Forever No. 1: Nino Tempo & April Stevens’ ‘Deep Purple’

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late April Stevens (birth name: Caroline LoTempio) with a look back at her and younger brother Nino Tempo’s (Antonino LoTempio) lone No. 1 together or apart: their slightly offbeat and altogether winning rendition of pop standard “Deep Purple.”

If you were trying to guess the lone Grammy taken home by Nino Tempo & April Stevens’ “Deep Purple” at the 1964 awards six decades later, best rock and roll recording would probably not be the first category to come to mind. After all, the song — a No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit for the brother-sister duo in November 1963 — was a cover of a 25-year-old pop standard recorded by the likes of Bing Crosby and Guy Lombardo, based around sweet harmonies and jazzy piano and not a ton of guitar. More importantly, the song hit its commercial peak two months before the British Invasion, heralded by The Beatles’ January ’64 arrival on the Hot 100, forever transformed the sound and role of rock music in pop culture.

But while rock and roll might not have been the best-fitting box for Tempo’s and Stevens’ version of “Deep Purple,” it’s not immediately clear 60 years later where the song really does belong. It’s an off-kilter arrangement of a truly curious performance, one that so confounded Ahmet Ertegun — the storied co-founder and president of the duo’s Atlantic parent label, as well as the “Purple” producer — that he resisted releasing it as a single until Tempo and Stevens demanded that they be released from the label if it continued to lay on the shelf. But it’s that gentle inscrutability that makes the 100th No. 1 in Hot 100 history (and the final before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination) one of the most rewarding pop records of its era — an era that would already seem worlds away just six months later.

The sibling duo began their careers as separate solo artists, with Tempo a musical prodigy and successful child actor (and later an in-demand session musician) and Stevens — who died on April 17 at age 93 — a star pop vocalist, scoring most of her solo hits in the pre-Hot 100 era. (Their shared family name was actually LoTempio.) Ertegun signed the pair to Atlantic’s Atco imprint as a duo vocal act, but their first few singles failed to make a major impact. Stevens had the idea to do “Deep Purple,” and Tempo came up with an arrangement for it, but the duo were already scheduled to record the pop standard “Paradise,” and had to tuck their “Purple” version into the very end of their allotted studio time. But the duo and their session backing band (including eventual country and pop icon Glen Campbell on guitar) were on their game: “In 14 minutes, we got two takes,” Tempo told Fred Bronson in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits.

That off-the-cuff, slightly rushed quality gives “Deep Purple” a good deal of its charm. The mix feels a little off — the bass disruptively high in the mix, the vocals a tad unpolished — and Tempo admits that some of the arrangement’s chords were straight-up incorrect in terms of replicating the standard’s melody. If there is anything particularly rock and roll about the recording, it’s in this breezy looseness — there’s a real energy to it, helped by its slightly amped-up pacing. And while calling the production “raw” would probably be a bit of an exaggeration, it feels messy enough for 1963 to at least not sound like something made to pander to young folks’ parents.

But the real joy of the recording is found in the siblings’ dueting, their harmonies entwining both satisfyingly and unpredictably. The way their respective voices glide up and down the octave, never totally settling into a traceable melody but never sounding out of place either within the arrangement or alongside one another, is somewhat stunning. And the real masterstroke comes with their second run-through the refrain, where a foregrounded Stevens intones the lyrics in deeply felt spoken-word as a backgrounded Tempo casually sings along — a striking and sticky creative choice, inspired by Stevens recording her “narration” simply to help Tempo remember the song’s words, and a friend noting that it sounded cool. Not easy to make a standard that had been around so long that Babe Ruth considered it a personal favorite sound fresh, but Stevens and Tempo managed it.

However, Eretgun didn’t see the commercial potential in the duo’s quirky rendition. He called it the most embarrassing thing that the duo had recorded, and released “Paradise” as their next single instead. But that single flopped, and Tempo asked out of the duo’s Atco contract so he and Stevens could sign with a friend of his who did believe in the song: legendary producer Phil Spector, of Philles Records. Ertegun agreed to meet them halfway — “I’ll release one more record, and if it flops, you’ve got your contract back,” Tempo quotes the Atlantic titan as saying in Number One Hits — but released “Deep Purple” with a B-side of the duo’s “I’ve Been Carrying a Torch for You So Long That I Burned a Great Big Hole in My Heart,” a zippy country-rock hybrid which he believed would become their actual breakout hit.

The public proved him wrong: “Deep Purple” debuted at No. 94 on the Hot 100 on the chart dated Sept. 14, 1963, and quickly bound its way into the top 40. On the Nov. 16 chart, it replaced Jimmy Gilmer & The Fireballs’ “Sugar Shack” at the apex — staying there for a single week before being replaced by another duo, Dale and Grace, with the much more conventionally arranged and produced maybe-breakup ballad “I’m Leaving It All Up to You.” (Coincidentally, Donny & Marie Osmond would score top 20 hits on the Hot 100 in the 1970s with remakes of both of these songs, with their version of “I’m Leaving It All Up to You” hitting No. 4 in 1974 and their version of “Deep Purple” hitting No. 14 in 1976.) Tempo and Stevens would have more hits the following year with renditions of standards like “Whispering” (No. 11) and “Stardust” (No. 32), and eventually did go the Spector route with 1966’s All Strung Out — albeit not with Spector himself — and scored a final top 40 hit with the album’s Wall of Sound-aping title track (No. 26). But the British Invasion quickly made relics of the duo, as it also did Dale and Grace, Jimmy Gilmer, and countless other acts on top of the pop world in 1963.

While the rock and roll world might’ve ultimately left Nino Tempo and April Stevens far behind, the most enduring legacy of “Deep Purple” 60 years later is, ironically, a quintessentially rock one. The band Deep Purple, who took their name from guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s grandmother’s love of the song, would become one of the biggest hard rock acts of the ’70s, earning induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016. But the highest that band ever got on the Hot 100 was the No. 4 peak of both “Hush” (1968) and “Smoke on the Water” (1973) — still three spots lower than Tempo’s and Stevens’ forever delightful pop oddity.

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