Jon Lord

Okay, I'll admit that this blog entry is more reflective of my influences than necessarily the other guys in Rule 17. I'm the biggest Deep Purple nut in the bunch, so the passing of Jon Lord bothers me the same way losing any big musical influence bothers you. While I'm trying to avoid putting too much non-band-related stuff in this blog, I have to admit that without Jon Lord, Rule 17 would either not exist or would be musically somewhat different than it is.

Musicians are the products of their influences along with whatever percentage of themselves they bring to the table. Most of us could probably list 20 other musicians who influenced us in some degree within a few minutes. In that sense, the musicians from a previous generation almost have some level of parentage to those of us in the generations that follow.

When one of your influences passes on, it takes a bit out of you. In some ways, it’s more understandable when you look at the shocking and tragic deaths of young musicians, particularly when they seem random like the crashes that killed Ronnie Van Zant, Cliff Burton, and Randy Rhoads; or the senseless shooting of Darrel Abbott. But time rolls on and, I hate to say it, but as we get older so do our heroes.

This was the case with Jon Lord who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 71. Granted, I’d be hard-pressed to call 71 years a particularly long life, especially in this day and age. But after his retirement from Deep Purple in 2002, and even after his diagnosis, Jon Lord was still making music...and it was good music.

Jon Lord is responsible for giving me a case of “Hammond envy” that has not subsided since I first started actively listening to Deep Purple in the early 1990s. To be honest, I started listening because of Ritchie Blackmore, but it didn’t take long for my attention to turn to the real weight of the band, which was Jon Lord hammering away on a Hammond B or C3 through a distorted Marshall stack. The power of the combination dwarfed most of the distorted guitar sounds of the day. The harmonic content generated by the tonewheels of the Hammond created all sorts of interesting growls and textures, which he would further accentuate with ring modulation, shutting off the drive motor and leaving the amplifier on, which allowed him to “divebomb”, and shaking the Hammond itself to make horrendous “Crashes” of the spring reverb that would place a jarring exclamation point at the end of a jazz or R&B influenced run. In this sense, he was something of a Hendrix of the Hammond.

At the same time, he was a very schooled musician, well versed in the orthodoxy of the classical world. The second Deep Purple lineup is probably the most well-known, although it’s not particularly well known for its earliest output, which was built around Lord’s “Concerto for Group and Orchestra”, which was followed up by “the Gemini Suite”. In fact, prior to the release of “In Rock”, Deep Purple risked being pigeonholed as a quasi-classical sort of prog-rock experiment. Ritchie Blackmore is most often cited as the one who brought classical music into heavy rock, but Jon Lord deserves at least equal credit. Due to the nature of the instrument and his musical background, it wasn’t at all unusual for little bits of Bach to show up in a blistering, 120 decibel keyboard solo.

Of course, Lord’s musical output greatly exceeded his pioneering work in Deep Purple, but that’s definitely the element that drew me in. I can’t honestly say that there’s another modern keyboard player who has had a similar influence on my guitar playing in the sense of composition, phrasing, even tone. Realistically, speaking as a guitarist, the guitar players in classic bands tend to get too much credit for the band’s sound. John Bonham had as much or more to do with Zeppelin being heavy as Jimmy Page. Geezer Butler should get as much credit for the sonic weight of Black Sabbath as Tony Iommi. And Jon Lord added much more weight to the Purple sound than Ritchie Blackmore ever did - even if “going heavy” was Blackmore’s idea in the first place.

So farewell, Jon Lord. He did good work, and even though he wasn’t young, when the good die we very quickly realize how much they still had to offer.