Creativity Quote by Ritchie Blackmore

Blackmore’s jab lands because it’s delivered in the plainest possible language: a backhanded compliment dressed up as professional assessment. Calling Stevie Ray Vaughan “very intense” nods to the thing no one can fake onstage - conviction - then immediately downgrades the actual playing as unremarkable. The move is classic veteran-guitarist gatekeeping: separate “feel” from “facility,” then imply the crowd can’t tell the difference.

The subtext is less about Vaughan than about the economy of attention in rock. By the time Vaughan broke big in the 1980s, guitar culture was split between flash (shred, arena spectacle) and authenticity (roots, blues revival, “real” tone). Vaughan’s whole appeal was that he made rigor sound like abandon: huge attack, bruised phrasing, a physical presence that read as danger. Blackmore reframes that as theater - intensity as a marketing device - while claiming the musical content was nothing special.

Context matters: Blackmore came up in an era when “amazing” meant novelty and reinvention, not mastery inside an existing tradition. Vaughan, by contrast, was a virtuoso of vocabulary: taking familiar blues language and supercharging its dynamics, time feel, and sonic authority. So Blackmore’s line is also a defense of his own aesthetic territory. If Vaughan isn’t “amazing,” then the cultural coronation of Vaughan says more about audience hunger for sincerity than about innovation - and Blackmore, ever prickly about taste-making, refuses to let the crowd be the judge.