Ritchie Blackmore Remembers the Night He Was Replaced by a 19-Year-Old Guitarist

Deep Purple shared the stage with a little-known guitarist named Christopher Cross on Aug. 28, 1970, at the Jam Factory in San Antonio. The twist? The 19-year-old Cross was filling in at the last minute for the band's regular guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore.

"I must have had a virus or something, because I had a canker sore in my mouth under my tongue," Blackmore tells Ultimate Classic Rock in a new interview. "So I couldn't eat, I couldn't speak. I was miserable about that and I wasn't happy about being on tour in America. I loved Europe, [but] America, it was so far apart in the places we played in. I had no idea where I was. I wasn't in my comfort zone and I kind of missed England."

Why Ritchie Blackmore Missed the Deep Purple Concert

That night in San Antonio, things came to "a climax," in Blackmore's telling. "I remember being very miserable, and I was walking down the corridor with [late Deep Purple keyboardist] Jon Lord to go to the show and then I felt very dizzy," he says. "I grabbed hold of Jon, and he kept me walking. Then I fell down and they took me to the hospital. They didn't know what it was. I think it was just pure misery. And they kept giving me shots in the hospital." [Blackmore chuckles lightly at the memory.]

The situation became more and more frustrating for the guitarist. "The doctors would say, 'Where's the pain? What do you feel?' I go, 'I just don't know. I'm just so miserable,'" he reflects. "It was interesting: They said the week before, apparently they'd had Keith Richards in for a similar kind of experience,  which I kind of wondered about."

"I just stayed in the hotel being miserable, and [Deep Purple] went on and did the show with, I think his name is Christopher Cross or something," he says. "[It] was some other guitarist and luckily, they played, because it's a terrible feeling when you're sick on the road and you let everybody down. You're letting the audience down, the crew down and the band down. Nobody wants to be sick on the road. But it does happen a lot."

"I can get quite depressed," he says. "And I was very depressed at the time being in America and knowing that I'd be there for three months before I got back to England."

What Does Christopher Cross Remember About That Night?

Cross has recounted the tale a number of times in the years that have followed, even getting longtime friend Eric Johnson to corroborate the night's events as word began to circulate that Lord had dismissed the story as untrue. Other Deep Purple band members have similarly denied the temporary pairing.

But Cross stands by his account of what happened. "They didn’t really want to cancel the show if they could help it,” the soft rocker recalled in The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s. A local promoter named Joe Miller was handling the Purple show and also "kind of managing" Cross at the time. "And Joe Miller said, ‘Y’know, there’s this guitarist in town who’s a big fan of Ritchie’s and he could probably step in.’"

Taking Miller's suggestion, Deep Purple welcomed Cross to the lineup for the night. "I came down, and I had a Flying V and long hair, and I’m this big Ritchie fan. So we played the songs that I knew and then we jammed some blues. And they told the crowd Ritchie wouldn’t be there. It was a great moment for me," Cross said. "And then, when they left town, I went to the airport and got to meet Ritchie, and he thanked me for covering for him. He was cool."

Cross, meanwhile, went on to enjoy major solo success with his 1979 self-titled debut album, which sold 5 million copies in the U.S. and netted the singer-songwriter five Grammys, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist.

What's Ritchie Blackmore Up to Now?

Blackmore recently released Temple of the King: 1975-1976, a nine-disc box set that revisits his first two albums with Rainbow. In addition to 1975's Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and 1976's Rising, the set also features three complete live concerts from the period. An additional disc of rarities rounds out the box set, which includes a book that has an essay with Blackmore's recollections of the time period.

READ MORE: Top 10 Rainbow Songs

Temple of the King is the first installment of a planned series of anthologies of Blackmore's work. The guitarist has remained active, most often making music with his wife, Candice Night, with their group Blackmore's Night.

The duo had to cancel a short run U.S. tour dates last fall after the guitarist developed health issues only two shows into the run. He tells UCR now that the severe vertigo issues that caused him to come off the road were "the worst thing I've ever been involved with."

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