Deep Purple Machine Head Review

The album's opening and strongest track, written on a tour bus when a journalist asked Ritchie Blackmore how he wrote songs and he answered by playing the opening riff on the spot. Ian Gillan improvised the lyrics around the fact that they were on the road, and the band arranged it at soundcheck the same day. The structure is a riff that accelerates, a verse that matches the speed, and dueling solos from Blackmore and Lord, the guitar solo based on a figure Blackmore learned from Johnny Burnette and shaped to sound like Bach. The song works because every part moves at the same momentum: Paice's drums lock into a straight eighth-note pattern that never drags, Glover's bass doubles the guitar riff, and Gillan screams the verses without needing vibrato or melisma to sell them. The production captures the drum sound and the organ warmth without losing the guitar attack. Highway Star is the template for the rest of the album: a simple riff, a functional lyric, and a performance that trusts speed and precision over complexity. Still a live staple fifty years later because the song is built to sustain that energy.

A riff-driven track built around a bass line Roger Glover wrote after listening to John Lennon's How Do You Sleep, shaped around a riff that starts off the first beat of the bar. The title and lyrics refer to Gillan's birth sign, a thin concept that gives him something to sing but does not add much to the song. The track works because the riff is strong enough to carry it and because the band plays it with the same attack they bring to Highway Star, Jon Lord's organ filling the spaces between the guitar phrases. The song was played live only once in 1972 but became a concert favorite after Joe Satriani joined the band in 1993, a sign that the songwriting holds up even when the lyrics do not.

A mid-tempo track about the landscape around Montreux, with lyrics that describe being far from home and images of the local area. The song moves between a steady verse and a climbing guitar figure, the structure simple but effective. The original recording left off a drum introduction that Paice recorded; it was added for the 25th anniversary reissue. The track is solid but not essential, a showcase for Blackmore's guitar work that does not quite reach the level of Highway Star or Smoke on the Water. Still in the live set after Satriani joined Deep Purple, which suggests the band values it more than the album sequencing does.

The most commercial track on the album, released as a single and considered by the band to have the most pop potential. It is also the slightest song on Machine Head, a mid-tempo rocker with a chorus that aims for accessibility but does not have the riff strength of the surrounding tracks. Played live once at a BBC session in 1972 and then dropped, which tells you how the band ranked it against the rest of the material. Functional but forgettable, the one track on the album that feels like filler even though it is only four minutes long.

The most famous track Deep Purple recorded, and the one song from Machine Head that became a cultural touchstone beyond the hard rock audience. The opening riff is four notes, simple enough that it became a beginner guitar exercise and specific enough that it never sounds like anything else. Ritchie Blackmore compared it to the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a motif that works because it is economical and clear. The lyrics document the casino fire and the search for a recording venue, the most specific and detailed storytelling on the album. Gillan describes the flare gun, the evacuation, Claude Nobs rescuing people from the basement, and the smoke hanging over Lake Geneva, all concrete images that give the song a narrative weight the other tracks lack. The backing track was recorded at the Pavilion theatre before the police shut the session down, the only usable material from that location. The band did not think the song had commercial potential and it was one of the last tracks from the album to be played live, but after it was released as a single in the US in 1973 it reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the song they could not avoid playing. The guitar solo builds in a straight line, Blackmore moving up the neck without showing off, and the song ends cleanly instead of stretching. Smoke on the Water is the center of the album and the track that justified the entire Montreux experiment: a song about the recording process that only exists because the process went wrong.

A long track designed as a vehicle for instrumental showcases, opening with an unaccompanied organ introduction from Jon Lord and including a harmonica solo from Ian Gillan. Roger Glover said the song was roughly based on an Oscar Brown song called Sleepy, while Ritchie Blackmore stated it was inspired by Eric Clapton's Stepping Out. The track was written to replace the instrumental Wring That Neck in the live set, and the structure reflects that purpose: a loose framework that allows each member of the band to take a solo and stretch the arrangement. Blackmore recorded his guitar solos in sections over two days, and Martin Birch spliced them together, but the tone stays consistent enough that it sounds like a single take. The song works because the band plays with focus even when the structure is open, and because the seven-minute length is earned by the movement in the solos rather than just repetition. Lazy was played live throughout 1972 and remained in the set after Gillan and Glover left the band, a sign that it worked as well on stage as it does on the album.

The album closer, written as a pastiche of 1950s rock and roll with science fiction phrases swapped in for the usual cars and girls. Deep Purple came up with nonsense lines like "music in our solar system" and built a song around them, the lyrics openly not meant to signify anything. Ian Paice plays a short drum solo on the track, and the arrangement is built to stretch in concert: the album version is four and a half minutes, but live versions from 1972 onward ran past twenty minutes, the song serving as a framework for improvisation. The track was first played in January 1972 and became the set closer, leading into the instrumental section of Mandrake Root. After Gillan and Glover left the band in 1973, Space Truckin' remained the final song, including a performance at California Jam in 1974 where Blackmore set fire to his amplifiers and destroyed a television camera with his guitar. The song works because the band commits to the riff and because the structure is strong enough to support the length, but it is the weakest of the seven tracks, a showcase piece that does its job without adding much. NASA used it as a wakeup call on Space Shuttle flight STS-107 in 2003, which is the kind of cultural afterlife a song called Space Truckin' deserves.