glenn Hughes is currently co-headlining the 'Classic Deep Purple Live Tour' in the US alongside Swedish guitar maestro Yngwie Malmsteen, and when the tour stopped off in Los Angeles at the Saban Theater last weekend (Friday, September 8) The Voice Of Rock invited a couple of close friends along to bring his show to a memorable climax.
First Hughes brought out his Black Country Communion bandmate Joe Bonamassa for a magnificent, epic 15-minute version of Mistreated, originally featured on Burn, the first album by Purple's Mk. III line-up. Then, presumably while his audience were still picking their jaws off the venue floor, Hughes added Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith into the mix to perform smoking takes on Highway Star and Burn.
Watch all three covers below:
Speaking in 2019 about his memories of making Burn, Hughes recalled, "We were at Clearwell Castle, and we wrote that album in the dungeon. It was spooky, and Ritchie loved that. I had a couple of seances with him in the dungeon, one of which freaked him out so badly that he scurried off to his room, shrieking like a banshee. David [Coverdale] and I formed this great partnership as vocalists, and I thought that Burn was a major step forward for the band after Who Do You Think We Are."
The speed with which things progressed for Deep Purple was dizzying: within nine months of Hughes and Coverdale joining, the band played to 400,000 people at the California Jam, above the likes of Black Sabbath and The Eagles.
"That was a memorable day," Hughes said in 2019. "I’d been up all night with Ozzy, I don’t think I slept at all, and we flew in together in a helicopter. The California Jam must have been the first festival in history to run ahead of schedule, so we were asked to go on stage one hour ahead of our allotted time.
"Ritchie [Blackmore] wasn’t having it, he refused, and he barricaded himself in his trailer, angry as all hell. It took the promoters, and then lawyers, and then security, and then the police to persuade him to open the door. The police in America have guns, so you can’t fight that. The show itself started off quite normally, but then Ritchie got pissed off with this camera man, and shoved the neck of his guitar right down his lens, and that’s when all hell broke loose. He had paraffin poured over his amps, and set fire to them, which looked great for the audience, but we could have all been killed. Ian Paice’s glasses got blown off his face in the explosion!"
Good times.
