They played their first show in Denmark on 20 April 1968, and their final one in Cardiff on 4 July 1969. They were active for only 15 months, during which they also released three studio albums.
I’m talking about Deep Purple Mark 1, featuring Rod Evans (vocals), Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Jon Lord (organ), Nick Simper (bass) and Ian Paice (drums).
The band’s original line-up does not loom large in the band’s history, and they may have had a whirlwind existence, but this version of the band managed to set up the musical foundations for a band that is still active in their seventh decade.
Crucially, if that version of the band hadn’t managed to score a bona fide hit, things could have turned out very different.
Hush starts with a touch of dramatic atmosphere. A few howls in the night (presumably) by some creature (or approximation thereof), possibly howling towards an imaginary moon, adds a somewhat haunting flair. Then the band comes crashing in in a similarly dramatic fashion, before an interesting bed of samba-inspired drum patterns on overdrive gets the song started properly. The organ conjures up a very interesting pattern of its own. The guitar lines following the na na na na’s are sharp and jarring, but also a big part of what makes that section work.
It was Deep Purple’s first hit. Not bad, as it also was their first single, released on 21 June 1968 in Europe.
The song was not written by anyone in Deep Purple. It was a cover version written by Joe South – an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. While he also had a music career, South is best known for his songwriting. He won a Grammy Award in 1970 for Games People Play, with a further nomination in 1972 for Rose Garden.
South was around 27 years old when he wrote Hush in 1967. It was part of a batch of songs that were specifically written for recording artist Billy Joe Royal who was looking for songs for his next album. South was his regular songwriter as well as producer, and when they met up for album sessions in Nashville in July 1967, South brought in several new songs. One of them was Rose Garden, which later became a mega-hit – written in the car on the way to the sessions. Royal, however, didn’t like that song. A different song was needed, and South quickly wrote Hush for him in five minutes while leaning on the dashboard.
In the end, Royal did record Rose Garden for his album, but didn’t release it as a single and so nothing much happened with it. In 1971 the song became an international hit for Lynn Anderson, becoming South’s most successful composition. Royal later regretted not liking the song, but we can be thankful for that as it led to Hush being written in its stead.
There is next to nothing to say about South’s inspiration behind the song. In this case, necessity was the mother of invention. A new song was needed very quickly, and so something was cobbled together there and then. It was supposed to fill a quota, but everybody quickly realised that what South had come up with was very special.
Billy Joe Royal recorded his version of Hush on 12 July 1967 in Nashville, with Barry Bailey (future lead guitarist for the Atlanta Rhythm Section) on guitar. It worked phenomenally well, quickly becoming the song that everybody rallied around. It was earmarked to be the next single. Royal liked the song so much that he even gave the album the somewhat awkward title Billy Joe Royal featuring Hush to emphasise it.
The single didn’t set the charts on fire, but it was a qualified success, reaching #52 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts as well as #45 in Canada. More crucially, it gave Royal a one-off hit on the European continent, as it reached #12 on the German singles charts, as well as hitting #1 in Belgium, #2 in Switzerland, and #5 in the Netherlands.
If Royal hadn’t had a hit with the song in Germany, Deep Purple might not have covered it. Ritchie Blackmore lived in Hamburg and heard Hush played on the radio as well as about town. He thought it was a great song. It might even work for the new act that he was part of putting together, as long as a different arrangement could be invented.
The following year, Blackmore was re-established in London and the first line-up of Deep Purple was slowly but surely coming together. The first rehearsals of what would be known as the Mark 1 line-up of the band involved a lot of jamming, as well as arranging some existing song ideas (And the Address and Mandrake Root). They slowly but surely started looking at cover material to fill out their set. Hush was one of them, suggested by Blackmore and duly rehearsed.
With a possible set list shaping up during rehearsals, Blackmore convinced a friend of his, Derek Lawrence, to become the band’s producer. They had met years before when both worked for producer Joe Meek. Lawrence also ran an independent production company that recorded singles for release in the United States, and it was felt that perhaps a collaboration there could be mutually beneficial. Joining some of Purple’s rehearsal sessions, Lawrence was impressed.
Through Lawrence, HEC Enterprises contacted the new American record label Tetragrammaton Records, which was looking for British bands to work with. HEC arranged for the band to cut some demos for the American label in late March and early April at Trident Studios in London. They taped two of their previously developed songs, Hush and Help!, as well as two new songs: Love Help Me (their own composition from earlier that year) and Shadows (quickly written ahead of the demo sessions). EMI would offer a European distribution deal on its sub-label Parlophone, while the other songs (minus Shadows) were submitted to Tetragrammaton for approval.
