rock-news-today – Joe Bonamassa

A reunion 33 years in the making finally lands on a Long Island stage, Status Quo admit where the boogie really came from, and Mick Jagger opens up the hood on how two guitars still weave.

Ritchie Blackmore reunites with Deep Purple

Blackmore rejoins Deep Purple — Jones Beach, 8/12/26

Rolling Stone · August 2026

Ritchie Blackmore Stands With Deep Purple Again After 33 Years

It was the reunion nobody in the Deep Purple camp would promise, teased by the one man least likely to spoil a surprise. Days before the show, Blackmore went on Instagram and told fans he'd probably turn up for an encore with his old band — then swore everyone to a secrecy he clearly expected no one to keep.

They kept nothing. On the night of Wednesday, August 12, at the Jones Beach amphitheater in Wantagh, New York, the 81-year-old co-founder walked out to join the band for the first time since 1993 and played "Smoke on the Water." Ian Gillan told the crowd the message had come in only a couple of days earlier: Blackmore lived nearby, and wondered whether he could stop by and jam. Gillan introduced him as a founder member, and the audience did the rest.

The scale of that is hard to overstate. Blackmore built Deep Purple in 1968, left in 1975 to form Rainbow, returned, and walked away again in 1993 — and for three decades the idea of him sharing a stage with Gillan was treated inside the band as a non-starter. Gillan had called it out of the question outright. Ian Paice, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came calling in 2016, admitted he had no idea whether the personalities involved could ever be set aside.

"It'll be good to see the old guys again."Ritchie Blackmore, to fans on Instagram

Blackmore has spent the past 25 years largely on acoustic guitar with Blackmore's Night, the medieval folk project he leads with his wife Candice Night, and the last few years fighting a run of health problems — arthritis, back trouble, vertigo that killed a 2025 tour, and a heart scare that kept him off the road for months. He joked to fans that he expected the whole lot of them to show up on crutches. Whether the Jones Beach cameo turns into anything more is anyone's guess. One song may be all there is. It's still one of the great loose ends in rock, finally tied.

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Status Quo — the boogie shuffle in action

The original — The Doors, Roadhouse Blues

MusicRadar · August 2026

One Riff, Eight Minutes: How Status Quo Built a Career on a Doors Song

Every band has an origin story, and Quo's happens to take place at closing time in a German nightclub. In 1970, deep into a long night's drinking at the X Club in Bielefeld, Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt were watching a couple on the dancefloor when "Roadhouse Blues" came on at volume — and the couple's whole body language changed. Rossi has described being mesmerised by the tempo, by how sexy the movement suddenly was, and turning to Parfitt with the obvious conclusion: they'd have some of that.

That, by Rossi's own account, is where the Quo twelve-bar boogie shuffle was born. The band were already pivoting away from the psychedelic pop of "Pictures Of Matchstick Men" toward something heavier on Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon, but the Doors track handed them the actual engine. "Roadhouse Blues" became a fixture of the live set and landed on Piledriver in 1972 — the record where, Rossi told Classic Rock, they started double-tracking the guitars and the sound got genuinely big. (He remains baffled by the sleeve: a cartoon gorilla with a bomb, which has nothing to do with a piledriver, and which he loved anyway.)

The mechanics were beautifully simple and nearly impossible to fake. Parfitt held the rhythm down on relentless downstrokes; Rossi played off him with a left-hand swing. Two guitars, one groove, no gaps.

"You try playing that one riff for eight minutes!"Francis Rossi, on what he told Eric Clapton

Rossi has never been precious about the sneering Quo attracted — the endless "anyone could do that" line. His reading of it is sharper than the insult: other bands liked having Quo around precisely because it gave them someone to feel superior to. And besides, he'd say, everyone wants to be better than everyone. What Quo actually had was one of the most fabulous followings in British rock, earned four chords at a time.

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Mick Jagger breaks down the new Rolling Stones song Mr. Charm

Jagger & Andrew Watt — behind “Mr. Charm”

MusicRadar · August 2026

Mick Jagger on Keith and Ronnie: The Weave Is Alive and Well

Jagger doesn't often sit down and take a Stones song apart in public, which is what makes this one worth your time. For a Behind The Song piece with Variety, he and producer Andrew Watt walked through "Mr. Charm" from Foreign Tongues — and the story of the track turns out to be a story about ego, or the useful lack of it.

It started with a Jagger riff. He handed it to keyboard player Matt Clifford to build a beat around, cut a demo, and sent it to Keith Richards. Richards came back with a riff of his own that was simply better. Jagger's part survived into the finished song, but it isn't the one driving it anymore, and he says so cheerfully: Keith made it much better, and that's his job.

Watt's contribution to the breakdown is the technical eye-opener. He points out that Richards also invented a bassline that didn't exist on the demo at all, reshaping the whole track in the process — the guitarist hears grooves, Watt says, in a way that turns a sketch into something else entirely.

"Weaving together and listening to each other and responding to each other."Andrew Watt, on Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood

That interlocking two-guitar conversation is the thing Stones fans have been listening for since 1975, and Watt's point is that it's still happening in real time on new material: Ronnie Wood's part on "Mr. Charm" grew out of hearing Keith's riff and answering it. There's colour elsewhere too — Steve Winwood turns up on Hammond B-3 and percussion, and Jagger tells a lovely aside about learning maracas from Jerome Green, Bo Diddley's man. Jagger also notes, not for the first time, that he writes a fair share of the punkier rockers, and that grabbing Keith's or Ronnie's guitar to demonstrate an idea is still not entirely welcome.

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