Fact #141694
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Machine Head, the sixth album by Deep Purple, reaches No1 in the Australian Kent Music Report albums chart.Full article:
MACHINE HEAD by Deep Purple
This feature by Johnny Black first appeared in HiFi News
To get the point of Machine Head you must first understand what it is not.
It is not a masterpiece of high fidelity recording, a breakthough in audio technology or even, for that matter, a high water mark in the craft of songwriting. Yes, it features Smoke On The Water, a frequent contender for greatest rock riff ever, and at least one other Purple classic, Highway Star, but even these are not its primary qualifications for vinyl icon status.
The reason to celebrate Machine Head is that it was the first hard rock album that actually sounded like a hard rock album. From the beginning of rock'n'roll there had been a yawning chasm between the desire of young musicians to kick up one hell of an exciting racket and the equally understandable desire of audio technicians to record that racket as clean and sharp as a new pin.
In a nutshell, sound engineers strove to eliminate distortion while rockers pulled out all the stops to maximise it. Indeed, some scholars maintain that the first rock'n'roll guitar solo happened on 5 March, 1951, when a guitar amp fell out the back of a van en route to a recording session in Memphis and damaged a valve. Unable to find a replacement, the guitarist, Willie Kizart, simply recorded his solo with the amp's dirty, distorted sound. The session was for Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston, often cited as the first rock'n'roll record.
According to Deep Purple's bass player, Roger Glover, Machine Head was born in London's De Lane Lea studio while the band was recording its acclaimed predecessor, Fireball. "Our drummer, Ian Paice, was walking around, carrying his snare drum and hitting it," remembers Glover. "As he walked from the studio area into the corridor, he noticed the change in sound of his snare drum."
The difference was so startling, from what Glover called a "quiet 'toc'" in the soundproofed acoustically dead studio to "the resounding crash in the corridor, bringing out the full range of sound … the real sound, exciting and loud!"
The band decided that their next album would exploit the potential of recording in an acoustically live environment which, they hoped, would produce a vibrant sound akin to a concert experience, but without the distraction of audience noise.
They flew into Montreux, Switzerland on December 3, 1971, planning to install themselves in Montreux Casino for three weeks. "It was a fair-sized hall," recalls Purple's vocalist Ian Gillan, "a beautiful old wooden building on the banks of Lake Geneva, and you could get a really excellent live sound in there."
The night before they were scheduled to start recording, Frank Zappa played a concert in the Casino which Deep Purple attended. Two hours into Zappa's show, an unknown man walked into the auditorium and fired a distress flare, which lodged in a cornice near the ceiling. "With the place being built of wood, the fire quickly started to take hold," says Gillan, "and the place was filling with smoke. Zappa was brilliant. He stopped the band, and started calmly directing everybody to leave the building."
Fortunately, no-one was seriously injured but the Casino burned to the ground, leaving Deep Purple with no recording studio. "Back in the hotel, we could still see the Casino burning from our windows," remembers Gillan. "We were watching the smoke roll out over Lake Geneva, and Roger wrote the words Smoke On The Water on a paper napkin right then. We didn't have a song at this point, it was just those words." (N.B. Glover himself claims the title came to him in a dream several days later).
Claude Nobs, organizer of the famed Montreux Jazz Festival, came to their rescue by arranging for them to record in the nearby Pavilion Theatre, where they laid down a blisteringly powerful backing track that would, in due course, become the album's centre piece, Smoke On The Water.
As luck would have it, their tenure at The Pavilion was brief. "We did it (the backing track) in about four takes, because we had to. The police were banging on the door," explained guitarist Ritchie Blackmore some years later. "We were waking up the neighbours about five miles away because the sound was echoing through the mountains. We had just finished it when the police burst in and said we had to stop."
Once more, Claude Nobs found them yet another new location, The Grand Hotel, which was closed for redecoration, and that's where most of the album was completed. The tracks were produced by the band, guided by highly acclaimed engineer Martin Birch (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and early Fleetwood Mac).
