Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore developed quite a reputation for his antics on and offstage, including Ritchie Blackmore’s prank that fellow rock and roller Lemmy Kilmister (of Motörhead) once called pure “malice.” Blackmore often played practical jokes on his Rainbow bandmate, drummer Cozy Powell, but the subject of this particularly malicious prank was a tour manager.
Indeed, this not-so-practical joke gives a whole new meaning to the idea that you never know where rock and roll is going to take you.
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Ritchie Blackmore’s Cruel Prank Against A Tour Manager
With a reputation like Ritchie Blackmore’s, one doesn’t necessarily need physical proof that a story is true. If it sounds like it could be Blackmore, then it likely is, as far as Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister was concerned. Describing the “best story he ever heard,” Kilmister said, “I believe it’s true. It sounds like Ritchie. Ritchie Blackmore was notorious for doing terrible things to people who were asleep.”
“This tour manager one time p***ed him off, and they slipped a mickey, right? He woke up stark naked without any clothes or papers of any kind in a hired car with no keys in it on a ferry to Iceland,” Kilmister continued. “I don’t care who you are. That is the best I ever heard. I hope it’s true, you know, because it should be. That is wonderful. It’s malice. What are you going to do, you know? Ask a sailor for help? Wunderbar.”
As for the reputation that allowed Kilmister to believe the story so readily? Blackmore doesn’t mind. “My good friends, people who really know me, know what I am,” Blackmore told The Guardian in 1978. He said he developed his persona “by being very moody, being very sincere, telling people to f*** off when I shouldn’t have done. But I don’t care, not at all.”
The Rainbow Guitarist Did Smaller Pranks, Too
Shipping a naked tour manager on a ferry to Iceland is certainly an outlandish prank, but Ritchie Blackmore was no stranger to the occasional lighter hijinx. Take, for example, one of the first pranks Blackmore pulled on drummer Cozy Powell after their antics became so unpredictable and chaotic that Blackmore called a truce. “Cozy always went too far,” Blackmore recalled in an interview with his wife and bandmate, Candice Night. “If you played a joke on him, look out. He was going to kill you.
As is often the case with prank truces among friends, Blackmore, the truce-caller, was also the one that broke their agreement. He recalled a moment in which Powell was speaking with the press outside of their hotel directly below Blackmore’s window. “I went, ‘Oh, this could be interesting.’ So, I said, ‘Candy, get the camera, the video camera. You go to the other window over there, so you’ve got an angle to see Cozy and [me].”
Night picked up the rest of the story, saying she filmed Blackmore as he dumped a giant glass of water on Powell’s ahead from the window above. While Blackmore immediately jumped back from the window, Night, weighed down by an early 1990s video camera, stayed in Powell’s sight. “I’m the only person who’s left,” she recalled, saying that Powell looked up and shook his fists at her. “You set me up,” she told Blackmore.
Photo by Ian Dickson/Shutterstock
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