Former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has weighed in on the direction the band went after he left the lineup for the final time in 1993, sharing his thoughts on his short-term replacement Joe Satriani as well as long-term current band member Steve Morse.
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Blackmore, who quit the band after a disastrous 1993 show and has spent most of the last 25 years playing outside the rock genre, offered no hard feelings toward Satriani or Morse — in fact, as he insisted in the Ritchie Blackmore YouTube Channel interview clip below, he felt only relief after being replaced, because he’d been trying to pry himself away from Deep Purple to no avail.
“I’m just glad they found a guitar player to carry on, because I thought I was going to be shackled to this band for the rest of my life,” said Blackmore. “It was like a ball-and-chain thing, and luckily they said, ‘Well, we found someone.’ ‘Thank God I can get out!'”