Come Taste the Band

Come Taste the Band is the tenth studio album by the English Rock band Deep Purple originally released in October 1975. The album was co-produced and engineered by the band and longtime associate Martin Birch. It is the only Deep Purple studio record featuring Tommy Bolin, who replaced Ritchie Blackmore on guitar and is also the final of three albums to feature Glenn Hughes on bass and David Coverdale on lead vocals before he later left to form Whitesnake.

History

When Blackmore left the band in 1975, there was uncertainty over whether Deep Purple would continue, as they did when Ian Gillan left in 1973. It was David Coverdale who asked Jon Lord to keep the band together, and Coverdale was also a major factor in recruiting Tommy Bolin to take the guitar slot.

Musically, the album is more commercial-sounding than the Deep Purple Mark III releases, leaning toward a conventional hard rock focus with overtones of soul and funk.

Development and Recording

Rehearsals for the album were recorded by Robert Simon, who was originally engineering the album. But after a dispute with the band over scheduling, the band left Simon's Pirate Sound Studios in favour of Birch.

The Band

The Band was a Canadian-American roots rock group, originally consisting of Rick Danko (bass guitar, double bass, fiddle, trombone, vocals), Levon Helm (drums, mandolin, vocals), Garth Hudson (keyboards, saxophones, trumpet), Richard Manuel (piano, baritone, drums, vocals) and Robbie Robertson (guitar, percussion, vocals). The members of the Band first came together as they joined rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins's backing group, the Hawks, one by one between 1958 and 1963.

In 1964, they separated from Hawkins, after which they toured and released a few singles as Levon and the Hawks and the Canadian Squires. The next year, Bob Dylan hired them for his U.S. tour in 1965 and world tour in 1966. Following the 1966 tour, the group moved with Dylan to Saugerties, New York, where they made the informal 1967 recordings that became The Basement Tapes, which forged the basis for their 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink. Because they were always "the band" to various frontmen, Helm said the name "The Band" worked well when the group came into its own. The group began performing as the Band in 1968 and went on to release ten studio albums. Dylan continued to collaborate with the Band over the course of their career, including a joint 1974 tour.