Machine Head

by Deep Purple

Released 50 years ago today, this classic of rock remains, deservedly, the most famous Purple record. My first partial encounter with it was, I reckon, in the mid-1970s. I say “partial” because the tape we listened to then lacked Pictures of Home and Lazy. Discovered by me towards 1980, they became my favourite tracks of the album.

Not as heavy as In Rock, not as diverse as Fireball, Machine Head nevertheless provides more than enough variety and fun for a rock album. It could have been perfect if not for that number about some stupid with a flare gun which I really think should have been left out and replaced by When a Blind Man Cries. Not that it’s bad; it’s just not up to the level of the other songs.

Roger Glover recalls in the liner notes to the 25^th Anniversary Edition (which I purchased, pre-Amazon, directly from The Deep Purple Appreciation Society) how the name came about:

During one of these lost and searching days, I awoke one morning in my room at the Europe and, in that moment between sleep and wakefulness, with eyes still closed, heard myself say the words “smoke on the water” to the empty room. Opening my eyes, I wondered if I had actually said it out loud, or had I been dreaming? No, I concluded, I’d actually spoken those words. Mentally filing it away, I thought nothing more about it until later, when I told Ian Gillan. “Sounds like a drug song,” he observed and since we were devoutly a drinking band, we dismissed it.

Maybe I am too hard on it. (How hard one can be on a hard rock classic?) After all, thanks to it I learned about Montreux (also how this latter is pronounced by the English) and Frank Zappa and The Mothers. By now, the band themselves may well be fed up with the old Smoke but the fans can’t have enough of it. And there’s no shortage of covers. My favourites are Señor Coconut’s Humo en el agua, Dread Zeppelin’s groovy one, an instrumental by Stekpanna (from Standin’ Tall) and 1920s-style version by Robyn Adele Anderson.

Speaking of covers, the rest of the album — the good rest of the album, you understand — is as inspirational. Check out Min Chuguruk by the Siberian ethno-rockers Bugotak and another version of Highway Star by the Italian outfit Black Mamba — that “Oooh”, just before “she’s a killing machine”, is priceless. I loved the version of Lazy by Jimmy Barnes and Joe Bonamassa, from Re-Machined: A Tribute to Deep Purple’s Machine Head. Ditto When a Blind Man Cries, again by Barnes with Jon Lord and The Hoochie Coochie Men, from Live at the Basement.

CD1 of the Anniversary Edition, remixed in 1997 by Glover, is “what it <the album> should have sounded at the time”. It took me 25 years to get used to, or maybe more: I’m still working on it.

RIP Martin Birch. RIP Jon Lord. RIP Frank Zappa. RIP Funky Claude. Long live Machine Head.