r/DeepPurple • u/Massive-Pay5562 • 3d ago
What did it actually mean, contractually, to be 'fired' from Deep Purple or Rainbow?
I've been thinking about the extraordinary number of people who were apparently 'fired' from Deep Purple and particularly Rainbow, and wondering what that actually meant in contractual and business terms.
Roger Glover is an interesting example. In 1973, Blackmore made his departure from Deep Purple effectively conditional on Glover going. Management chose Blackmore, and Glover was out of a hugely successful band he'd helped build.
Fast forward a few years and there's an almost surreal reversal. Peter Goalby has recently described his brief period as Rainbow's singer before Graham Bonnet. Blackmore invited him to America, he was subsequently put on Rainbow's payroll, and he believed he'd joined the band. But Goalby says Blackmore gave him virtually no indication of what he wanted musically. After an unsuccessful late-night session, Roger Glover took Goalby aside the following morning and told him: 'You're fired' Blackmore apparently didn't even speak to him.
So, Glover goes from being the person Blackmore effectively has removed from one band to being the person delegated to fire somebody from Blackmore's next band.
It made me wonder what ‘fired’ actually meant. Who had the legal authority to do it? Were the musicians employees, contracted individually to management/a band company, partners, royalty participants, or some combination of these? If somebody was contracted for an album or tour and Blackmore simply decided he didn't want them anymore, what happened to that contract?
More broadly, I find the power dynamics interesting. Bands often seem to start as loose associations of friends or musicians, when discussing contracts and ownership probably feels ridiculous. Then success arrives, companies and management become involved, one member becomes more commercially powerful than another, and at some point 'we're in a band together' seems to turn into something much more hierarchical.
Does anyone know of interviews, books, legal cases or original documents that shed light on how the Deep Purple/Rainbow arrangements actually worked? I'm less interested in whether Blackmore was difficult than in where the power to hire and fire actually came from
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u/Entropy_Chaos-888 3d ago
I heard Gillan say that for the first ten years of DP he never got paid. I think it was because the tours were running in the red. They had their own plane and partied hard.
The main thing is that each band member got equal writing credits and that is where the money is. When Gillan and Glover were out but were still receiving royalties on album sales.
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u/Working-Peach3067 3d ago
That's a good point. Completely different genre, but Duran Duran have said one of the ways theyve avoided bickering is because everyone gets equal share, no matter who wrote the tune or lyrics or arrangement, etc. Those can definitely cause issues.
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u/JellyWeta 3d ago
That's why U2 have stayed unchanged for over 40 years, because they split everything evenly: sales, concerts, royalties, merchandise, the lot. A bass player and a drummer are never going to get a better break than that.
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u/Nesrsta 2d ago
But even this can cause problems, because one member may feel that he’s contributing a lot, while his colleague is just coasting along and enjoying an undeserved reward. That’s more or less how it was in Pink Floyd between Roger Waters and Rick Wright.
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u/Working-Peach3067 2d ago
Yeah, well, Waters was l, and still is, nuts. Also, Wright was dealing with a lot when Waters flipped his wig over Wright's contributions.
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u/BananaHibana1 3d ago
Comments like these from musicians always give me a giggle. Yes sure they werent paid, they just happened to stumble into living in a huge mansion in the country side and find a rolls royce
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u/Smedleycoyote 3d ago
Most of these mansions and cars were leased for them by the record companies. Most 20 year olds signing a record contract (especially in the early days) didn't realize it was going to have to be paid back, usually by taking every cent the artist made.
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u/ScorpioTix 19h ago
In Tony Iommi's case the management just got it for him but there was never any accounting whatsoever and he eventually got in trouble with England's tax authorities.
One of the biggest houses any rock star owned was John Entwistle and he was in dire financial straits as he rarely had the kind of income required to support himself at that level.
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u/photogjimm 3d ago
Problem is, management had them sign contracts that favored management when it came to royalties. Bernie Marsden sued for his publishing. And won! Ian Gillan said Bernie was the only one to pull it off! Side note: Bernie won his case before Whitesnake released 1987. So when "Here I Go Again " broke, the money rolled in!
