Creativity Quote by Ritchie Blackmore

For a guitarist mythologized as both virtuoso and control freak, Ritchie Blackmore claiming he "can never remember what I do even in the studio" lands like a wink at the whole idea of the perfectly authored rock performance. The line isn’t an admission of incompetence; it’s a refusal of the post-hoc narrative that says every great lick was planned, logged, and repeatable on command. Blackmore’s best work with Deep Purple and Rainbow often feels like it’s teetering on the edge of falling apart, then snapping into something inevitable. Forgetting becomes proof of volatility: the take mattered because it happened once, not because it can be diagrammed.

The subtext is also defensive in a very musician way. Fans want the solo as a fixed artifact; bandmates and producers want consistency; the marketplace wants a reproducible product. Blackmore, famously prickly about expectation and authority, sidesteps all of that by framing creation as muscle memory and mood, not deliberation. It’s an artist protecting the mystery and, quietly, protecting himself from being cross-examined about choices that were instinctive.

Contextually, studio culture in rock invites forensic obsession: isolated tracks, re-amping, comping, endless retakes. By saying he can’t remember, Blackmore pushes back against the assumption that recording is the definitive version of a player. He’s insisting the real engine is the moment: a near-accident you can capture, but not fully reconstruct.