It didn't help that both Gillan and Glover were on the edge of quitting. Tales abound of band members surreptitiously fiddling with mixing desk controls to boost their personal contributions to the album, but despite these internal shenanigans, the results were spectacular.
At the time of this album, Deep Purple songs tended to originate from jam sessions or, more often, from Ritchie presenting the band with a riff. Pictures Of Home, for example, was built on a piece of music Blackmore had heard on Bulgarian Radio, and the closing track, Space Truckin', originated from a Blackmore finger exercise based on the familiar Batman tv show theme. These basic frameworks would then be fleshed out by keyboardist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice, and only then would Ian Gillan write a set of lyrics. By mutual agreement, publishing royalties were split five ways, ensuring that no individual member profited more than any other.
Highway Star, often credited as being one of the first speed metal songs ever, was born quite spontaneously in 1971 on a tour bus en route to Portsmouth but, by the time they recorded it in Montreux, it had become a rather more sophisticated beast. Blackmore's guitar solo, voted No15 in a 2008 Guitar World magazine list of 100 Greatest Guitar Solos, was meticulously crafted. “I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” he has said. “I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out - and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression - Dm, Gm, Cmaj, Amaj."
Few would argue against the statement that Smoke On the Water is the album's single greatest achievement but, bizarrely, Deep Purple didn't immediately see its potential. "Recording in The Grand went very well, and we got more or less to the end and we were very happy with songs like Highway Star and Lazy and the rest, but we realised we still could do with one more song for the album," remembers Ian Gillan. "That was when we decided to do something with Roger's Smoke On the Water idea. We were really approaching it as just a throwaway, a filler track to finish the album off."
Gillan goes even further, admitting, "When we'd finished it, we still didn't see it as anything very special. Then some deejays on American radio stations started to pick up on it and play it, and it took off from there. Of course, it went on to become one of the most successful things we ever did, with all kinds of cover versions and parodies, so it really took on a life of its own."
On December 21, 1971, Deep Purple walked out of the Grand Hotel, Montreux, blissfully unaware that they'd recorded an album which, in times to come, would routinely be cited as one of the Holy Trinity of hard rock, the other two being Led Zeppelin IV and Black Sabbath's Paranoid.
Released on April 13, 1972, it reached No1 in the UK on 6 May 1972, secured a US Gold Disc on 6 November and its enduring merits were confirmed in 2001 when Q magazine named it as one of the 50 Heaviest Albums of All Time.
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PRODUCTION NOTES
The circumstances under which Machine Head was recorded were decidedly unusual for the time.
To achieve their goal of creating a studio album with the visceral sonic attack of a live performance, they chose to perform the tracks live and with no overdubs using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.
The Mobile was built specially for The Stones in 1970 by Helios Electronics, a company run by one of rocks' most respected audio engineers, Dick Swettenham, and it was the first fully fitted mobile multi-track studio. As well as being used by The Stones, it had been employed for both Led Zeppelin III and IV before Deep Purple trundled it out to Switzerland.
The Purps' Roger Glover neatly summed it up as, "a 16-track studio perched on the back of a lorry and painted with camouflage colours, for reasons best known to The Stones."
Axemeister Ritchie Blackmore recently told Guitar World, "We had the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording unit sitting outside in the snow, but to get there we had to run cable through two doors in the corridor into a room, through a bathroom and into another room, from which it went across a bed and out the veranda window, then ran along the balcony for about 100 feet and came back in through another bedroom window. It then went through that room’s bathroom and into another corridor, then all the way down a marble staircase to the foyer reception area of the hotel, out the front door, across the courtyard and up the steps into the back of the mobile unit. I think that setup led to capturing some spontaneity, because once we got to the truck for a playback, even if we didn’t think it was a perfect take, we’d go, ‘Yeah, that’s good enough.’ Because we just couldn’t stand going back again."
