When Ritchie Blackmore had an "embarrassing" encounter with Eric Clapton
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Fans can thank Candice Night for convincing husband Ritchie Blackmore to sit down in his private tavern in front of a camera and share some of the great rock stories he's been telling his inner circle for decades. "Candice here is always asking me to write these stories down and they're kind of private, and sometimes silly," says Blackmore in the video below. "I would never write a book but I have stories I will tell my friends when I'm in the bar drinking, like now."
In the latest of these stories, he looks back on meeting Eric Clapton when Deep Purple supported Cream in 1968. Things were so cordial Clapton even gifted Blackmore a toy wooden duck on his birthday during the tour, but years later an incident in an Australian hotel was less warm.
So 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
"Another time, we were in a hotel, I think it was Melbourne, Australia. What happened was, I knew that Eric was with his band in that hotel," remembers Blackmore. "We'd had three days there where we'd been woken up very early with hammering – the usual nonsense that goes on in hotels. 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.
"Which we did," confirms the guitarist. "The next day of course the hammering started as per usual, they took no notice of what we said, so 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. And what happened was, as soon as he started playing we were so loud we got a bang on the door and it was Eric's security…"
They were not amused – and neither it seems was Eric Clapton, who trying to sleep and was much closer to the cacophony than Blackmore could have anticipated.
"Believe it or not, Eric was in the next room to where we were," remembers Blackmore. "I thought Eric was on another floor way away from where we were. And that was embarrassing, so we stopped playing."
Another awkward encounter further underscored Blackmore's embarrassment.
"The next day we had some words with his security and I said, 'I'm really sorry, I didn't realise we were next door… that was embarrassing, especially to think that Eric might have thought it was me making this racket on the guitar. 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."
But it wasn't all bad news – Blackmore's hotel protest tactic would soon come in use again.
"When we came back to England we noticed in the hotel that we stayed in there was a chalkboard, and written up on this chalkboard was, 'There will be, at 7 o'clock in the morning, a fire drill' and we went, here we go again – we're going to hear noises. So we said, 'If you do that, we will bring our amplifiers in and we'll start bashing away, doing what we did in Australia. And luckily enough one of the guys behind the desk said, 'What a minute – we've just read about this in the paper. These guys will do that.' So they changed the time of the fire drill to a respectable 1 o'clock in the afternoon. So our reputation preceded us."
The Deep Purple and Rainbow legend is clearly an admirer of Clapton, and as well as revealing in the video above how he ended up buying one of the blues great's old Strats that he later used for the recording of Deep Purple's Emmaretta, Blackmore also explains he's more recently corresponded with Slowhand regarding myopathy arthritis that Blackmore suffers from. Clapton revealed in 2016 that he experiences nerve damage that has affected his guitar-playing abilities.
Check out Ritchie Blackmore's official YouTube channel for more videos.