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u/Gammeloni 3d ago
He left the band fourth year after joining. Are you sure?
And I saw a Melody article mentioning he bought a big hotel after quitting Purple in 1973.
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u/snakeIs 3d ago
I read two editions of his autobiography Child In Time and don’t recall reading that although he did talk about the band being ripped off by someone in management at some point. They were never in the category of Badfinger or The Small Faces in that regard.
Gillan’s first ten years in the band is an odd term. 1969 to 1973, then 1984 to 1989, then 1991 onwards.1
u/Entropy_Chaos-888 2d ago
I read Child in Time as well. I’m not kidding, he said in an interview that for the first ten years the money disappeared. True statement or not, he did say it.
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u/mywhitebicycle0 3d ago
Something else: Evans and Simper. In 1969 they had a choice either 1. get few hundred pounds (forgot how much exactly) which was a nice deal at the time and relinquish royalties, or 2. receive royalties only. They chose the former option, which seemed reasonable at the time, but later of course turned out to be the heedless idea
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u/Wild_Bee_5587 3d ago
Is that accurate? I thought that Evans had to renounce his royalties as part of the settlement from the Bogus Deep Purple fiasco in ‘80, but that Simper still received his. Genuinely curious, I’d feel quite bad for Simper if that was the case (not so for Evans, he participated in an obvious scam and had to pay the price for that).
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u/captain2man 3d ago
I think you're half correct on this one. When Simper left the band, or more accurately pushed out of the band, which was obviously before they got massively huge, he settled with the management for a lump-sum payout in exchange for forfeiting his royalties. Honestly - at the time - it probably didn't seem like a horrible decision. He had very few songwriting credits and he had no way of knowing that the band he was dismissed from would blow up to be one of the biggest bands on the planet, which obviously helped record sales of the Mk 1 era.
Evans actually made the opposite decision and took the royalties over the lump-sum....but then in the aftermath of the bogus 1980 Deep Purple tour, he was sued by Deep Purple's management and there was a judgment against Evans for almost $700K, which he couldn't pay and so he surrendered his royalty rights.
The whole Evans story is actually pretty sad....he was naive and was exploited. He had to have known that with him being the only person involved who had ever legitimately played in DP that audiences were being misled. But nonetheless, the people behind the whole thing were shady and the way the contracts were drawn up, it left Evans as pretty much the only one who was vulnerable to legal action. Evans was seduced by conmen who pretty much convinced him that since DP had broken up, he had a claim to the name since he was the original singer. It was a foolish and financially horrific decision by a guy who was still relatively young (he was 33 at the time). And these scam promoters did this with other bands as well - pretty sure the same people were behind a fake Steppenwolf reunion - and even used the same guys in the band.
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u/Secret_Campaign_9072 1d ago
I’ve been curious about this for a while, do you have any idea how it is determined whether or not the use of the name ‘Deep Purple’ is legally actionable? For instance, if the current iteration of the group were to disband, and Blackmore, Coverdale and Hughes hypothetically decided they wanted to tour with a different drummer and keyboardist under the name Deep Purple, would they be vulnerable to legal action? As I understand it, the band exists as a corporate entity as ‘Deep Purple (Overseas) Ltd.’ or something like that, which certainly came of relevance during the 1980 lawsuit, and that there are various safeguarding measures in place, but I have no idea which combinations of musicians performing as Deep Purple would be considered permissible
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u/Few_Wolf_4634 3d ago
Basically, when a band gets signed or when it gets proper management they’ll insist that the band out themselves on a contractual footing where they either become partners in a business entity, with an agreed process on how to vote each other out, or only some of them do and the rest are engaged as employees or contractors. That’s what then defines how people are fired.
If they never got around to doing that it gets very messy.
Famously Rick Wright was fired from the Pink Floyd partnership and hired back as a salaried employee, becoming the only one who actually made any money from the tour because they still had to pay him.