Blackmore also remembers, "quite amazing scenes with me playing guitar in the corridor, Ian putting on drums two doors down and Jon in another playing organ."
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This feature by Johnny Black first appeared in HiFi News
To get the point of Machine Head you must first understand what it is not.
It is not a masterpiece of high fidelity recording, a breakthough in audio technology or even, for that matter, a high water mark in the craft of songwriting. Yes, it features Smoke On The Water, a frequent contender for greatest rock riff ever, and at least one other Purple classic, Highway Star, but even these are not its primary qualifications for vinyl icon status.
The reason to celebrate Machine Head is that it was the first hard rock album that actually sounded like a hard rock album. From the beginning of rock'n'roll there had been a yawning chasm between the desire of young musicians to kick up one hell of an exciting racket and the equally understandable desire of audio technicians to record that racket as clean and sharp as a new pin.
In a nutshell, sound engineers strove to eliminate distortion while rockers pulled out all the stops to maximise it. Indeed, some scholars maintain that the first rock'n'roll guitar solo happened on 5 March, 1951, when a guitar amp fell out the back of a van en route to a recording session in Memphis and damaged a valve. Unable to find a replacement, the guitarist, Willie Kizart, simply recorded his solo with the amp's dirty, distorted sound. The session was for Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston, often cited as the first rock'n'roll record.
According to Deep Purple's bass player, Roger Glover, Machine Head was born in London's De Lane Lea studio while the band was recording its acclaimed predecessor, Fireball. "Our drummer, Ian Paice, was walking around, carrying his snare drum and hitting it," remembers Glover. "As he walked from the studio area into the corridor, he noticed the change in sound of his snare drum."
The difference was so startling, from what Glover called a "quiet 'toc'" in the soundproofed acoustically dead studio to "the resounding crash in the corridor, bringing out the full range of sound … the real sound, exciting and loud!"
The band decided that their next album would exploit the potential of recording in an acoustically live environment which, they hoped, would produce a vibrant sound akin to a concert experience, but without the distraction of audience noise.
They flew into Montreux, Switzerland on December 3, 1971, planning to install themselves in Montreux Casino for three weeks. "It was a fair-sized hall," recalls Purple's vocalist Ian Gillan, "a beautiful old wooden building on the banks of Lake Geneva, and you could get a really excellent live sound in there."
The night before they were scheduled to start recording, Frank Zappa played a concert in the Casino which Deep Purple attended. Two hours into Zappa's show, an unknown man walked into the auditorium and fired a distress flare, which lodged in a cornice near the ceiling. "With the place being built of wood, the fire quickly started to take hold," says Gillan, "and the place was filling with smoke. Zappa was brilliant. He stopped the band, and started calmly directing everybody to leave the building."
Fortunately, no-one was seriously injured but the Casino burned to the ground, leaving Deep Purple with no recording studio. "Back in the hotel, we could still see the Casino burning from our windows," remembers Gillan. "We were watching the smoke roll out over Lake Geneva, and Roger wrote the words Smoke On The Water on a paper napkin right then. We didn't have a song at this point, it was just those words." (N.B. Glover himself claims the title came to him in a dream several days later).
Claude Nobs, organizer of the famed Montreux Jazz Festival, came to their rescue by arranging for them to record in the nearby Pavilion Theatre, where they laid down a blisteringly powerful backing track that would, in due course, become the album's centre piece, Smoke On The Water.
As luck would have it, their tenure at The Pavilion was brief. "We did it (the backing track) in about four takes, because we had to. The police were banging on the door," explained guitarist Ritchie Blackmore some years later. "We were waking up the neighbours about five miles away because the sound was echoing through the mountains. We had just finished it when the police burst in and said we had to stop."
Once more, Claude Nobs found them yet another new location, The Grand Hotel, which was closed for redecoration, and that's where most of the album was completed. The tracks were produced by the band, guided by highly acclaimed engineer Martin Birch (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and early Fleetwood Mac).
