DEEP PURPLE'S MOUNTING MAJESTIES

Deep Purple are beautifully cooperative examples of the “dinosaur theory" of heavy metal rock. Their metal-gorged footsteps shook the earth in the early 1970s, they were brontosaurus-huge on all fronts of rock—records, radio, concerts— but their big-body, small-head developmental imbalance finally caught up with them in 1976, and since that overnight extinction, all we ever hear of Deep Purple now are occasional, furtive replays of “Smoke On The Water” or “Highway Star," on the AOR.