Rainbow is an interesting band in that there are several very different versions of it. Each version of the band is more or less defined by who the lead vocalist is. A change of vocalist usually meant some level of change in the band’s musical direction.
Initially formed in late 1974 by Ritchie Blackmore as a vehicle to record a song that Deep Purple wasn’t interested in doing, Rainbow quickly became a band in its own right once Blackmore saw how well it was working. This prompted him to leave Purple the following year to go full-time with his new outfit. Ronnie James Dio fronted that version of the band, and with him the band released some of the biggest hard rock classics ever.
In 1979, Blackmore rang in some changes. He was not content with the mystical style spearheaded by Dio. He wanted bigger American success and was willing to cast aside anyone in the band who was not ready to embrace more commercial rock (and songs about love) to achieve it. He recruited Graham Bonnet and slowly but surely started the move towards more melodic hard rock. While this version of the band saw bigger hits than ever before, especially with their cover of Russ Ballard’s Since You’ve Been Gone (UK #6, US Billboard Hot 100 #54), the erratic behaviour and unusual appearance of the frontman (who sported a short buzzcut) led to even further changes. Blackmore wanted to get there even quicker, with even more commercial material and a frontman with the looks to help things along. Enter Joe Lynn Turner.
Turner was the perfect collaboration partner for Blackmore, who loved what he brought to the table vocally as well as song ideas. Their first album together was Difficult To Cure (1981) which included their most successful UK single I Surrender (another Ballard song) at #3, as well as #19 on the US Mainstream Rock chart. Can’t Happen Here was also a UK Top 20 hit.
As if to underline the band’s American focus, the two new recruits for the album (Joe Lynn Turner and drummer Bobby Rondinelli) were both American. For the follow-up, a further line-up change brought the American tally even further up, as keyboardist Don Airey was replaced by David Rosenthal – a New Jersey prodigy fresh out of the Berklee College of Music, who was chosen after the band had auditioned some 50 other hopefuls.
For the first time, Americans dominated the band, with the last remaining Englishmen being the former Deep Purple colleagues Blackmore and bassist Roger Glover. This was the line-up that was preparing to record Difficult To Cure’s follow-up.
The band chose Le Studio in Morin Heights, Canada as the recording studio for their next album. The facility was highly regarded: Rush had recorded Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures there, as had The Police with Ghost In the Machine. In fact, The Police was just wrapping up that album as Rainbow arrived.
“I remember that The Police were up there finishing one of their albums at the time,” said Joe Lynn Turner, “and we had a three-hour layover, so while we were waiting, we watched them lay down their stuff. It was really inspiring.”
The band arrived and went to work in December 1981. As planned, they focused on developing a collection of melodic rock songs specifically aimed at the huge American FM AOR audience. The album was fully expected to give the band American hits. It got to the point where this was all that mattered to Blackmore. UK hits were still appreciated, but not enough for him at this time.
One of the songs they were working on had the form of a melodic, emotional ballad, which would eventually become known as Stone Cold. Written by band members Joe Lynn Turner, Ritchie Blackmore and Roger Glover, the song is about a man whose lover has left him out in the cold.
That guy, at least at the offset, was Rainbow bass player Roger Glover.
Glover had joined Rainbow in 1979 at Ritchie Blackmore’s invitation. This coincided with a period when the marriage to his first wife Judi Kuhl was breaking down. As Rainbow had moved base to America, so did Glover, initially staying as a guest of Bruce Payne, his new manager. The divorce was finalized in 1982, at which point he moved into his own house in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Joe Lynn Turner wrote the lyric after spotting a despondent and drunk Glover in the studio one day. Asking him what was wrong, all Glover managed to say was “She left me stone cold.”
The band already had the instrumental skeleton of a song that could work for a set of lyrics around that theme. “I heard the story of what happened,” Turner said in the book The Other Side of Rainbow. “It was the usual divorce proceedings, and I went back to my room and wrote the lyric. I knew I had something with that mood that we were putting down.”
While the focus of many Rainbow songs was on Blackmore’s guitar, this time they really pushed the overall melodic qualities in order to make maximum impact on the radio. In many ways, this makes Joe Lynn Turner’s vocals the high point of the track.
