Listening over half a century later to the goosebump-inducing remastered version, there is no indication whatsoever that Deep Purple’s Machine Head album was made amidst a virtual minefield of misfortune. Missteps lurked seemingly in every direction, any one of which had the potential to blow the effort sky high. And judging by this March 1972 album’s iconic place in hard rock history, these hardships merely served to steel Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan, wayward guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, bass player Roger Glover, under-rated drummer Ian Paice, and the late esteemed organist Jon Lord, against adversity on all sides.
The roadblocks began piling up even before the band returned from the US Fireball tour in Autumn 1971, as bass player Roger Glover’s new Rickenbacker guitar purchased in New York City got impounded by British customs agents, with first a loyal roadie, then Glover himself both arrested for trying to avoid paying the import tax at customs. Then on the day of arrival in Geneva Switzerland to commence recording the next day, the band members barely escaped with their lives when the huge complex burned down during a Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention concert. Miraculously all escaped, but the facility in which Deep Purple had planned to record Machine Head was completely consumed by the massive fire seen here. Nevertheless, the songs “Highway Star”,”Maybe I’m a Leo”,”Lazy”,”Space Truckin’ “, and the timeless but true “Smoke on the Water” recorded by Deep Purple in a most unconventional way erected Machine Head as one of the pillars of hard rock to this day. The absolute essence of timeless rock music is contained in the music of Deep Purple’s Machine Head . We already knew it when we asked my guests Ian Gillan and Roger Glover to share their recollections in this classic rock interview about making this album which went to #1 sales in the UK a week after release fifty years ago, but no one outside of Deep Purple’s inner circle knew the unbelievable back story against which this entire project hinged until then. –Redbeard
Unquestionably and uniquely in a category all its own, Jethro Tull’s 1972 epic Thick As a Brick is the only album in music history to attain #1 sales on Billboard containing only one song, albeit 43 minutes long! And as you will hear in this classic rock interview with my guest composer/singer/flautist Ian Anderson, Thick As a Brick‘s ultimate irony is that the album was conceived by Anderson as a total spoof of music critics purporting to ascribe imaginary meaning to Jethro Tull’s preceding Aqualung album, as well as a send up of rock’s progressive darlings at the time.
Redbeard: As I was going back and researching our many previous conversations about your Jethro Tull body of work, I noticed that you’re very careful never to refer to Thick as a Brick, the original, as a rock opera. Why not?
Ian Anderson: Well, it was a rock rambling, really. It was supposedly a spoof, a parody aspect of the original Jethro Tull Thick As a Brick. But it was supposed to be written by an eight year-old boy, a wannabe poet, who is having, I suppose, slightly beyond his years of rambling pre-puberty moment of gushing forth with sort of grandiose ideas. And it was a fun thing. This was the year (1972) of Monty Python, this was a year of the development of quite surreal British humor into an international phenomenon. So it was quite timely in the sense that this particular album should be a spoof, a parody, a send-up, a complete fiction into which people quite readily bought, usually knowingly, but sometimes they didn’t get the joke and took it all absolutely seriously. But for the most part, I think people understood it was a British humor thing. And my feeling back then was that it was a timely event. It wouldn’t have worked a year or two earlier or it wouldn’t have worked a year or two later. Because by then we were into a major change of music culture in the U.K., particularly as the so-called punk year or two started to come around. So this was not meant to be a rock opera, it was meant to be the ramblings of a young, precocious mind. And I never really thought about it as being in any way a parallel perhaps to something like (The Who’s) Tommy or even having the slightly mysterious (Pink Floyd) Dark Side of the Moonkind of aura about it. This was just whimsical light-hearted fun, although it had its serious moments embedded in there too. But no, never a rock opera, just a bit of rambling surreal British humor. RB: You told me previously that Thick as a Brick was conceived as a direct response to many critic’s assertions that Aqualung was a concept album, something that you have consistently denied ever since. And that the original Jethro Tull #1 seller Thick as a Brick was this clever elaborate send-up of a concept album. How long did it take you to realize that not everyone got the joke?