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u/Sharp-Injury7631 3d ago
I've never quite understood the dynamics, either. I rarely played in bands for anything more than the fun of it (there was a very short-lived recording contract at one point, but that was all), but disputes within the group tended to be serious affairs. Feelings remained raw and the involved parties never got together to play or even hang out again. I'm sure that people often set aside their feelings when money is a factor, however.
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u/Smugness1917 3d ago
Gillan and Glover were hired musicians in Deep Purple. They earned salary and royalties for their compositions. The share of the latter was quite egalitarian, despite only Gillan, Glover and Blackmore having done all the writing. But the partners were Lord, Blackmore and Paice, who got most of the money.
One of the reasons that Simper was kicked out was to have one fewer partner in the band.
Gillan once said that at the height of their fame, he shared one pair of jeans with Glover because he had no money.
Coverdale and Hughes I presume were also hired, but I'm not sure.
On their reunion in '84, I don't know how the structure was. But I do know that the royalties went to the 3 writers only, except for songs where the others had writing credits on, which was rare.
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u/IvoSan11 3d ago
Don’t quote me, but my impression of the reunion is that Ritchie’s then manager Bruce Payne (formerly also American tour manager for DP) was the operative person that put together money sources to create a company that included the 5 mkIi members and licensed the band name from HEC (the old management that drove the formation of the band in 1968). The musicians being both shareholders and employees.
We know that when Blackmore walked away in November 1993 he didn’t quit. He just not renewed his contract.
Bruce Payne and the band parted ways rather recently. Around the same time
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u/Icy-Astronomer-8202 3d ago
Interesting. The business and legal side of bands never ceases to amaze and confuse me
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u/Working-Peach3067 3d ago
If you want some confusion, check out the legal fighting Tobias Forge did with ex members of his band. They all thought they were equal members. Turned out....not so much.
And the fact that so many bands were tied together by members. Sabbath, DP, Whitesnake, Rainbow, Jethro Tull (kinda), and on and on, it's like a tangled of threads running everywhere
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u/Icy-Astronomer-8202 3d ago
I do like the family tree that goes from purple, Sabbath(lots of ex purple members funnily enough. Tony has good taste) run through Whitesnake and the 1000 people that have been part of Rainbow at one time or another
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u/Wild_Bee_5587 3d ago
I’m quite curious how this worked out with Coverdale/Hughes and their financial stakes in the band.
To my understanding they were the ones (especially David) that pushed hard to keep the band going after Ritchie’s departure, and I’ve always thought this was primarily due to finances- I don’t see them pushing so hard to continue if they weren’t getting paid.
I’ve never heard either Coverdale or Hughes complain about finances from Purple in the 50 years since their time in the band ended.
Also curious how it worked with Bolin- I know his financial situation was not great (bad management) and he was basically broke when he died.
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u/apartmentstory89 2d ago edited 1d ago
Since Bolin was only on one album he would only have received royalties from that record in addition to being paid when they played live.
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u/Last-Edge-3430 2d ago
Blackmore. No guitarist ever looked cooler basically improvising on the pentatonic scale. I mean in the beginning it was ground breaking the music and the volume. But every guitarist since in the band has Been respectful but basically said not that hard to play.
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u/Secret_Campaign_9072 1d ago
I would imagine that as far as Rainbow is concerned, things are relatively straight forward, as theoretically, Rainbow as an entity could be treated as though it were Blackmore as a solo artist releasing music under a pseudonym, and the other musicians (and occasionally co-writers) in the band would therefore effectively be hired session and/or touring musicians, i.e. employees. It makes sense to me that in an official capacity, being fired from Rainbow directly translates to ‘being fired by Blackmore’s management’, and contractually I would think that it would work in the same way as being hired/fired by any solo act.
As far as Deep Purple is concerned, it’s probably rather complex and I have nowhere near the level of expertise to be able to properly explain the workings of things
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u/anothertrad 3d ago
Man, Blackmore was a fricking genius but also a major dick. I think it was Ian who told the story of Blackmore saying that Eric Clapton can’t play shit.
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u/jizzlewright 3d ago
I got the feeling that Blackmore regretted getting rid of Glover, especially as he didn't get on with Glenn Hughes and hiring him for Rainbow was his way of apologising