When Steve Morse left Deep Purple in 2022, he had logged more time with the group than any other guitar player.
But perhaps familiarity really does breed contempt: Morse says several members of the band were more than happy to see the back of him.
The Dixie Dregs founder enjoyed side quests with Kansas and Lynyrd Skynyrd before he joined Purple in 1994, just as Ritchie Blackmore’s second spell in the band came to an end. After eight studio albums with the British hard rockers, he departed when his wife fell ill with aggressive Stage 4 cancer.
As Morse recently revealed, his time in Deep Purple was marked by frustration over his tendency toward virtuoso fusion playing, which took the group a step away from the blues-meets-classical roots they formed with Blackmore. He's said that 95 percent of the ideas he presented to the group were dismissed.
Morse now tells Guitar Interactive Magazine he believes his band mates were glad to see him go and that he can't imagine performing with them again even for a one-off event.
“I think if the band felt differently, I would feel differently,” he says. “But I think that there's a couple of guys in the band that were really glad for me to be gone, because they were sort of heading back to their roots and wanted just to be a rock band, and ‘don't give me any of that fancy crap.’
“When you look at me as a writer, I definitely give you that fancy crap,” he says, laughing. “I can't help it.
Deep Purple seems to have found what they want in Morse's replacement, Irishman Simon McBride, who is another blues-centric player, and a fine one at that.
“So I think the band's happier the way they are,” Morse adds, “and it would be kind of a step back for them to wanna do something like that. They're happier and better off, and I think it’s the same here.”
Vocalist Ian Gillan said as much last summer.
“Simon is a fantastic contributor to the band,” he told Made in Metal last summer (via Blabbermouth). “It's one of the best things that could have happened.”
“He's changed things quite a lot,” he said in another interview two years prior. “He's a catalyst; we feel very relaxed with Simon's style of playing. It's very compatible with the way we started. It's very straightforward; the platforms are simple, and the virtuosity is on top.”
Reading between the lines, it's easy to see why Morse hints at there being more disharmony during his reign than the fact that he stuck around for 28 years lets on. The comments on McBride’s playing, and of its simplicity, also feel like a veiled dig at Morse’s inability to do likewise.
Talking of his successor, Blackmore called Morse a “fantastic” guitarist, but suggested he played more from the head than the heart, which he felt was to his detriment.
Morse is back on familiar ground with his namesake trio. He’s got a new album out in Triangulation and is back on the road to celebrate it. This, despite his ongoing struggles with arthritis, which means he has to change up his playing style daily. It’s also rendered one of his more virtuoso songs unplayable.
