Well, most of the fans did, anyway.

“Once in a while during those early days, we’d play someplace where not everybody was aware that Ritchie was no longer in the band, and they weren’t up on who had replaced him,” says Morse, perhaps thinking of the “beer throwing contest” that erupted toward his side of the stage at one of his first Deep Purple shows abroad. The shower of ale and stout wasn’t enough to dampen the guitarist’s spirits (“Jon Lord got hit by a bottle that I ducked on!”), and Morse’s famous smile made it through the evening intact.

There was another night, however, when liquid projectiles didn’t roll off Morse like water off a duck’s back, and, for perhaps the first time ever, the guitarist lost his temper on stage. It was at a raucous stadium show in Santiago, Chile. “There was this guy up front there who could spit like a llama,” says Morse, “and he was spitting at me every time I closed my eyes—which I often do when I’m soloing. I tried motioning to the security guys to grab him, but they didn’t speak English, and they just looked at me eagerly, like, ‘Pick? You give me pick?’”

The final time the man spat, he hit Morse right in the face and mouth. “That was too much,” says Morse. “I remember this guitar”—the original Music Man Steve Morse Signature Model, serial number 001, that Morse is holding during our interview—“going over the back of my head, and the sound of it crashing on the stage at about the same time I went flying through the air and into the crowd. Everybody thought I was stage diving, and they were like, ‘He loves us!’ The whole stadium was cheering, and people were tearing stuff off me, but I was just trying to get the guy.”

A couple of nightmare gigs are a small price to secure a dream job that Morse has described as a “comfy chair.” (“This band doesn’t rush, everything’s really relaxed and really powerful, improvisation is highly valued and encouraged, and no one’s acting—we really are having tons of fun on stage.”) Indeed, if luck favors the prepared, it’s hard to name anyone who has proven the saying more true than Steve Morse. If he hadn’t spent years with the Dregs and the Steve Morse Band forging his reputation as the dazzling and literate lead guitarist who seamlessly melds chicken pickin’, hard rock, bluegrass, and classical into a singular style, the GP Readers’ Poll Hall-of-Famer might never have gotten the call for Purple.

“People need to remember that it’s extremely rare when somebody walks up and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a gig for you that’s made—the band’s already recorded, they’re famous, and they want you to be the guitarist,’” says Morse. He’s not trying to rub in the fact that he’s already been handed two “made” bands in his career. (Don’t forget his years with Kansas.) He simply wants to remind young musicians that most great bands have humble beginnings.

“They arise from experimentation, from trying to find a magical chemistry, and from giving themselves opportunities to succeed,” says Morse. “When the Dregs were getting started, we were told we’d get much better gigs if we got a singer, which bummed me out. But then we played a free concert in a park, and all these strangers were walking up to us and saying how much they loved our music. So I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Who should I listen to? My heart or the business people who want a packaged product?’”

As the topic unfolds, Morse’s eyes light up, because he loves doing his part to inspire young guitarists with their careers. “If you want to play music for a living, limit your obligations,” says Morse. “Don’t take on any debt. Be self-contained—have your equipment and your car paid for—and start spending ten hours a day working on your profession. That time should include writing, making contacts, and listening to other music. After all, you should put in at least as much time each day on music as someone working a shift at a burger joint, right? Also, why not be the guy who shows up at rehearsal ten minutes early with all of your parts nailed? Be the person who gets everything right, all the time. Make those your standards, and you’ll become an immaculate player.”

Truly one who “walks it like he talks it,” Morse has taken a disciplined and fully hands-on approach to nearly every aspect of his career. An experienced pilot who has flown for Delta Connection, Morse flew the Dregs around for years in a band plane financed with all the money they saved not using the airlines. Once, while doing a string of shows with a broken fretting arm suffered skateboarding with his son, Morse flew home for an afternoon, put ol’ Steve Morse Model number 001 on the bench grinder, and shaved the corner off the guitar’s neck heel so he could reach the high frets with his cast on. While in his shop, he drilled several 1/2" holes in the plaster on his arm for ventilation.

In addition to designing a custom amp and effects switching system with his guitar tech Michael Berger and Danish rig builder par excellence Steen Skrydstrup, Morse had a role in shaping the tone of Engl’s new flagship programmable four-channel head, the Invader 100. (“They modified the midrange on Channel 2 specifically for me, so I can have extra clarity without sacrificing any sustain.”) The head fills the stage through four Engl XXL Pro 4x12 cabinets loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s. Ernie Ball volume pedals allow Morse to call in Electro-Harmonix Memory Man delay sounds and other stompbox effects on the fly. Effected signal is amplified exclusively by an Engl Powerball E 645 head driving two additional 4x12 cabinets. This setup evolved from Morse’s experience with noisy, hissy tape echo units. “I figured out long ago,” he says, “that the best way to use those things is to send their signal to a separate amp—even just a small combo—controlling the input level of that amp with a volume pedal.”

Though Deep Purple was once listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world’s loudest rock band, the loudest thing onstage these days “is the super clear, hi-fi vocals cranking in the side fills,” says Morse, who wears half a foam ear plug in each ear to reduce Ian Gillan’s voice by about 10 dB. It’s the house mixes, however, that Morse takes issue with.

“The biggest problem at clubs and theaters these days is all those subwoofers in front of the stage,” says Morse. “They can really muddy everything up. I am totally not into this thing of making the bass drum the feature of the band. Personally, I’d love it if engineers were more concerned with the actual sound coming off the stage, because there are a huge number of people in front of the stage who can’t hear the P.A. mix. I’ve always campaigned for having the musicians intermingle their cabinets across the stage so everybody everywhere hears everything, but I have yet to win that argument. That’s okay, though. If everything goes perfect in a band, you only get your way 20 percent of the time.”

Watch Steve Morse rock with Deep Purple on the band’s new concert DVD Live at Montreux 2006 [Eagle Rock].