Rainbow’s Spooky Studio Moment During ‘Street of Dreams’ Session
Joe Lynn Turner recalled a spooky moment in the studio with Ritchie Blackmore while they were working on Rainbow's hit “Street of Dreams” in 1983.
The record was being tracked in Copenhagen, Denmark, when a thunderstorm rolled over the city. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, singer Turner said he and Blackmore reacted powerfully to what happened next due to their spiritual leanings.
“I came into the lounge while Ritchie was trying to do the guitar solo,” he recalled. “He said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ I go, ‘Why?’ He goes, ‘Because your vocal is intimidating me.’ That threw me back. I went to the fridge and got a couple of beers. I said, ‘Come on, man. You go in there and just play those melodies that you love. You got this thing.’
“All of a sudden, there was a crack. Lightning had hit the rod above the studio. … All of the lights went out. There were candles burning. We looked at each other like, ‘Holy fuck,’ since we were into that spiritual type of black magic shit. And I said, ‘It’s a sign.’”
Blackmore returned to the recording room and studio staff fired up a generator. “He went in, played that lead, came out, lights went back on,” Turner said. “It was just this magical type of atmosphere that had happened. It was really moving. We knew it was a sign.”
Asked about the pressure of working with noted eccentric Blackmore, Turner said that “You’re never secure about anything. I was really, at that point, locking into the whole thing. I was like, ‘This could really go somewhere.’ The fact of the matter is that if you don’t produce, you’re out. Ritchie is a production in his own right. He wants things a certain way, and he’ll let you know. He’ll tell you right to your face.”
He added, “Yeah, there were some fights and some disagreements. But the whole point of the respect that we had for each other is that when we wrote, we wrote for what his vision was.”