Did You Know? Deep Purple's Ritchie Blackmore Loses it and Smashes Guitars
January 22, 2014On April 6, 1974 in Ontario, California a huge and great festival was being held featuring famous bands and artists like The Eagles, Rare Earth, Earth, Wind & Fire, Seals & Crofts, Black Oak Arkansas, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Deep Purple was given the choice when to go on stage to perform and they decided to go on during sunset and that meant to push Emerson, Lake & Palmer to be the last band to perform in the festival.
The festival was ahead of schedule so Deep Purple decided they should stall their gig so the sun will go down and this decision made organizers very angry as they tried to force Deep Purple to go on stage sooner and not let hundreds of thousands of fans in the crowd wait, even threatening to cancel their performance.
Finally, Deep Purple went on stage and performed their songs in the festival but it wasn't before they made everyone wait nearly an hour before they got on stage for it to be close to dusk.
Ritchie Blackmore who was not pleased with the organizers and their threats, decided not to let things slide and approaching the end of their show threw several guitars, an amplifier and even speaker cabinets into the crowd and if that's not enough he even attacked one of the network's video cameras and damaged it.
That was not the end of it and Deep Purple had to leave the concert by a helicopter assistance to avoid the angry fire marshals (because of a fire breaking on stage due to Blackmore's mayhem) and the executives of ABC-TV who were the ones in-charge of the concert.
Rock n' Roll!!!
Ritchie Blackmore loses it 3 minutes into the video
