Every Christmas for the last seven years, I am blessed to be invited to a holiday party given by Candice Night and Richie Blackmore. I usually read Tarot for several hours finishing my readings around 3:00 am. After that, till the very wee hours of the morning, the few remaining guests are treated to a live performance by Richie and Candy. Sometimes there are one or two other band members present and this year Mike Clemente was there.
Mike is their new bass guitar player, and a fun guy who knows something about everything. (He hosts a TV show as well called The Genius Game Show. The game plan there is to find out: who is the genius and who is just plain smart!) He kept me entertained and laughing and didn’t mind that I kept stealing his tambourine to play along with the band.
Their sound man, Jim, a guy who is half-Finnish like me, (It it rare that I meet a fellow Finn), hangs around to take care of the technical part, and you feel like you’re in an intimate concert hall. Poor Jim fell asleep at the bar around 5:30am, and the other guests took over his job when necessary.
Richie Blackmore, the legendary 1970’s rocker, who hasn’t aged a minute since then, sits behind the bar, and in between sets, he becomes the most gracious of bartenders. He is a great man of great humility and always shines the spotlight on others, and so it was for me as he congratulated me on the book, telling me how much he is enjoying it. He wanted me to read my favorite passage from it, which I politely declined, since I was all talked out from four hours of Tarot readings.
It is such an incredible experience to be sitting just a few feet away from one of the world’s best guitar players and watch him perform. And Candy has the most incredible voice with perfect pitch, and she never misses a note. She is one of the most beautiful women, both inside and out, that you can ever meet. They are a Soul Mate couple who truly make you believe in the prince and princess, and fairy-tales, and Happily Ever After. (Check out their fairytale wedding on their website: www.blackmoresnight.com/
Their band is called Blackmore’s Night. Richie had been in the band Deep Purple (Smoke on the Water) and another band Rainbow prior to performing with Candy. To see all the Gold Records gracing their basement walls, astounds you to say the least.
Although these Soul Mates have been together for eighteen years (they met at a soccer game), they only got married this year. What a banner year it has been for them, and to top things off, Richie is celebrating that finally his longstanding lawsuit against the management of Deep Purple is over. The icing on the wedding cake for the two of them is the inclusion of their song,Olde Mill Inn, in the newly released Jim Carrey movie, Yes Man!
I always have the time of my life, singing along with all of them, and this year, Candy and her friends have been studying Belly Dancing, so we all had a good time dancing together as well. (I think most of the guests were surprised to learn that I have been a professional Belly Dancer for more than thirty years.) I guess it proves that the art of Belly Dancing is an ancient and enduring one. And women have been drawn to it throughout the ages.
Please take the time to watch the second video. It is a holiday video card from the Blackmores and it is such a breathtaking holiday song that when I heard them perform it live at 5:30 in the morning, it moved me to tears.
I thank God that I have this incredible job in which I have gotten to meet some of the most fascinating people in the world and can count them among my friends.
If you want to know a little more about Mike Clemente (who also writes for the National Lampoon) and why sitting next to him for a couple of hours was quite an experience, check out the third video.