Machine Head

Deep Purple

album cover

The Deepest Heavy Rock from England

Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" lives wherever guitars are sold. Like its obvious model, Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," it's an insanely memorable riff that boils rock and roll down to an easily mastered (and endlessly repeatable) four-bar code. It still crawls regularly from the din of amateur hour in the guitar department, an easy shortcut to cool for misfit kids.

It's also the rare rock song that describes the circumstances of its creation—"Smoke" tells how the five-piece Deep Purple, then just beginning to attract attention, had its recording plans derailed by a fire. Under pressure to create its seventh album quickly, the band had rented the famous Casino in Montreux, Switzerland, and the Rolling Stones' mobile studio. The night before the recording was to start, an audience member ("some stupid" in the song) fired a flare gun into the ceiling during a performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The resulting fire sent smoke all over the coastal area, ruined the venue, and forced Deep Purple to scramble for an alternate location. They landed in the vacant Grand Hotel, where they set up in corridors and had to walk through a mazelike series of rooms and balconies to reach the recording equipment.

Though the arena-rattling "Smoke on the Water" was the band's breakthrough (and the reason the album hit the top five in the U.S. and sold over two million copies in a year), it's perhaps the least musically substantial offering on Machine Head. The other tracks show Deep Purple differentiating itself from the heavy-rock heavyweights (Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin) then ruling England: The opener, "Highway Star," scoots along, sleek and almost jazzlike, a caterwauling groove that inspires one of the most demonically intricate solos in the hard rock canon. Each track is rendered with steady-handed precision, and is spiked by head-swiveling solos that all but taunt aspiring axmen: "Sure, you can cop the riff, but let's see you do this!"

Genre: Rock
Released: 1972, Warner Bros.
Key Tracks: "Highway Star," "Space Truckin'."
Catalog Choice: Who Do We Think We Are
Next Stop: Black Sabbath: Paranoid
After That: Cream: Live Cream
Book Pages: 216–217