Rainbow Biography Index of Musician Biographies with other users of this site, please see the bottom of this page on how to submit Rainbow lyrics.Rainbow began when Ritchie Blackmore, a classically trained and legendarily difficult lead guitarist left Deep Purple, the British heavy metal band that made him famous. The rest of Deep Purple had had the audacity to demand democracy--and wouldn t record one of Blackmore s favorite songs, Quatermass s "Black Sheep of the Family"--so the guitarist packed up his strings and went solo. He immediately commandeered a New York band, Elf, which had opened for Deep Purple and starred shrieking vocalist Ronnie James Dio. The new band, Rainbow, became a revolving door of over-the-top metal talent.Although it never had a gold album or a hit single, Rainbow wasn t a failure; the band toured successfully for almost a decade beginning in the mid-1970s and released the underrated metal anthems "Man on the Silver Mountain," "Since You Been Gone" and "Jealous Lover." It also anticipated two major 1980s hard-rock trends: hair bands such as Poison and Bon Jovi, who borrowed aspects of their coiffure and singing styles from Dio, and fast-fingered guitarists such as Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani, who adapted Blackmore s classical leanings and rock excess. But even Rainbow s members knew they weren t exactly making musical history. "It was successful, but it was always a second-rank band.
