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If it could, it would
Couple of Machine Head related articles in the Vintage Guitar magazine. Both have originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of the magazine, and now are also available online.
Roger Glover was interviewed on the occasion of the Dweezil Zappa’s remix of the album.
The recording circumstances are part of the Machine Head legend, so would it have lost some of its magic if it was recorded traditionally in a sterile studio environment?
Absolutely. But that’s what studios did. They took sound away. They controlled it too much. Our concerts were pretty wild. Crazy-sounding, loud and vicious, and aggressive and exciting. We wanted to bring that into the studio somehow. The idea was to record an album in a venue, not in a studio.If we didn’t quite achieve it, it’s because, to me, the album sounded a bit muddy considering we were after this huge, echoey sound. But whatever it was, it worked. It certainly would’ve been different if we’d done it in a proper studio.
The fire changed everything. It took our time away, but brought the band together in a way we wouldn’t have if we were all living at home, traveling to the studio at night.
Read more of Roger’s interview in Vintage Guitar.
And a retrospective article about the album, albeit dealing mostly with Smoke, Highway Star, and guitar amps used in the recording.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
You know what? I’m no pyromaniac or arsonist, but I’m ‘happy’ the Casino burned down. Without that terrible event (which luckily cost no lives), Machine Head would have never come into existence the way we can hear it today. The time pressure, the after-shock of the fire and the specific acoustics of the Grand Hotel all contributed to it becoming the iconic album it is.
I’m especially happy that DP’s initial plan to capture live acoustics in a hall (with buoying echo and all) failed. I love the sonics of MH which were forced on DP by having to record in hotel rooms & corridors. Some people say MH sounds sterile because of it, to me it sounds incredibly direct, vibrant, direct & focused, I love that intimate “Deep Purple in your own living room concentrating on what they do”-sound.
In the Vintage Guitar Magazine article there is a lovely and succinct Joe Satriani quote at the end:
QUOTE
“Machine Head crystalized what to me back then was heavy rock and metal,” Satriani added. “There’s something cultured about it. It’s gutsy, it’s bluesy, it’s soulful, but it’s polished at the same time.”
UNQUOTE
My feelings exactly, that album has more elegance and finesse than anything Led Zep or Black Sabbath ever put out. And I love it for exactly those qualities.
January 15th, 2025 at 03:58“I remember saying to Jon on a train going to a gig after we finished Deep Purple in Rock, “The album could have been better.” He turned to me and said, “No, it couldn’t. If it could have been better, it would’ve been better. It is what it is. Leave it alone, get used to it, and move on.” And that was good advice. There’s no such thing as perfection, thankfully.”
January 15th, 2025 at 06:35Love this statement! Jon Lord was completely right here.
When I listen to In Rock and Machine Head, the original recordings, I’m always amazed because we can hear exactly how it was at that exact moment, not what producers later on wanted it to be.
Not that I don’t appreciate later productions, but the first ones are indeed lovely.
Always make me wish there had been a tiny camera so we now could experience how it was to be there all the time 😊☺️
@ 1 – “My feelings exactly, that album has more elegance and finesse than anything Led Zep or Black Sabbath ever put out. And I love it for exactly those qualities.” Falling asleep again, waking, rolling my eyes again, sighing repeatedly again, falling asleep again, waking , rolling my eyes again , etc, etc, etc.! Cheers.
January 15th, 2025 at 08:48I do like the ‘nothing is perfect comment’ so true & that IS the way it is. Reminds me of ‘what is & what should never be’. Oh dear, I just dragged the behemoth Zeppelin into a Purple rave again. Uwe is going to go ballistic I fear. A good interview & thanks for posting it. And the retrospective article too. Cheers.
January 15th, 2025 at 09:10Be serious Herr MacGregor, one might prefer both Zep and the Sabs to DP for certain aspects, but were they ever ELEGANT in their music (that is all I pointed to)?
Zep sounds to me like this US WW II tank (the M3 Lee or Grant) looked – convoluted if idiosyncratic design:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/AlfredPalmerM3tank1942b_crop2.jpg/600px-AlfredPalmerM3tank1942b_crop2.jpg
Sabbath is akin to this Soviet tank (the IS-2), brutish, does what it looks like:
http://tank-photographs.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/is-2-tank-russian-soviet-ww2-holland.jpg
And DP sounds like this tool of the once forces of evil and tyranny to me (a Panzerkampfwagen V or Panther, sorry for using a German example, but I’m quoting Lemmy: “The bad guys always had the best-looking equipment.”), a – for a tank – sleek design:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48700809888_20f35fe4e9_b.jpg
If elegance of musical design and neatness in instrumental construction is your thing (I have a penchant for it …), I think you are automatically drawn to DP as opposed to LZ or BS. If your preference is for music less clear-cut (some people find DP’s music to be too overt and in your face) and more ‘hazy-charming-romantic’, then LZ must be your logical choice and if primal power attracts you, then BS will make you happy. Each band highlights certain musical traits in its respective oeuvre, it’s all I’m sayin’.
