Beyond flower power

A year later, having produced a 20th studio album, “Infinite,” Deep Purple will arrive at the KeyBank Pavilion on Friday on the Long Goodbye Tour with Alice Cooper and the Edgar Winter Group.

That will entail going on stage after the King of Shock Rock not only rocks through an imposing set list but gets beheaded with a guillotine and rolls out a giant Frankenstein.

“Strange would be one word, intimidating would be another,” Glover says of going on after Alice. “For me, I’m working with two of my heroes. Edgar Winter, I remember from his first album ‘Entrance’ in 1970. I became a huge Edgar Winter fan. He wrote some great songs. We did a gig with him six years ago, and it was an honor to meet him. You know, you meet your idols. And Alice is great. It’s like Broadway on wheels. And I think he’s a really underrated lyric writer. Lovely man. Both are heroes of mine.”

All three artists were part of a postWoodstock, hard rock wave hitting the world around 1969-70. Glover and singer Ian Gillan were transitioning into Deep Purple from a band called Episode Six.

“Bands were getting heavier,” Glover says. “Hard rock hadn’t been invented yet. It was just heavy — heavy rock. I suppose it grew out of Hendrix and Cream. The flower-power thing, don’t get me wrong, I loved flower power, but I remember in Episode Six, we said we should get heavier and to do that, we just got more equipment and played louder. And it really wasn’t until I heard Zeppelin’s first album that I realized that heavy wasn’t louder, it was attitude, and that came about a week or so before the Deep Purple idea came along. I owe a lot to Led Zeppelin for that. I thought they were great. I heard ‘How Many More Times’ and all I wanted to do was play that in a club for the rest of my life. And I ended up doing that, more or less.”

When that Zeppelin album landed in January 1969, Deep Purple was trying to figure out what it was. The band — singer Rod Evans, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, organist Jon Lord, bassist Nick Simper and drummer Ian Paice — had scored a hit on its 1968 debut “Shades of Deep Purple,” putting a heavier cast on the Joe South/ Billy Joe Royal psych rock song “Hush.”

But the quickly released second album, with a cover of Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman,” didn’t take, and when Deep Purple made its debut in Pittsburgh on its second U.S. tour — playing Carnegie Mellon University in May 1969 — there already was some discontent within the band.

“I think it was the end of that tour that Ritchie and Jon and Paicey decided they were going in slightly the wrong direction, and they wanted a tougher approach, and they decided that Rod Evans wasn’t the guy for the job of singing.”

So, Blackmore reached out to his friend Mick Underwood, who was playing drums in that flower-power band Episode Six, inquiring about singers. The drummer generously suggested he come see Ian Gillan.

Mark II lineup

“They came to scout us in East London where we were doing a pretty squalid gig,” Glover says. And he got the job. But they also needed songs and Glover was the cowriter in Episode Six.

“We played our songs for Jon Lord, who didn’t like them much, because they were crappy. But then he invited me to play bass on a song they were recording that night. That was my audition. It was a song called ‘Hallelujah,’ not Leonard Cohen’s one. And I did the session not thinking about anything, and at the end of the night, Jon said, ‘You want to join the band?’ Little things happen without you planning them.

“I was blown away by their musicianship. I had never encountered anything like that before.”

What set Deep Purple apart from British cohorts Zeppelin, Cream and Sabbath — and another reason they belong in the Hall of Fame — was the nasty way classically trained Lord helped drive the rhythm section with the organ.

“I remember Jon saying Ritchie could bend notes and he couldn’t on the organ, but he found a way of doing it,” Glover says. “If you’re playing a note and you switch the organ off, it goes daaaaaaaa. So you switch it off and switch it on again and it claws its way to pitch. Also the sound. Most organ players play a washy sound that is behind the main thrust of the song. It’s some kind of sweetening, but Jon wasn’t content with that, he wanted to compete with Ritchie and he found a way to do that by plugging his organ right into a Marshall amp and getting it cranked and distorted like a guitar. I think he was the first one who could play rhythm organ. It was never just putting his notes down and staying there till the chord changed. There was always movement going on in there. Incredible player.”

To a bassist that might seem threatening. Look at the Doors, which got by using “ghost” bassists in the studio while Ray Manzarek did it on keyboards himself live. Glover didn’t mind sharing the rhythm section with the organ.

“Good musicians learn to work within each other and around each other,” he