Get your own Free Web Page!First we showed our ticket stubs to the person at the isle and it turned out that the mixing board was in our seats so the girl asked us "Do you guys want to sit in the front?" she asks, so we were like "uhh O.K!" so she takes us down to a V.I.P. section 3 feet from the stage!! The place held about 1400 people and there was not a bad seat in the whole house. A band named "Wild T and the Spirts" opened for Deep Purple, they were very good. Lots of jamming and high power guitar playing. They were selling there CD and autographing them after the main show. They were all very cool people.
Now for what you want to hear! I did not write the set list down but can remember most of the good stuff. Deep Purple opened with HUSH and than FIREBALL. They had A LOT of POWER in the music, you could just hear and feel the intensity in the air. Ian Gillan's voice was PERFECT (I was purposely listening very closely). He was right on the money in key and the screaming he whaled out was great. He was wearing a beat up t-shirt and sweat pants. His killer long hair is back! Steve Morse was wearing a black swade vest with a tie die shirt under it and black jeans. The rest of the band was wearing basically the same thing T-shirts jeans and sneakers. ( just like us regular guys ) Roger had a black bandana his head like a pirate would. It was nice to see that Roger still has that heavy old bacher bass. He used two others as well. Ian Paice still has a fairly small set but you would never know it by listening ! Jon Lord was right next to him on stage but I wish he would place the keys so we could see more of him being the last 5 times I saw them he was buried behind them. They only played about 4 songs off of _|_ which I though was strange. They played a lot of the old stuff that you would never hear with TMIB ( because he liked to stick with the Made in Japan set list ). Tunes like "Maybe I'm a Leo, Pictures of Home, and one of my favorites - No One Came" This night was truly unreal. Deep Purple was 4 feet in front of us the whole show! After "No One Came" the crowd was really getting into the show ( there must have been a lot of die hard Purple fans there like us who knew the older stuff ). There was only about 1400 of us but everybody was so into it that it sounded like 14,000, I could tell the band was thriving off the energized fans. It looked like they were looking around at the fans thinking " WOW these people are really into it !!" So I think that made them jam even harder, espeicaly when all of us were singing along with Ian Gillan for songs like "Pictures of Home and No One Came". Maybe they thought that a lot of people would not remember those tunes-WRONG, because when they saw all of us singing along with all those songs they really looked surprized and VERY HAPPY. Anything negative I might have said about the new Deep Purple I fully take back. Gillan's sweat was flying right on us and the band was looking right at us for half the show. They were waving to us and giving us the thumbs up the whole show. I mean RIGHT AT US! We were the routy ones in the front! We got the best pictures you could possibly imagine. Wait till you see them you won't believe it! ( for amatures who don't know what were doing with a camera ) Steve Morse was BRILLIANT! I'm am not a convert but definitely a believer now.
The show was nothing less than AMAZING. One of our friends has these glasses that he throws on stage at every concert he goes to. They are colidiscope glasses from the Greatfull Dead shows he went to. He throws them on stage. After a song or two Gillan picks them up and looks at them and put them in his pocket! we are like " owe my god, he just put them in his pocket!" The next tune was "NO ONE CAME" excellent tune and we never expected to here that one! He came running out from behind the stage with the glasses on and sang the whole song with them on!!! We have the pictures of him wearing them!
AS if that would not be enough, (I know this is going to sound unbelievable but) as they were leaving the stage before the encore, Paicy comes out from the drum set and throws one stick to someone on the side of the stage and for the second on------he looks right at me and I'm yelling "here here here" he throws it about two feet over my head and I snatched it right out of the air!! I HAVE IAN PAICE'S DRUM STICK!!!!!!!!!!!!! I was flipping out to say the least.
Them came back out for a few more tunes compleat with disco ball ( Perfect Strangers, Hey Cisco, and Highway Star ) and after the last tune My friend Dave and I got to shake Gillan's hand Twice!! Dave then went over to Roger and shook his hand and I went over and also shook Steve Morse"s hand too!!
Some other songs they did were ( Maybe I'm a Leo, Pictures of Home, Speed King, Smoke on the Water, When a Blind Man Cries (WOW), Woman from Tokyo, Black Night, Ted the Mechanic, and Rosa's Cantina ) to name most of them. Deep Purple played for about 2 full hours. Ian Gillan said that this was the last show of the "End of the World" tour. As everybody has been saying, the band was ear to ear smiles. Steve Morse and Jon Lord were having a great time, they were interacting in ways that TMIB never did. Also Roger was smiling the whole show. You could really tell these guys were having just as much fun as we were watching. The light show wasn't the best I've ever seen but when watching DP, who cares about lights !! If I had to discribe the show in one word I think it would be "POWERFULL".
I'd really hate to say this but it is really going to be hard for Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow to top that show! Can't wait to see that one too.
The pictures should be web worthy in about a weak, be sure to stop back and check them out. You won't be sorry. (Tony C.)
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