Is that so wrong?
It’s the same reason why I prefer Judas Priest over Iron Maiden or Saxon – more elegance in musical construction.
January 15th, 2025 at 10:29I never said it was ‘wrong’ at all Uwe. Zeppelin had fine moments, The Rain Song is sublime & there are plenty of others. Their acoustic songs are also delicate in many ways & nice sounding to my ears. Sabbath had some nice moments too, on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath the album & also Sabotage and a few others with string arrangements etc. It is just the way the records sound overall that makes it all sound nothing like the elegance of Machine Head. But then would we want it to? If everything sounded like MH it would be tad boring in that aspect. Machine Head is a wonderful recording, a little dry of course but that is good thing. Certain bands have their ‘charm’ as we say, it is the way of things. Sabbath could have done with better sounding albums at times, a shame that didn’t occur. Horses for courses again as I prefer Maiden to Priest, by a long shot actually. Much better compositions & melodies and I am talking predominantly in preference to the 1980’s era. I didn’t follow those bands much after that. I have a listen here & there online to a new song or two. Judas Priest to me are too predictable. Each to their own. Cheers.
January 15th, 2025 at 21:49We have just got back home after a three week European Christmas holiday tour (sounds very DP LOL). On route to Zermatt, we stayed two nights in Montreux. Obviously I couldn’t resist taking a selfie with the plaque that hangs round the back of, what once was, the Grand Hotel. My pilgrimage visit compliments the many DP concerts I have enjoyed and the story of how Smoke was dreamt up. It kind of gave me that fulfilled DP fan feeling:)
January 15th, 2025 at 22:02By the way, Montreux is still as sleepy as Roger mentioned in his interview!
@5 Nice one, Uwe, especially the DP/PzV comparison!)
I’d rather compare the unholy trinity to planes, though: DP would be the Spitfire, LZ would be the Thunderbolt, and BS would be the Me110.
January 16th, 2025 at 13:21Aber Herr MacGregor, Iron Maiden have only written two types of songs ever: Ones that start slow and then move into their trademark gallop and those others that confoundingly already start with the gallop, but then introduce reassuringly for their musically conservative fans the yearned for slow parts later! And in between there is lots of harmony guitar twiddling, a busy-as-a-bee bass guitar and someone recites/sings the Wikipedia entry of some historical occurrence with operatic tremor. 😂
I have all their albums but I’ll be damned if I could really tell them apart. I think I like the one with Eddie on the cover best. 😎
January 16th, 2025 at 13:26Jan, I take it that you took that picture at the Swiss Al Kaaba of Purple worship according to all prescribed pilgrimage rites, i.e. while clutching your rosary of Ritchie & Roger plectrums and reciting faithfully: “Ye all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline …” etc!
🔥😇🔥😇🔥😇🔥😇🔥😇🔥
And the ritual is only complete if you smash the cell phone camera in the aftermath!
January 16th, 2025 at 14:04Uwe, I went to a Maiden concert in 2008, I have stated this here before. It was grand, all the songs I like from the 80’s plus a few more. Great stage presentation & everything else. I own the double live cd from the 80’s and that is it.. With Judas Priest I own the Screaming for Vengeance cd, that is enough for me. Do I regret not going to a Priest concert around the 2009/10 era? Possibly because they fractured after that with Downing leaving. With the unfortunate health issues for Glenn Tipton also becoming an issue a few years later, it had me thinking I should have gone, but I don’t lose sleep over that. I have always respected them both, those lineups that I have mentioned. It is just that I am not into that sort of music in big way. The fact that you own all their albums means nothing to me as you are collector first, rather than a fan based collector. Well that is how I see it. I only buy music that I like. It’s those old horses for courses again. Maiden did provoke more of an interest for me and I heard plenty of both bands back in the day, sharing a house with a younger metal head guitarist friend. It doesn’t matter. It is what it is. Cheers.
January 16th, 2025 at 21:09Uwe, smashing my cell phone right after taking my valued selfie makes perfect sense. It would however require me to travel back to that sleepy place to take yet another selfie. One ponders… 😀
January 16th, 2025 at 21:49Novicianvs, I’m more a Focke-Wulf Fw 190/Republic P-47 Thunderbolt/Chance-Vought F4U Corsair/Lavochkin La-7 man myself (I have a thing for aircooled engines), but, yeah, the comparison of the Supermarine Spitfire with DP as regards elegance of design and construction fits!
