Old Wavers often tried to move with the times, go a little New Wavey - Peter Gabriel, Alice Cooper, Robert Fripp, J. Geils Band... Get a hot producer in if they couldn't pull it off themselves (as did Yes)
But some didn't make any concessions, just dug their heels in.
And prospered - in some cases having their biggest commercial success during the New Wave era.
Here's Ritchie Blackmore on the cover of Sounds in 1982
Love the fact that he is doggedly sticking with his personal golden-oldie canon (Strawbs!)
None of that Robert Plant thing of striving to keep au courant with the new trends...
Also surprised to read that Ritchie had a period of occult-dabbling, doing seances and what not...
If I was pressed to think of a group that I had no interest in ever exploring.... well, there'd be many, obviously, but Rainbow would be right up the top.
With bad music - with Bad Music Era bands - there is always the possibility of learning something through exposing yourself to the awfulness... it can be indicative of something in the popular desire... and there can be a sort of pungent frisson with bad taste, the tang of decay or excess, that is perversely bracing and invigorating after listening to so much Good Music... bit like those cultures/cuisines where eggs are kept for a hundred years, or a fish is buried in a pit and allowed to rot...
But Rainbow just seem unutterably lame, all the more so for the ear-worm stickiness of things like "Since You've Been Gone"
It's partly the band name. Rainbow.
Also the logo
And the artwork
Well this cover art is a classic of Old Wave graphics
Apparently metalheads rate the first few Rainbow albums
The first one is essentially Blackmore plus the band Elf, as in Dio
Then he fires Elf, except for Dio, and recruits such echt-Old Wavers as Cozy Powell
Thoughts of Elf and Dio remind me of this Spinal-Tapper- than-Spinal-Tap story:
"In September 2003, Dio accidentally severed his thumb during a gardening accident when a heavy garden gnome fell onto it. Dio was concerned he would no longer be able to do his signature "devil's horns" hand gesture, but a doctor managed to re-attach it."
I know Dio is - was - tres petite indeed, but how big was this garden gnome? What was it made of, osmium?
Perhaps it fell from a height - from some further-up plateau in a rockery where Dio was troweling away?
I'm just trying to picture it out.
