There are many versions of this song available. There is one studio version from this album:
Which has a great album cover. Sadly, Deep Purple album covers can often suck balls, so enjoy this one while you can.
The version recorded on the album isn’t anywhere as near as good as some of the live versions. Here’s a bunch to sample, if you want.
That first link I gave you is one of the better ones. My favourite is from a 1970 show in Stockholm. Here’s a bunch of videos. You can search for a complete version, but the one at the top has most of it.
Anyway, amazing song. Which they sort of ripped off from another band.
Here’s what some schleps on Wikipedia wrote:
It is said by the band members themselves to have been inspired by a riff featured in a song by the Psychedelic band It’s a Beautiful Day, called “Bombay Calling”.[1] As Ian Gillan put it in a 2002 interview, “There are two sides to that song – the musical side and the lyrical side. On the musical side, there used to be this song ‘Bombay Calling’ by a band called It’s A Beautiful Day. It was fresh and original, when Jon was one day playing it on his keyboard. It sounded good, and we thought we’d play around with it, change it a bit and do something new keeping that as a base. But then, I had never heard the original ‘Bombay Calling’. So we created this song using the Cold War as the theme, and wrote the lines ‘Sweet child in time, you’ll see the line.’ That’s how the lyrical side came in. Then, Jon had the keyboard parts ready and Ritchie had the guitar parts ready. The song basically reflected the mood of the moment, and that’s why it became so popular.”
Reminds me of “Sanitarium” by Metallica… or rather… not really by Metallica.
The section of the song that begins at 4:06 (“Fear of living on/Natives getting restless now…”) bears a resemblance to a main riff in the Rush song “Tom Sawyer”. Metallica thanks Rush in the liner notes for the album. Hetfield admitted that the main riff of the song was lifted from the band Bleak House’s song, “Rainbow Warrior”.
And this kind of thing goes on and on in music. There are only so many good sounding combinations of notes and rhythms, sooner or later something is going to sound a lot like something else.
I’ve made fun of Ritchie Blackmore on this blog before, so I think I might as well do that again. Not for his odd manner of dress back in the late 60s and early 70s, but for his strictly Middle of the Road sound he had going with Rainbow in the 80s. Sigh. I heard “All Night Long” come on my iPod a while ago. Considering the music he’s doing now, it’s hard to reconcile that he once wrote for the pop charts and even inhabited them with his 80s band for a while.
So let’s make fun of the way he looks again!
Meh. My heart’s not in it. Nice hat though.
And nice wife. Damn.