January 16th, 2025 at 22:31I’ll make you a provocation:
I agree with you on the concept of elegance, and I also add that of technique and melody superior to other super hard rock groups.
as for the sound, it’s true that MH has an obviously unique sound, but I don’t understand all this mythologizing of his sound, for me the clear change in sound was with In Rock, then from there more or less the sound has always been similar up until stormbringer.
CTTB has a greater roundness, but I think this is due to the technological development of recording hardware which has grown exponentially since the mid-70s.
all in all the sound of the 70s hard rock was that, I find it in a bit of all the first records of all the bands including Rush, Journey and Queen, arriving at the beginning of the 80s the sounds and the mixes became much more varied and complex.
#5 Uwe:
January 16th, 2025 at 23:49I’ll give you a hard time by telling you that Judas are not one of my favorite big bands because of the doping of “Painkiller” and the following ones that they wanted to take as a path, as much as Coverdale took the path of 1987.
I’m surprised that you, who are very uncompromising, did not consider this in your judgment of Judas.
Fla76, I don’t like the Painkiller album all that much – I missed Tom Allom’s production – and of course the two albums that followed without Rob were terrible. But by the time of the reunion with Rob and Angel of Retribution, they sounded more like in the Tom Allom years again. My favorite Priest album is the one nobody likes, the poppy and new-wave influenced Point Of Entry. I like my Priest a little poppy, hence Turbo, Killing Machine/Hellbent for Leather and the Glover-produced Sin After Sin plus Sad Wings of Destiny are my other favorite ones.
I don’t even like the song Painkiller, too fast and screechy.
January 18th, 2025 at 18:38@13 No specific preference with me to either aircooled or watercooled engine planes but there’s some family connections with the former. My granddad flew even more vintage species of those: Polikarpov’s I-15 and I-16. Later on he switched to Hawker Hurricane, though. He must have met some of your boys in the air. I guess those encounters were slightly less friendly than DP/LZ rivalry. Probably something more of the Megadeth/Metallica thing. But such was the time.
@everyone Anyone of you folks can point me to the animated Smoke on the Water video online? I liked it a lot and want to rewatch it now but it seems to have been taken off YouTube. Only trailers are available. Maybe someone else has published it?
January 18th, 2025 at 18:51@16
Is it this you’re looking for?
https://youtu.be/Q2FzZSBD5LE?si=KdZ6bDVNdWX8C5Ko
😊
January 18th, 2025 at 22:36@17 Yep, Karen. This is the one. Many thanks, Ma’am!
January 19th, 2025 at 17:07Georgivs, now that is an ancestry I like! I’m a great fan of the achievements of the Red Army and Red Airforce in the East – WW II was won (and the Nazi scourge eliminated) there, in a sea of blood of the Soviet people. The lack of recognition for that is still appalling.
I really like the Polikarpov I-16 and, initially, some Luftwaffe pilots in their performance-wise superior Me Bf 109s made the mistake of trying to outturn these little beasts – it cost them dearly. You didn’t dogfight with I-16s. 😎
You said your granddad moved on to Hawker Hurricanes, no Bell P-39 Aircobras (the Yank plane the Red Airforce fell in love with) or Yak-3 or -9s?
January 19th, 2025 at 17:19@18
January 20th, 2025 at 09:22You’re welcome sweetie!
@19 Well, I-16 was extremely maneuverable but, by the start of WWII, underpowered and underarmed, so to speak.
And thanks for your kind words. I am not sure I can fully restore all stages of my granddad’s career, though. What I know is when the German invasion started, he was a fighter pilot stationed in Belarus. Then he was deployed to Leningrad. I guess it was there where he transitioned to the Hurricane leased by the UK, circa 1942. By then, the Hurricanes were also getting obsolete and were no match for Me-109s. He didn’t fly any newer models because he was badly wounded (by Finnish mortar fire, so the Germans are absolved in this case)) and sent to the hospital till the end of the war. Ironically enough, his wife, my granny, stayed on the occupied territory and one of the Luftwaffe units was stationed in their neighborhood. Someone was happy to tell the Germans that her husband was a Sowetisch flieger and was fighting them on the other side. Yet the pilots treated her in a friendly way and shared some food with her. They were the normal ones in those times.
Quite a Bruce Dickinson-esque theme, innit?
January 20th, 2025 at 12:04