A quick one today to recap some news that hit yesterday about a massive new box set chronicling the earliest part of Ritche Blackmore’s career in Rainbow. A set called Temple Of The King will release on March 6, 2026 and features an insane NINE cd’s of music.

Now -this set is not a deluxe album collection, something even some casual collectors might jump all over. This is the first of several sets intended to cover Blackmore’s career, which I’ll presume will cover all of Rainbow’s long run and possibly also his other projects. Though do note that this format likely won’t extend to Deep Purple, which Blackmore would not have sole control of.

What we get across these nine discs are the first two Rainbow albums – Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and Rising. The remaining discs are loaded with live shows and the final disc offers up a series of rough mix and alternate rarities.

Given that the crux of the content is live stuff, I decided to go ahead and pre-order this monstrosity. I do have these first two albums hanging out in my cd collection but I saw this and said “what the hell, why not.” I haven’t often been one for the deluxe box set covering just an album or so kind of thing, but this one seemed fine at nine discs for a $100 price point. Add in the fact that this set covers the years 1975 and ’76, which means Ronnie James Dio would feature as the singer on all of the content and I was sold.

The layman might view the tracklists with skepticism, as the live concerts only feature three or four songs per CD. Rest assured that when Blackmore and Rainbow played live in the ’70’s, Blackmore showed up to play his damn guitar. Many songs from the live shows of this era run over ten minutes. And while I don’t know the exact run times of the offerings here, there were some jams that went on for over twenty minutes back in the early Rainbow days. While each disc might only feature roughly thirty minutes or so of music, the sets might have been too long to fit on one CD, with a generally given run time of 80 minutes. Or maybe they could have each fit on a single CD and this presentation is a bit excessive. I don’t know, I guess I’ll find out in March.

Time will speak to the exact worthiness of this set, but overall I think it’s in good shape with two albums, three live shows and a rarities disc. It also clearly opens the door to future installments that would run past Dio’s time in Rainbow and cover the more commercial rock era that featured Graham Bonnet and later Joe Lynn Turner. And the list of other players who were in and out of Rainbow over the years could honestly fill a book. We’ll see how the overseers of this material, assuming Blackmore is among them, choose to present future offerings. But we are off to a running start with two mega classic albums, the immortal tones of Ronnie James Dio, and enough Ritchie Blackmore guitar to fill a planet with soundwaves.