It blows my mind to this day that the band chose 'Never Before' as the lead-out single ('Never Before' is a great song, but there were smarter choices), meaning it took until the spellbinding Made In Japan for Deep Purple to get their American breakthrough. Not only does it contain 'Smoke On The Water', but also 'Pictures of Home' and 'Highway Star' and 'Lazy' and 'Space Truckin'', all songs that are classics of hard rock and heavy metal. It is one of the very, very few albums that I'd award five stars without compunction, an album I'd consider damn near perfect and one of my personal favourites (funnily enough, it only came out a year and a half before one of my other favourite albums of all time, The Who's Quadrophenia). And while David Coverdale (future Whitesnake vocalist) cut his teeth with the bad throughout the 70s, the majority of Deep Purple fans consider the Mark II lineup the best, mostly because they were responsible for the classic album Machine Head.Īnd make no mistake here: Machine Head is one of the best goddamn albums of all time. Well, if we go by the annals of history, most would say the iconic lineup of Deep Purple was the 'Mark II' lineup (Ian Gillan on vocals, Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Roger Glover on bass, Jon Lord on keyboards, and the iconic Ian Paice (who is, incidentally, the only band member to last all forty-five years) on drums). I mean, even though every would-be guitarist on the planet learns 'Smoke On The Water' (often incorrectly, because Ritchie Blackmore uses an alternate tuning of 'all fourths' instead of just power chords), how much had Deep Purple really affected rock & roll? With fifteen different members over forty-five years, who could even say was the definitive Deep Purple? And really, it's not like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame hasn't earned that contempt - I mean, the induction of ABBA, Madonna, and Randy Newman over Deep Purple, a band that is widely considered one of the founders of heavy metal? I mean, fucking really?īut putting aside the obvious fact the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is completely full of shit, I did begin to ponder the impact of Deep Purple on rock. That same year, Deep Purple was denied a place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which earned the institute a fair thrashing at the hands of Billy Corgan (of the Smashing Pumpkins), Gene Simmons (of Kiss), Geddy Lee (of Rush), Kirk Hammett (of Metallica) and Slash (of Guns 'n Roses). A bit less than a year ago, a group of artists that included Carlos Santana, Iron Maiden, The Flaming Lips, and Metallica got together to produce an album cover of the 1972 album Machine Head by Deep Purple.
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