An Indy evening in August with Edgar Winter, Alice Cooper and Deep Purple.

In a recent interview with Mojo magazine, esteemed songwriter and musician Jimmy Webb recalled the way Otis Redding flat stole the show at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

Webb explained that Redding had been a professional musician virtually his entire life, whereas so many of the other acts were flower-power dilettantes unfamiliar with stagecraft and the necessary dynamic of performance art.

Otis knew what worked, and he delivered. The others learned, or perished as working musicians.

Edgar Winter, Vincent Furnier (a.k.a. Alice Cooper) and the members of Deep Purple (even current virtuoso guitarist Steve Morse, then all of 13 years old) all were playing and performing in some capacity in 1967.

A half-century later, we had the pleasure of seeing them play at the open air Klipsch Center, formerly Deer Creek, located north of Indianapolis. Rest assured: they have learned.

This reviewer in California might as well have been writing about the show we saw in Indiana on August 30, although Deep Purple omitted "The Surprising" from its Indy set, and played only "Time for Bedlam" from the band's inFinite album, released earlier this year.

Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Edgar Winter Group electrify Greek Theatre crowd, by Robert Kinsler (Orange County Register)

Three distinct brands of classic rock were on display Sunday night at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. American blues rocker Edgar Winter, shock rocker Alice Cooper and British heavy metal pioneers Deep Purple all came to the venue armed with their biggest hits delivered via crowd-pleasing, fast-moving sets.

Deep Purple has been the tour's headliner, in the midst of what the group acknowledges probably is its final jaunt. Three-fifths of Purple's classic lineup (Ian Gillen, Roger Glover and Ian Paice) remains in place, and summer's set list is built to please the legacy/heritage rock crowd, which makes even more sense in a venue where the "craft" beers cost $16.

Instrumentally, Deep Purple retains the swagger necessary to give solid readings to hit songs like "Highway Star" and "Smoke on the Water," even if lead singer Gillen's voice is diminished, and sole founding member Paice's drumming can be a tad sluggish at times.

As a fan of 45 years, I have a minor complaint to register.

The current aggregation of Deep Purple has been together since 2003, producing four excellent albums of original material, the last two of which are simply outstanding.

I'd gladly pay double an already high price to hear this lineup play an entire set derived solely from their time as a unit. Admittedly, I'd be the only person in the Klipsch Center, but it would be a great seat, indeed.

The late Johnny Winter was a renowned, spellbinding blues guitarist. His younger brother Edgar is a dazzling multi-instrumentalist, switching from keyboards to saxophone to drums, and capable of playing jazz, funk, blues and straightforward rock and roll.

Winters' opening set compressed all of these considerable talents into a mere five songs lasting 45 minutes, which isn't enough. The most recent of these songs was released around 1972.

That's the rock/show biz, which brings me to Alice Cooper.

He has (and has not) been doing the same stage show since the first time I saw him in 1976. The guillotines, blow-up dolls, macabre embellishments and shtick is unchanged; significantly, Alice's music always has evolved. He might remain a teenager lyrically, but instrumentally, his cast of younger musicians shred, staying nicely up to date in terms of backing metal.

I've long maintained that Alice Cooper is the last vaudevillian standing. Know that I didn't coin the comparison; Groucho did.

"When guys like Groucho Marx would come to the show, he always called me, he says, 'You're the last hope for vaudeville.' And he would bring Jack Benny and George Burns and Mae West. And people like that would come to the show, because it was vaudeville to them. They said, 'Ah, remember 1923? The Great Floyd used to do that! Remember? Of course, he would have doves come out of his sleeves when he —' And this was nothing new to these guys. They would, you know, Groucho would come to the show and he'd see it, and he'd go, 'Ah, rawr rawr rawr.' You know, he'd insult everybody there. 'Excuse me, I got to go insult the maitre d'.' You know, that kind of thing. We were best of friends, Groucho and I were. But they saw it as vaudeville, and actually that's what it is. It's rock 'n' roll vaudeville."

In June we saw U2 at Papa John's Stadium in Louisville. I never thought the time would come for me to say this, and yet here it is: My monstrous outdoor venue concert-going career may be over. Both shows were fun, and I have no regrets ... but those $16 beers.

Ugh.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Time for bedlam.

Ideas can come together in mysterious, serendipitous ways. Earlier in 2017, Deep Purple released a new album called inFinite, of which there'll be more to say when I get around to it, some day.

In advance of the album came a single, "Time for Bedlam."

When we write the songs, we steep ourselves in the atmosphere of the song and try and figure out what it's about. And this one sounded vicious. Especially the keyboard solo. It was bedlam."

I thought to myself at the time: Hmm, bedlam; interesting choice of words, and from a group seldom noted for lyrical heft.

Weeks passed, and I concurred with my friend Jon's choice of massive summer novels for shared reading, this being a long tradition of our literary partnership.

Alan Moore’s Time-Traveling Tribute to His Gritty Hometown, by Douglas Wolk (NYT)

Brilliant and sometimes maddening, “Jerusalem” is Alan Moore’s monumentally ambitious attempt to save his hometown, Northampton, England — not to rescue it from the slow economic catastrophe that’s been gnawing at it for centuries, but to save it “the way that you save ships in bottles,” by preserving its contours and details in art. The book is, itself, roughly the size of a schooner: a 1,266-page behemoth composed in several dozen shades of the deepest, richest purple prose, fusing social realism, high fantasy and sparkling literary showoffishness. And it’s a vehicle for nothing less than Moore’s personal cosmology of space, time and life after death.

The novel is nothing short of incredible, certainly the finest book ever written about New Albany, and I'm hooked even if it will quite literally occupy the entire summer. However, my point at present is this single sentence at the very end of book one, chapter one.

