By the time Deep Purple started work on Come Taste the Band, the band had already lost its most famous face. The tenth studio album from the British hard rock group would be the only one without singer Ian Gillan and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, the two men most fans associated with the name. In their place came Tommy Bolin, a young American player whose sound leaned harder on funk and effects than on the old blues-rock fire. The record was released in 1975, though sources split between 7 October and 10 November, and it arrived as a deliberate break from everything Deep Purple had built before. Deep Purple released Come Taste the Band on October 10, 1975.
A new lineup and a new direction
The gamble was real. Deep Purple had sold millions by sticking to a formula of roaring riffs and screaming vocals, and now that formula was gone. Bolin and singer David Coverdale wrote most of the material before the band entered Musicland Studios in Munich, so the new direction was not an accident. Bolin brought in songs he had started with Jeff Cook, and Cook also wrote the music for Lady Luck while Coverdale supplied the words. The result was the band's tenth album and its first to put funk grooves where Blackmore's guitar solos used to sit.
Bolin's playing changed the texture of the record in ways that went beyond songwriting. He used Echoplex effects and pedals, tools Blackmore had avoided, and the band often layered multiple guitar tracks on top of one another. That gave songs a thicker, stranger sound, part hard rock and part something closer to dance music. Critics noticed the funk influence immediately, and the album title underlined the shift: it translates the phrase 'come taste the wine' from the musical Cabaret. Deep Purple was asking listeners to try something unfamiliar, and not everyone was ready.
Drug problems during the Munich sessions
The sessions themselves nearly fell apart. Bolin and bassist Glenn Hughes both struggled with drug problems while the band recorded, and Hughes was sent to London for rehabilitation while the public was told he had a liver infection. As a result, Hughes sings far less than on the previous two albums; he takes lead vocals only on Gettin' Tighter and This Time Around, and shares a vocal with Coverdale only on You Keep On Moving. Bolin even plays the bass part on Comin' Home, a small sign of how much the lineup had been stretched.
For a moment, the record seemed to work. In the UK it reached number 19 and stayed on the chart for four weeks, selling more than 60,000 copies and earning a silver certification. In the US it climbed to number 43 and held on for 14 weeks, while New Zealand and Norway pushed it to number 6. But the tour behind the album failed, and Deep Purple broke up after it. The band had released one more studio record with Bolin, then fell silent in 1976.
What came next was brutal. The last concert with this lineup took place on 15 March 1976, and the official announcement of the split followed in July. Bolin died that December of a heart attack brought on by a drug overdose. Come Taste the Band was left as the only Deep Purple album with Bolin, and the only one without Gillan and Blackmore. It was also the band's last studio album before the first breakup.
The record never quite escaped its mixed reputation. Some reviews were kind, and the band's sound had clearly moved toward funk, but the absence of the old guard made it hard for longtime listeners to accept. The story of the album is not a clean triumph; it is the sound of a band trying to survive its own past, with a gifted guitarist who brought in new material and a new feel, and then ran out of time.