I thought about my high school days the other evening, catching an episode of Two and a Half Men. Young Jake was pouting in his room, guitar in hand, shaking the house with an overly-amplified version of Smoke on the Water.
It occurred to me what an enduring song that has been.
Maybe it isn’t played all that often on the radio anymore. It might be more of a cultural reference now, I don’t know. It seems to me that the song – along with several others – pretty well defined an era of rock music.
Hearing Jake thump out the three or four notes, bum-bump-bummmm, bump-bum-ba-bummmm… made me think about way back when. Those things tend to make me feel older, since I realize that younger people probably don’t care one whit about the song or that time.
Today’s news made me feel even older (with all due respect to my youngish octogenarian friends and customers).
Jon Lord, the keyboard player for Deep Purple and a co-writer of the song, has died at age 71. Perhaps because I was high school age when the song was released, I have retained a mental image of the band members as young men. Maybe I thought they had found the Fountain of Youth.
They didn’t.
In fact, Jon Lord was quite a bit older at that time when I assumed he was near my own age.
He never slowed down, even after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer some years back. When Deep Purple disbanded, he played with 80’s rockers Whitesnake. Deep Purple reunited later, but in between Lord kept busy. He even had a classical work that was performed at Royal Albert Hall in London.
I’m sure there will be plenty of hits on YouTube this evening, bringing up videos of concert performances.
Jon Lord – a big part of the music scene of that time – will live forever in that venue.