The ‘never meet your heroes’ quip runs both ways. There’s a chance they might disappoint you, but worse still, there’s a chance you might disappoint them. Ritchie Blackmore found this out to his own cost during an “embarrassing” encounter with fellow guitar virtuoso Eric Clapton over in Australia in a deeply comical hotel episode.
Hotels have been the bane of countless sleep cycles over the years. From catching glimpses of ghouls in the weird cuckold chair in the corner facing the bed to noisy neighbours rowing through paper-thin walls, catching a good night’s sleep in a hotel is as rare as finding a cheese sandwich in China. This old truism is amplified tenfold when you introduce a rock band and a construction crew into the weary inn.
While Noel Gallagher might claim throwing a TV set from a balcony will cleanse every ounce of angst, depression and rage from your soul, not all rock stars are quite so reckless, particularly while in the rigours of a relentless tour. This was proved by a slumbering Eric Clapton and a red-faced Ritchie Blackmore one noisy night in Melbourne.
Though the pair had met in passing in the past, they were mere mutual admirers from afar. In fact, by the late 1960s and early ’70s, Blackmore was pushing on into heavier, louder sounds, trying to differentiate himself from his equally revered peers. It was around this time that he toured Down Under with Deep Purple. Australia was still largely under construction at this point, as was the Melbourne hotel that the band happened to check into.
”We’d had three days there where we’d been woken up very early with hammering – the usual nonsense that goes on in hotels,” Blackmore recalled in his own video series. “We were so sick of it we actually threatened the front desk, ‘If you wake us up again tomorrow, we will bring all our amplification into a room and play at 3 o’clock in the morning and see how your patrons like hearing this noise’.”
The threat was lodged, but the building work continued. Ask Ronnie James Dio or anyone else who has worked with Heston-raised guitarist, and they’ll tell you that he doesn’t make threats lightly. In fact, Dio will tell you that Blackmore is somewhat of a tyrant. So, when the banging rumbled on, the decision was made: ”We went ahead and brought in some Marshalls, stacked them, and my friend actually started playing the guitar – he started playing some bad blues, actually.”
Bad blues was the last thing that great blues player Eric Clapton wanted to hear at this point, and the jet-lagged ‘Layla’ guitarist just so happened to be in the very next room. “As soon as he started playing, we were so loud we got a bang on the door, and it was Eric’s security,” Blackmore recalls. These were not the bellboys the Deep Purple lot were expecting to see. A hush descended, but for the continued construction racket.
“Believe it or not, Eric was in the next room to where we were,” Blackmore continues. “The next day we had some words with his security and I said, ‘I’m really sorry, I didn’t realize we were next door.’ That was embarrassing, especially to think that Eric might have thought it was me making this racket on the guitar.“ Not only had they pissed Clapton off, but they had done so with shoddy licks that no doubt had the Cream guitarist thinking, ’ If you’re going to be noisy bastards, then at least be noisy bastards properly’.
Still, Blackmore just about exonerates himself from the lack of skill on display, commenting: “I was in there having a drink, but I wasn’t playing. That doesn’t get me off the hook – it was really my idea to make all this noise.”
Perhaps somewhere in this wild interaction, we find a hint of the rationale behind one of Blackmore’s more leftfield opinions. While Blackmore had a healthy respect for the blues, he saw Clapton as someone simply copying off the best, telling Creem, “When Cream came along, I thought, ‘Well, it’s all happening again.’ Although I was never knocked out with Eric Clapton’s playing, it was competent, and he was copping a lot of the English blues guitarist”.