IA: Well, I thought when I wrote the album prior to its release that it would be divided down the middle between those that got the joke immediately, even just reading the album cover, they would know that there was a joke there. And that other people wouldn’t immediately get it but most of them would, but not until after they parted with their money and actually bought the thing. I’m just kidding. But the reality was I suppose in some countries they never did get the joke, maybe not even to this day. But I think it was immediately apparent in the U.K., maybe in Australia, maybe in one or two other places, it took a little longer maybe in the USA for some people to realize that it was a parody, it was a spoof and in some places as I suggested like Japan, or in countries that are notorious for a different culture, perhaps the inability to see humor in the same way as most of the rest of us. But I don’t want to single out the Japanese, let me toss in the Germans, the Swiss and the Austrians as well ! But it maybe just wasn’t in their culture to see that kind of a humor at face value, it took ‘em awhile to figure it out. If indeed they figured it out at all. And it was interesting doing the multi-lingual translations of the lyrics of the 2012 Jethro Tull album Thick as a Brick 2, because I was working with Germans, Spanish, Italians, Russians, Czech, so in a way trying to explain some of the elements of my often wordy and sometimes obscure lyrics…
RB: Yeah, good luck with that! IA: … I did encounter some deep levels of conflict with culture clash. Ya know in the sense that it didn’t register, they didn’t have a word, or words to describe a certain thing that we understand, or might easily translate into Italian or Spanish, but the Germans didn’t have a word for it. So yeah, it was kind of interesting, I think because I deal in words, that’s a big part of what I do, I’m quite fascinated in the semantic confusion that can so easily result and when you think about that , plays out in world politics. How does ( former German Chancellor) Angela Merkel, who doesn’t speak a huge amount of English, how does she get the nuances of a conversation with the UK Prime Minister or U.S. President? I mean, there are always a danger that these little elements of language can confuse with even literal translations working, ya know. I’m not suggesting we’re facing World War III, but it’s easy to see how people could get their knickers in a twist.” –Redbeard
If like me you hold Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything? in high esteem, you will never be able to listen to songs such as “Cold Morning Light” in the same way ever again after hearing Todd’s insights in this in-depth conversation. “My biggest songwriting influence up until that time was Laura Nyro, who was also a heavily R&B-influenced artist. So it was all connected to R&B in one way or another.”
Todd Rundgren’s third solo album Something/Anything, released March 1972, is an impressively diverse collection of styles, incorporating a dazzling array of pop music influences in a cascade of twenty-four songs all written by Todd, including tasty power pop (“Hello It’s Me”,”I Saw the Light”,”Couldn’t I Just Tell You” ), sweet soul ballads (“It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference”), and flat-out guitar god showcases (“Black Mariah” ). And 75% of the musical arrangements are all played and sung by Todd Rundgren who, at the time of Something/Anything‘s release in 1972, was a ripe old 23 years of age. Even before the February 1972 release of Rundgren’s third solo album Something/Anything, Todd was being hailed by some rock critics as a wunderkind, that rare combination of left-brain creative and right-brain analytical talents, able to write charming pop lyrics, blessed with an innate ability to play practically any musical instrument, while adept at understanding and utilizing the technical intricacies of the modern recording studio. Something/Anything would have been a monumental achievement under any circumstances, yet Rundgren admits in this classic rock interview to neither reading nor writing music!
With every development in the technical evolution of music recording, what Todd Rundgren did and the way that he did it entirely on his own, some of it not even in a professional recording studio’s facilities or assisted by technical staff, only serves to continue to elevate this collection. And now prior to his long-deserving induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Todd joins me In The Studio for this #29 charting album which Rolling Stone magazine counts as #173 on its list of the Top 500 Albums of All Time. – Redbeard
How did Pink Floyd devolve from the sublime introspection of Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 to the madness and despair of The Wall six years later? It’s a real zoo In the Studio with Pink Floyd Animals wranglers David Gilmour, Nick Mason, & former member and big-concept composer Roger Waters. Gilmour, Mason, and Waters explore the dark, ominous, yet vitally important transitional musical missing link, January 1977’s Animals, an album that was highly anticipated, here in my classic rock interviews. After all, the two Pink Floyd predecessors, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, were on their way to selling forty million copies, collectively, just in the U.S.
The original sound of the Animalsdisc was as dark and murky as Roger Waters’ vision of humanity, and I must confess that the combination of only three lengthy main songs,”Dogs”, “Pigs”, and “Sheep”, with that thick bass-heavy sonic presentation of the original, kept Animalsoff of much of American rock radio then. With the close-mic’ing technique of the musical instruments so popular then, the resultant sound of Animalscan be startling today with the latest 21st century remastering, like finding a pristine black pearl perfectly preserved in the muddy bottom of the stream of time.