It didn't help that both Gillan and Glover were on the edge of quitting. Tales abound of band members surreptitiously fiddling with mixing desk controls to boost their personal contributions to the album, but despite these internal shenanigans, the results were spectacular.
At the time of this album, Deep Purple songs tended to originate from jam sessions or, more often, from Ritchie presenting the band with a riff. Pictures Of Home, for example, was built on a piece of music Blackmore had heard on Bulgarian Radio, and the closing track, Space Truckin', originated from a Blackmore finger exercise based on the familiar Batman tv show theme. These basic frameworks would then be fleshed out by keyboardist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice, and only then would Ian Gillan write a set of lyrics. By mutual agreement, publishing royalties were split five ways, ensuring that no individual member profited more than any other.
Highway Star, often credited as being one of the first speed metal songs ever, was born quite spontaneously in 1971 on a tour bus en route to Portsmouth but, by the time they recorded it in Montreux, it had become a rather more sophisticated beast. Blackmore's guitar solo, voted No15 in a 2008 Guitar World magazine list of 100 Greatest Guitar Solos, was meticulously crafted. “I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” he has said. “I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out - and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression - Dm, Gm, Cmaj, Amaj."
Few would argue against the statement that Smoke On the Water is the album's single greatest achievement but, bizarrely, Deep Purple didn't immediately see its potential. "Recording in The Grand went very well, and we got more or less to the end and we were very happy with songs like Highway Star and Lazy and the rest, but we realised we still could do with one more song for the album," remembers Ian Gillan. "That was when we decided to do something with Roger's Smoke On the Water idea. We were really approaching it as just a throwaway, a filler track to finish the album off."
Gillan goes even further, admitting, "When we'd finished it, we still didn't see it as anything very special. Then some deejays on American radio stations started to pick up on it and play it, and it took off from there. Of course, it went on to become one of the most successful things we ever did, with all kinds of cover versions and parodies, so it really took on a life of its own."
On December 21, 1971, Deep Purple walked out of the Grand Hotel, Montreux, blissfully unaware that they'd recorded an album which, in times to come, would routinely be cited as one of the Holy Trinity of hard rock, the other two being Led Zeppelin IV and Black Sabbath's Paranoid.
Released on April 13, 1972, it reached No1 in the UK on 6 May 1972, secured a US Gold Disc on 6 November and its enduring merits were confirmed in 2001 when Q magazine named it as one of the 50 Heaviest Albums of All Time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRODUCTION NOTES
The circumstances under which Machine Head was recorded were decidedly unusual for the time.
To achieve their goal of creating a studio album with the visceral sonic attack of a live performance, they chose to perform the tracks live and with no overdubs using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.
The Mobile was built specially for The Stones in 1970 by Helios Electronics, a company run by one of rocks' most respected audio engineers, Dick Swettenham, and it was the first fully fitted mobile multi-track studio. As well as being used by The Stones, it had been employed for both Led Zeppelin III and IV before Deep Purple trundled it out to Switzerland.
The Purps' Roger Glover neatly summed it up as, "a 16-track studio perched on the back of a lorry and painted with camouflage colours, for reasons best known to The Stones."
Axemeister Ritchie Blackmore recently told Guitar World, "We had the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording unit sitting outside in the snow, but to get there we had to run cable through two doors in the corridor into a room, through a bathroom and into another room, from which it went across a bed and out the veranda window, then ran along the balcony for about 100 feet and came back in through another bedroom window. It then went through that room’s bathroom and into another corridor, then all the way down a marble staircase to the foyer reception area of the hotel, out the front door, across the courtyard and up the steps into the back of the mobile unit. I think that setup led to capturing some spontaneity, because once we got to the truck for a playback, even if we didn’t think it was a perfect take, we’d go, ‘Yeah, that’s good enough.’ Because we just couldn’t stand going back again."
Blackmore also remembers, "quite amazing scenes with me playing guitar in the corridor, Ian putting on drums two doors down and Jon in another playing organ."