The recording of demos was followed by a short promotional tour of eight dates in Denmark and Sweden through April and May. The fledgling band performed their first ever gig before a crowd of about 500 at the Park School in the district of Vestpoppen in Tastrup, Denmark on 20 April 1968.
The 45-minute set opened with the band’s own instrumental And The Address, but the rest of the set largely relied on covers and followed the Vanilla Fudge influence of re-arranging a combination of familiar and less well-known songs. Amongst them were Hush, Paint It Black, I’m So Glad, Help, and Hey Joe. In fact, the only other self-penned song they played at the time was Mandrake Root, which would soon develop into a tour-de-force closing number. Their act would be knocked into shape during their string of Danish dates, dropping a few songs and even jamming up a few new ideas.
After completing their Scandinavian tour, they immediately entered Pye’s Marble Arch Studios in London to record their debut album, produced by Derek Lawrence.
“It was basically our live show,” bassist Nick Simper said in a 2006 interview with Jerry Bloom for the Black Knight book. “We’d been over to Denmark and as soon as we came back, they said, ‘You’re in the studio!’ ‘What are we going to do?’’’Do what you did in Denmark!’ So we did. We left a few of them out, we did the ones we liked best and did nearly everything first take in 18 hours.”
The band rattled out the entire album in a weekend, recording on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th May 1968, after which Lawrence spent the following Monday 13th mixing it. This was the start of the band performing all the backing tracks for their albums live in the studio, a recording practice that they have always stuck to ‘till this day, albeit with room for overdubs.
What makes the recording of their first album especially impressive is the fact that the band had barely been playing together for a month at the time. “We were under extreme pressures to record, having only been together a matter of weeks” said bassist Nick Simper in an interview for the first album’s Deluxe Edition liner notes. “We had no option but to record a selection from the songs that we had cobbled together for our first gigs! I was reasonably happy with our direction.”
Most of the songs on the debut album, which was given the title Shades of Deep Purple, was recorded in very few takes. They needed (or afforded themselves) two for Hush. Others were done in one.
In conversation with Jerry Bloom, Nick Simper said: “When we did the first sessions at the Pye Studio all we were told was you’ve only got it for two days, but we’d come up from doing an A and B side in four hours. That’s what it was like in those days so we were used to delivering. In those days you had to do it from beginning to end but we were all well practiced at going into the studio and delivering our parts and getting it right first time. And nearly everything was first take on that first album. We hardly made any mistakes.”
I got a certain little girl, she’s on my mind
No doubt about it, she looks so fine
She’s the best girl that I ever had
Sometimes she’s gonna make me feel so badHush, hush, I thought I heard her calling my name now
Hush, hush, she broke my heart, but I love her just the same now
Hush, hush, thought I heard her calling my name now
Hush, hush, I need her loving and I’m not to blame now
Nick Simper said, “We would put a track down and Derek would say, ‘Maybe you could do it better boys’ and we’d do it again and you’d have an alternative, but then maybe the first one was the best. But we hardly ever blew it and had to start again. Usually we would do it without even a vocal guideline. You played it as live and we just knew the song. If you weren’t quite sure you would write it down or Jon [Lord, keyboards] would score it out for you. He put the tablature down on a sheet of music paper and you knew exactly what you were doing and you’d have it on a music stand to remind yourself. We’d all do that but basically you knew the song and where the singer was supposed to be singing. You learnt the song from beginning to end.”
Of all the songs on the album, Hush in particular seems to have a timeless sound, remaining quite contemporary. “Hush does have a timeless quality,” Simper agreed in the Deluxe Edition liner notes. “Our version was very different because we had not studied the other recordings of the song. A friend came to our rehearsal room in Deeves Hall one evening and taught us the musical parts. From there we re-structured the song and built our own interpretation.”
The friend in question was Rod Freeman, vocalist for a band called Flintstones. Not much is said of this visit, but it is known that Freeman became particularly impressed with Purple’s drummer Ian Paice, likening him to Mitch Mitchell [of the Jimi Hendrix Experience].
Ian Paice is in fact the only member still present in the band from those humble beginnings, but Ian Gillan and Roger Glover (who replaced Rod Evans and Nick Simper on vocals and bass respectively in 1969) are not far behind.
The album’s producer, Derek Lawrence, is clear about what he thinks the reason is for the song’s timeless quality: “The song, the song, the song, the song!” he said in the Deluxe Editon liner notes. “What Purple did was bring it up to date for that time.”
As far as the howling at the beginning of the track, Lawrence said “The between song noises on the disc were taken straight from a BBC Sound Effects library album.” This also included sounds of rain and thunder.