Every night I have the same old dream
‘Bout you and me and what’s in between
So many changes, so many lies
Try to run, try to hide
From everything that I feel inside
But I can’t escape you or your frozen eyes
Searching in the darkness
Fading out of sight
Love was here and gone like a thief in the night
Stone cold
And I thought I knew you so well
Stone cold
Can’t break away from your spell
The recording of Straight Between the Eyes is largely remembered by the entire band for the harsh weather conditions, which turned out to be a great inspiration for the vocalist. “I remember recording Stone Cold in the studio we were at up in Canada,” Turner told MetalCastle.net. “It was called Le Studio, and it was just outside of Montreal. I remember doing Stone Cold while this amazing snow and ice storm was happening outside. So, I was singing Stone Cold, and all the glass walls that the studio was made from were covered in snow and ice. It was an incredible storm and the perfect setting for me to sing that song to. I worked on it all night, and the storm was inspirational. It altered my approach and taught me that your environment could motivate and inspire you – especially a singer – to reach higher heights and find more honesty in the delivery.”
New keyboardist David Rosenthal had been asked to contribute with the songwriting, but was told that as he was new, he would not receive a full writing credit for anything that was used. This had happened to some previous recruits as well, but despite his young age, Rosenthal was more on the ball than them and simply contacted his lawyer to deal with the situation. Blackmore received a letter from Rosenthal’s lawyer shortly after arriving at Le Studio. His reaction? On the surface, he shrugged and got on with things. But it did make Rosenthal the target of many practical jokes during these sessions.
The harsh weather conditions had a particular part to play in “Operation Rosenthal.” In Jerry Bloom’s book Black Knight, drummer Bobby Rondinelli remembers: “As a practical joke, Ritchie decided to take all of his [Rosenthal’s] furniture out of his room and put it in the cold, in the snow. The next morning at breakfast Dave was shivering because it took all night for his room to thaw out, and he brought everything back into the room on his own. That was a vicious one.”
In spite of incidents like this, most of the album sessions have been described as harmonious, with fond memories shared by the involved in hindsight. The sessions seemed to have far less bickering and disagreements than previous ones, and the music was taking shape very nicely.
Best of all: their approach worked. Stone Cold was released as the second single from the album. It was released in the UK first, on 26 March 1982, and later that spring in the US (exact date unknown, but as its chart position peaked in mid-June it was likely released in mid-to-late May). The song gave the band their first and only Top 40 hit on the US Billboard Hot 100 – although just barely, peaking at #40 on 19 June 1982, spending 12 weeks on the chart in total.
The song also went all the way to #1 on the US Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart on 5 June 1982, which was a huge achievement. In the UK, it had a more modest singles chart placement at #34.
In America, this is still Rainbow’s most popular song. The song made its way onto the playlists of many classic rock radio stations, where it can still be heard. Much of the song’s success, however, came thanks to MTV. The music channel was only about a year old when the song was released, and it managed to get into the most important playlist of the day: MTV’s high rotation list.
Rainbow, like many British bands, had been making videos for a while, and for Stone Cold they made an attention-grabbing clip with smoke, mirrors and mannequins. The video was directed by Edd Griles, who was already considered a name director for music videos, but who truly became notorious when he was picked to produce the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984. But that’s another story.
Blackmore would later on start refusing to do music videos, but for the time being he was quite willing to play the game for the greater good.
Blackmore has not always looked back fondly on songs (or even albums) he has been involved with, but he seems to have a genuine soft spot for the Straight Between the Eyes album, and in particular the song Stone Cold. In speaking with RockAndRollGarage.com, he said: “When Stone Cold comes on the jukebox, I go ‘I’m proud of that!’ Because it was exactly where I wanted to go. The fact that I could kind of write something that was poppy was something new for me. I like that groove. I just don’t wanna play ‘Crash, crash, crash’ for the sake of it. I’ve got a hear a melody, the melody was always at the bottom of, for me musically, where I was going.”
Blackmore was also extremely complimentary of his former lead vocalist in a conversation with Classic Rock back in 1995: “Joe was the best singer we had in Rainbow, without a doubt. Him singing things like Can’t Let You Go, Street Of Dreams, he was brilliant. On his ballads no one could touch him, and his was the voice I was looking for. And when we broke up and I had to do the Purple thing, I shouldn’t have really done that. I did it because it was basically easy money.”
Joe Lynn Turner has in turn been complimentary about Blackmore, although he makes no secret of the fact that it can be challenging working with perfectionist larger-than-life personalities, which he’s done a lot over the years (Blackmore, Malmsteen, Schenker). “They can be difficult,” Turner says, “but anybody looking for perfection is difficult. And there is no such thing, in my opinion, as perfection because I believe you have to be perfectly imperfect. I’d have to say that Ritchie was always very song-oriented; he was always playing for the song.”
The band went on to tour America on the Live Between The Eyes tour, which featured a giant pair of moving mechanical eyes as part of the stage set, with spotlights shining from the pupils. The tour, although extensive, was their first not to include the UK which rankled with British fans. The American focus was absolute, and for the time being, it paid off.
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