Stealing Deep Purple

By the time the New Deep Purple were due to play the Long Beach Arena in LA, the officials of the actual band had begun to move legally. Tony Edwards and John Coletta, of the management company HEC, found the US courts too slow, partly because the duo themselves were not very quick to act. This is could have been for one of a number of reasons; the official line was because they were late find out about the venture but there’s evidence to suggest they may have verbally agreed in principle to the New Deep Purple or they were adopting a ‘wait and see approach’……

Either way, by the summer they had made up their minds to go to the courts. They had lost a court case in July to get an early injunction to stop the band performing and both were finding the next state of the legal system a slow moving beast.

In the 1960s the management of The Zombies curtailed a fake version of the band by advertising in the music press that real band weren’t actually touring at that point in time. It worked and helped bring about a resolution to the confusion.

The Monday 18th August edition of the LA Times featured an advert for The New Deep Purple, Featuring Rod Evans. In fairness to the band they were advertised correctly… ‘The New’ and ‘Featuring’ prefixes were not buried or hidden in the lettering, although the words DEEP PURPLE were considerably larger than any other bit of the text. On any other day an advert that size would really stand out in a newspaper. However directly below HEC had delivered a masterstroke. The band were legally allowed to perform after the July ruling but there was nothing stopping Edwards and Coletta from informing the public as to who was and who wasn’t playing in The New Deep Purple.

Note the use of the Deep Purple logo on the HEC advert but not on the New Deep Purple advert even though they were using it on T shirts and posters.