In 1868 Ern's wife and mother for the first time in their lives agreed on something and allowed him to be placed in Bedlam.

Having slipped into insanity, the Londoner named Ernest was sent to Bedlam, and accordingly, bedlam as it comes to us today is "a scene of madness, chaos or great confusion."

bedlam

Bedlam is a scene of madness, chaos or great confusion. If you allow football fans onto the field after the big game, it will be pure bedlam.

The term bedlam comes from the name of a hospital in London, “Saint Mary of Bethlehem,” which was devoted to treating the mentally ill in the 1400's. Over time, the pronunciation of “Bethlehem” morphed into bedlam and the term came to be applied to any situation where pandemonium prevails.

The Encyclopedia of Trivia adds:

Bethlehem Royal Hospital became a tourist attraction, where sightseers paying an entrance fee of twopence each, could amuse themselves at the patients' antics. Often the patients were teased and provoked by the general public into a raving frenzy.

From the fourteenth century, Bethlehem had been referred to colloquially as "Bedlam." The word "bedlam", meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from the hospital's nickname. Although the Bethlehem Royal Hospital became a modern psychiatric facility, historically it was representative of the worst excesses of asylums in the era of lunacy reform.

Bedlam for the beak-wetting set?

Why, that's no hospital -- it's the Redevelopment Commission.

Six new songs from six new albums.

So far in 2017, it's been heavy portions of Krautrock and jazz, some classical, and less pop/rock. here are six new songs representative of the latter.

With the exception of Deep Purple and Depeche Mode, the albums containing these songs have been released.

Cheap Trick's Bun E. Carlos on limbo, lawyers and friendships.

Photo credit

Yes, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ultimately stands as the epitome of First World meaninglessness.

At the same time, when three of your favorite bands are to be inducted in one sweeping act of vindication, it's at least worth a brief self-congratulatory grin. I've been a fan of Deep Purple and Chicago since junior high school, and Cheap Trick came along only shortly thereafter. Their music brings me pleasure; so be it.

Each of these three bands has survived the ephemeral ups and downs of the marketplace, and remain working musical entities. For fans, it's all about the music, but more pointedly, for working musicians, it's about dollars and cents. As with any other business, workers come and go, and often their decisions have to do with money and personalities, not art.

Unsurprisingly, there is an interesting back story for each in the context of personnel. Deep Purple's Ian Paice fears fisticuffs might erupt between present and former band members if they were to share a stage.

Everyone wants to know whether Peter Cetera will reunite with Chicago, but what about original drummer Danny Seraphine, who was fired a quarter century ago, and later wrote a tell-all book about the experience?

And then there's Cheap Trick, three members of which evidently attempted to dump drummer Bun E. Carlos in 2010. After legal wranglings, Carlos remains a partner in the business operation, but is blockaded from performing live with the band. He's in a curious sort of limbo, though at least the checks are still being cut -- after the lawsuit was filed.

When he asks for financial information, does he receive it? Do they forward his snail mail? Have they blocked his e-mail?

Interesting. Very interesting. I have absolutely no idea why, although there is a certain melancholy attached to a statement like this:

"Any friendship we had went away when I had to file a federal lawsuit. That cost a bucket of fucking money. Going after these guys wasn't pleasant. The friendship sort of frittered away there."

Cheap Trick's Bun E. Carlos on Possible Rock Hall Reunion, by Andy Greene (Rolling Stone)

 ... We just drew up a contract that said, "I don't tour with the band, but I'm a full member of the band." We've got all these corporations. The touring company said, "If you quit touring, you lose your vote." I wasn't going to let that happen. I'm a full member of the band. So we drew up a piece of paper, and a couple years later the check stopped coming. I met with Scott Borchetta — that was something special. And then I had to sue them in federal court to get my money back. We did a settlement last spring and its all hunky dory. That's the short story.

"All the Time in the World," by Deep Purple.

I neither expected Deep Purple's new album to make my musical year to date, nor that I'd embrace one of the songs as a theme of sorts. But there it is.

Remembering Jon Lord.

In honor of the late, great Jon Lord, here's an original cut from the epochal Deep Purple album, In Rock. It isn't heard as often as "Child In Time," off the same album, but it's hard to find a better showcase for the musical elements that made this group's second lineup (Mark II) so very memorable.

I saw Deep Purple perform at the soccer stadium in Kosice, Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1991. Singer Ian Gillan was not on board at the time, replaced temporarily by the serviceable journeyman Joe Lynn Turner, but Lord and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore were in fine form, and the rhythm section of Roger Glover (bass) and Ian Paice (drums) shook the adjacent rabbit hutch high rises.

What I remember most from this 1991 experience is something I surely would have failed to notice at a live show during the days of my earlier youth, when Deep Purple ruled the rock world. The classically trained Lord consistently interjected classical quotations during his numerous solo opportunities, but not just the random Bach and Beethoven snippets.

Rather, Lord's embellishments (at least, the ones I caught) were drawn from Smetana and Dvorak, heroes of the Czechoslovak orchestral tradition. It is an understatement to note that the crowd appreciated the gesture.

Jon Lord, 1941-2012.

Jon Lord - The Official Website

Gettin' Tighter: Recalling the forgotten Deep Purple Mark IV.

Deep Purple's "Mark IV" lineup featured the great, doomed Tommy Bolin on guitar (think Fats Navarro, not Bix Beiderbecke), alongside future Whitesnake vocalist David Coverdale, bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes, and original Purple members Jon Lord and Ian Paice. Unfortunately, the revamped band imploded after a year, laid low by fatigue and drugs.

I purchased the 35th anniversary edition of "Come Taste the Band," Mark IV's only album, and lemme tell ya: Overlooked at the time of release, it has aged incredibly well. And there'll be a film, too?

Back to the headphones.