Once representatives from Tetragrammaton had heard the album, they wanted it released as soon as possible. Hush was picked to be released as a single, both in America and Britain. The band’s preference was to see Help pulled as the single, but Tetragrammaton’s overruling decision was to pay dividends. It was to be one of the few correct business decisions the new record label would make.
Hush was released as a single on 21 June 1968 in Europe. The album followed in September. In the US, the single as well as the album arrived on 17 July, and it would be America that embraced the band first. It it peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September that year, as well as going all the way to #2 in Canada. Europe was not unresponsive either – the song got to #16 in Italy and was a minor hit several other territories, getting good press in the process. But it went largely unnoticed in Britain, where the band was barely above club level.
It is unsurprising that the band focused on building a bigger profile across the pond, making their first US tour of many in October 1968. The band played their debut show on US soul on 16 October 1968 at the 16,000 seat LA Forum in the Inglewood area of Los Angeles, supporting Cream on their farewell tour. They were thrown off the bill after a mere three gigs. According to Derek Lawrence, some aspects of the live show, mainly Ritchie’s onstage antics, didn’t go down too well with the more serious headliner. “Cream didn’t think it was funny,” he said, “but the audience loved it, and what with Hush being a hit single they went down very well… probably too well.”
Given the huge US success of Hush and Shades of Deep Purple, Tetragrammaton urgently wanted a follow-up recorded as soon as possible, and Deep Purple returned to England and De Lane Lea Studios, Kingsway in London to produce their second LP even before the first one had been given a UK release. This writer’s favourite Deep Purple Mark 1 album, The Book of Taliesyn, was taped between August and October 1968. This was an ocean of time compared with the first album, but that is however another story…
Looking back at Hush, Blackmore was pleased with his performance and sound on the track: “I liked the guitar solo – especially the feedback. That was done with my Gibson ES-335, which I don’t have anymore because my ex-wife stole it. I used that right up to the In Rock album, on Child In Time and Flight of the Rat. The reason I changed to a Stratocaster was because the sound had an edge to it that I really liked. But it was much harder to get used to. When you’re playing a humbucking pickup, you’ve got that fat sound and it’s quite forgiving. But when you lay with Fender pickups, they are so thin and mean and edgy and hard. And every note counts; you can’t fake a note.”
In an more recent interview with Geoff Barton for Classic Rock, Paice was thinking back to his drum parts on Hush: ”Basically it’s a samba. Obviously, I wasn’t trying to play the same way that a guy with congas and hand drums would do it. But I was keeping that pulse that the organ was doing in my mind in a way to complement the fairly straightforward rock-and-roll rhythm I played, so try to maintain the inherent swing of the samba while you’re playing. It finds its own feel.”
Eventually, nearly two years later the song’s debut with Billy Joe Royal, and a year after Deep Purple released their version, Joe South finally recorded his own version of his song. It was included on his second solo album Games People Play, released spring 1969. He did not release it as a single – the song was after all two years old at that point. He had newer material that he wanted to showcase, but as Deep Purple had achieved a high level of success with it, reclaiming it for his own probably didn’t hurt.
Two decades after Deep Purple first recorded the song, they interestingly went back to it. When they launched their double live album Nobody’s Perfect in 1989, a new version of Hush was included as a bonus studio finale. The recording they used was taken from a jam session during a rehearsal at Hook End Manor in 1988.
Many were excited at the prospect of getting a new recording of the song which included Ian Gillan and Roger Glover. One person who did not care for the idea was Ian Gillan. “Adding Hush was the strangest decision of all,” he said in his autobiography. “Nobody has yet owned up to that idea, although I did try to get it across that Rod Evans could have done a much better job than I could with the newer version. An original is always best.”
Gillan was probably ecstatic when he found out that the new version would even be released as a single. It reached #62 on the UK singles chart (beating the original!) and number 44 on the US Hot Mainstream Rock chart (not even close to the original version, to say the least).
Numerous line-ups of Deep Purple has come and gone, but Hush has never really gone away. It remains a cornerstone of the Deep Purple discography and the track still has many fans. Rick Wakeman is one of them. The final word goes to the Yes keyboardist, who has often praised the early Deep Purple sound, at times even going as far as citing Shades of Deep Purple as his favourite album. A lot of that has to do with Jon Lord’s organ sound and playing, as he told Classic Rock: “I was a huge fan of Jon ever since I heard Hush in 1968. I’d never heard an organ played so wildly as Jon did on that record. It was so amazing, I went out and bought Shades of Deep Purple. It was so far ahead of its time.”
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