I just don't understand, as Ann-Margret once sang, why an exciting band like Deep Purple, who consistently hit the top of the charts in Merrie Olde and have taken Europe by storm, remain a comparatively unknown quantity to American audiences. Especially when said audiences have wholeheartedly embraced bands with similar musical aims and not one more ampere of excitement.
It's a shame, but Deep Purple themselves are at least partially to blame. Their first two American albums on Tetragrammaton were mostly uninspired, despite some good cover versions of songs like "I'm So Glad" and "Hush." The basic problem seemed to be that the group hadn't really learned to write yet, so the covers were
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the best way to grow without losing the audience. Except that no self-respecting late-Sixties rock band wants to put out an album with nothing but covers on it, so we were left with a bunch of boring originals, half of them instrumental. When, that is, they weren't indulging in long "improvisational" forays such as their first album's bolero rendition of "Hey Joe." Jon Lord was the main culprit here, having a background of extensive formal keyboard training which tended to make his solos at least a bit Emersonic and at most positively pompous. The pretentious side of Deep Purple found its fullest expression in their first album for Warner's,
Concerto For Group and Orchestra, written by Lord and performed with the aid of Malcolm Arnold and the "Royal Philharmonic Orchestra."
It was an atrocity. A "movement" would begin with a few minutes of "symphonic" mush, then abruptly the orchestra would stop and the band would start to play, build until you thought they were just about to really start cooking, and then–whoosh–drowned in string sections again. A recent Lord-Arnold collaboration on Capitol called Gemini Suite was just more of the same miscegenation.
Fortunately, the band has seemingly realized that that sort of thing can get out of hand, because their last three albums have finally found a comfortably furious groove for them to work in, making them prime contenders among the most searingly loud and heavy bands on both sides of the Atlantic. Deep Purple in Rock was a dynamic, frenzied piece of work sounding not a little like the MC5 (anybody who thinks that all heavy bands put out thudding slabs of "downer" music just hasn't gotten into Deep Purple). Fireball was more of the same, if not quite as frantically effective. Machine Head bears strong similarities to both its immediate predecessors, lying qualitatively somewhere in between the two.
And like both of them, though it delivers the Sound, the rushing, grating crunch of the hard attack, it has its ups and downs compositionally. "Highway Star" is a great opening track, quite similar both structurally and thematically to "Speed King" and "Fireball," the openers of the two previous albums. The pace is blistering, almost too fast for com
Simply one of the most important rock records of all time. Not only does every guitarist learn "Smoke On the Water" at some point, there are few moments in rock as jarringly, unspeakably great as Ian Gillian shrieking in "Space Truckin'." Then there's the rest of "Space Truckin'." And "Highway Star." And "Space Truckin'.
