In November 1973, on the top floor of a convention centre in Montreux, a 22-year-old singer who had never made a record sat down and cried over his own voice. David Coverdale, recruited weeks earlier from a northern English club band to front one of the biggest groups in the world, had just heard the playback of “Mistreated” — and thought he had failed. He demanded another night, sang the seven-and-a-half-minute blues again, and produced one of the great debut performances in rock. “Mistreated”, the longest track on Deep Purple’s Burn, became the song that proved the post-Gillan band could be reborn, and it followed everyone involved for the rest of their careers: Coverdale sang it in Whitesnake, Ritchie Blackmore played it in Rainbow, and Glenn Hughes is still singing it today.
A Song Blackmore Kept in His Pocket
“Mistreated” was older than the line-up that recorded it. Glenn Hughes, the bassist and singer who joined Deep Purple alongside Coverdale in 1973, used to introduce the song on stage as one Blackmore had written about two years earlier — around 1971–72, at the height of the Mk II band. Inspired by “Heartbreaker”, a song by Free, the British blues-rock band Blackmore admired enormously, it had even been considered for Who Do We Think We Are, the final Mk II album. Blackmore held it back. He seems to have known, instinctively, that the song was waiting for a different singer: not Ian Gillan, whose genius ran to screaming intensity, but a true blues voice.
The context made the gamble bigger. Gillan and bassist Roger Glover had both left in June 1973, exhausted and at odds with Blackmore. Paul Rodgers — Free’s singer, and the obvious candidate for a bluesier Deep Purple — was approached and declined, preferring to form Bad Company. Hughes arrived from Trapeze as bassist and second vocalist. For the lead role, the band advertised, sifted through mountains of demo tapes, and found Coverdale: an unknown from Saltburn in the north-east of England whose own band, the Government, had once opened for Deep Purple in 1969. His route to the audition has become part of Purple folklore. Spotting an advertisement in Melody Maker announcing that the band were holding auditions and considering unknowns, Coverdale sent in a demo tape he later described as the worst he ever made — recorded, by his own admission, while very drunk, running through songs by Harry Nilsson, Bill Withers and Joe Cocker. For the accompanying photograph, the best he could produce was a picture of himself as a Boy Scout. Drummer Ian Paice, sifting the mountain of tapes at the management office, heard past the roughness to the voice underneath, and summoned him. He auditioned in August 1973 and was announced to the press on 23 September, the day after his 22nd birthday.
The New Singer’s Trial
The new Mk III line-up — Blackmore, Coverdale, Hughes, Jon Lord and Ian Paice — wrote and rehearsed its first album at Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire in September 1973, then flew to Montreux in November to record Burn with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, engineer Martin Birch at the controls. Coverdale wrote the lyrics to “Mistreated”, draping a deserted-lover’s lament over Blackmore’s brooding, slow-climbing chord sequence, and it became the only song on the album that he sings entirely by himself, without Hughes sharing the lead.
The recording itself was an endurance test. As Coverdale remembered it, most of the instrumental track was cut in a marathon session running from 11 at night until 7:30 in the morning. Then came the playback. Listening to his own first attempt at the vocal, the young singer was appalled — he found it mediocre, and the gap between what the song demanded and what he had delivered overwhelmed him. “It was so bad I just sat down and cried because I wanted it to be so good,” he recalled. The following night he went back into the studio and sang it again, chasing the perfect take, a shy and inexperienced singer holding himself to the standard of the biggest band in Britain. The performance that survives on Burn is the sound of that second night: controlled, wounded, and rising by degrees into a howl.
The Solo They Argued Over
The sessions produced one more revealing quarrel. During mixing, Coverdale and Hughes stacked around a dozen vocal tracks behind the song’s climax — a wall of voices surging around Blackmore’s closing solo, building the drama to breaking point. Blackmore listened and ordered the vocal stems muted: in his judgement, the massed singing buried his guitar, and the record could not carry both. Coverdale was upset, feeling that much of the drama he and Hughes had created had been lost — though he conceded Blackmore’s underlying point, that too many voices would disorient the guitar’s sound. The released mix stands as the compromise history remembers: the voices swell, but the guitar keeps the last word.
Part of the song’s power lies in its patience. “Mistreated” is built as a slow burn in the most literal sense: it opens in near-stillness, Blackmore’s riff circling over Jon Lord’s organ while Coverdale sings at a wounded murmur, and then, verse by verse and chorus by chorus, everything intensifies — Paice’s drums pressing harder, the tempo of the emotion outrunning the tempo of the band, until Blackmore’s guitar finally breaks loose in the long closing solo and the song arrives at the catharsis it has been promising for seven minutes. It is the architecture of the classic blues performance translated into hard rock, and neither the band nor its singer had recorded anything quite like it before.
Burn was released on 15 February 1974 and did everything the sceptics said it could not. It reached No. 3 in the UK and No. 9 in the United States, charted in thirteen countries, and established Mk III as a genuine band rather than a stopgap. Within it, “Mistreated” — at 7:28, the album’s longest track — was quickly singled out. Tellingly, it was never released as a single; the singles from Burn were “Might Just Take Your Life” and the title track. Its reputation was built entirely as an album track and a concert piece, passed between singers and bands like a challenge: if you front this family of musicians, sooner or later you will be measured against this song. Reviewing Burn retrospectively for AllMusic, Eduardo Rivadavia called it the “fantastic slow-boiling blues”, a song qualifying for “the highest echelons of hard rock achievement” and “an essential item in the discography of any self-respecting music fan”.
Everybody’s Blues
“Mistreated” refused to belong to one band, or one singer. Deep Purple kept it in the set until Blackmore quit in April 1975; a live version appeared on Made in Europe in 1976, with further recordings on Live in London and Live in Paris 1975 and the film Live in California 74. That last document captures the song’s coronation: at the California Jam festival in April 1974, in front of one of the largest crowds in American rock history and the cameras of ABC television, the Mk III band introduced itself to America, and Coverdale — months removed from the clubs of Teesside — sang his seven-minute blues like a headliner of a decade’s standing.
When Purple split in 1976, Coverdale simply took the song with him. It became a centrepiece of Whitesnake’s early sets — a band that for a time also included Lord and Paice — and can be heard on their live album Live… in the Heart of the City. Nearly four decades after Montreux, he re-recorded it for Whitesnake’s The Purple Album (2015), an entire record of his Deep Purple songs.
Blackmore, meanwhile, claimed it for Rainbow. With Ronnie James Dio singing Coverdale’s lyric, “Mistreated” became a showpiece of Rainbow’s late-1970s concerts, stretched out into an epic — the version on On Stage (1977) runs to more than thirteen minutes, the blues slowed to a smoulder — and documented further on Live in Germany 1976 and Live in Munich 1977; Blackmore revived it again in Rainbow’s mid-1990s incarnation and in the band’s 2015 reformation. Dio’s own band covered it on the Angry Machines tour, Yngwie Malmsteen recorded it for his 1996 album Inspiration, and Glenn Hughes — the man who had shared those stacked backing vocals in 1973 — still performs it, both as a solo artist and with Black Country Communion.
Few songs in the Deep Purple catalogue can match that diaspora. “Mistreated” began as a riff its writer hid from his own band for two years, waited for a singer who had not yet been discovered, and was recorded by a frightened young man who wept over his first attempt and demanded the chance to do it properly. The perfectionism of that miserable night in Montreux paid off: the song became a rite of passage, the blues that every great singer who passes through the Purple family seems obliged, sooner or later, to measure himself against.