With hindsight, it is clear that Pink Floyd’s Animals and its subsequent tour were the linchpin between the sublime Dark Side…, the melancholy Wish You Were Here, and the creeping numbing isolation of The Wall brought on by superstar success. Animals, though, was cynical, agitated, downright venal in places, Roger Waters’ vented emotions frozen in time then without the luxury of The Wall‘s explorations of Waters’ troubled childhood past for context, nor his future for resolution. Listening to Animals upon its release was the musical equivalent of suddenly coming upon a car crash and being aware immediately that serious trauma had occurred. The listener desperately wants to call for help, but who are we to notify? –Redbeard
In January 1967 when Doors drummer John Densmore’s snare cracked like a rifle shot before Ray Manzarek’s nimble fingers made their intricate run of baroque-sounding notes on that reedy Farfisa organ, all on the introduction to jazz/flamenco guitarist Robbie Krieger’s composition “Light My Fire”, it boldly announced a unique approach to rock and roll that, more than half a century later, still really has no peer. And all of that before Jim Morrison stepped up to the microphone to introduce one of the greatest voices (and hedonistic personalities) in rock history. Not unlike Creedence Clearwater Revival from the same period, no other American bands put out more albums in less time, which were more influential in the last 50+ years. And like CCR, no one has sounded like The Doors ever since. Here is Doors co-founder the late Ray Manzarek with me In the Studio to mark The Doors anniversary.
Ray Manzarek’s memory for detail was positively cinematic. “In 1966 The London Fog was this pathetic little bar on the Sunset Strip where The Doors played five or six doors down from the Whiskey a Go Go. On the London Fog marquee out front it said,’ The Doors band from Venice Beach’ with ‘Go Go Dancer the Lovely Rhonda Lane’ .” Apparently either the dancer had a great agent or she was sleeping with London Fog bar owner Jesse James. You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
When he spearheaded the original VHS release of The Doors Live at the Hollyood Bowl in 1987, the late Ray Manzarek did our first interview together in Dallas at Q102prior to a premiere event. Afterwards Manzarek graciously invited me to his hotel suite where we continued our conversation in private. He was such a good storyteller that when we launched the In the Studio weekly national radio series about fifteen months later, I wanted Ray to give the show instant credibility with another classic rock interview about The Doors‘ 1967 debut album. So it was arranged for me to visit Manzarek’s tile-roofed stucco Beverly Hills home just a few blocks off Rodeo Drive.
I arrived about fifteen minutes late, only to be informed by his quiet-spoken wife Dorothy that when I had not shown up on time that Ray had second-guessed his instructions and headed to longtime biographer/ publicist Danny Sugerman’s place hoping to find me there. Returning home clearly annoyed, Ray accepted my sincere apology and appeared to shrug it off, ending up sitting for hours at his breakfast table next to a lovely oriental garden as the Doors co-founder regaled me in his rich baritone with rock campfire stories of Jim Morrison, Robbie Krieger, and John Densmore, complete with heroes, villains, Greek gods, and yes, ghosts.
The top 10 list of rock game-changing debut albums is short but breathtaking. Among them: Are You Experienced?, Led Zeppelin 1, Music from Big Pink, Ramones, Please Please Me, Never Mind the Bollocks. But ever since John Densmore’s opening snare drum shot through the ether to my little transistor radio tuned to some distant big city Top 40 station, The Doors‘ January 1967 debut took up permanent residence in any such aggregate collection purporting to have transfigured rock’n’roll. Along with Densmotre, guitarist Robbie Krieger, keyboard/bass pedal player Ray Manzarek , and vocally gifted wildchild Jim Morrison did more to influence the next 55 years of popular music with less (six studio albums in five years) than just about any band in rock history. With the passing of Ray Manzarek at age 74, we swing open the door of time In the Studio for this classic rock interview. Essential stuff. –Redbeard
It was just before Christmas 1989, and after almost being permanently paralyzed and unable ever to walk again only seven years earlier, rock’s Mr. No Control and Where’s the Party, Eddie Money, showed up for our In the Studio interview…with a cooing little baby girl. “Now I’m buying a house out in suburbia,” Eddie Money revealed. “I’m forty years old and I figured it’s time for me to start having some kids, ya know?…I went from a quarter ounce (of cocaine) a day to having babies!” Eddie chuckled.
Over the years you may have forgotten just how deep a well of great songs Eddie Money’s 1986 collection Can’t Hold Back is, and how popular the subsequent response to it was. But the tragi-comic back story that it was even made at all, or that Eddie lived to enjoy its success, sounds like the over-active imagination of a pulp fiction writer. But in this In the Studio archive classic rock interview, the late Eddie Money ‘fesses up warts and all while sharing “Take Me Home Tonight”, “I Wanna Go Back”, “Endless Nights”, “One Chance”, and the blistering rocker “We Should Be Sleeping”. Eddie Money’s sojourn with his most popular album Can’t Hold Back took him from the top of the charts in 1986 with “Take Me Home Tonight” back to the hospital where his drug overdose six years earlier had paralyzed his leg. “The first time I heard ‘Take Me Home Tonight’ on the radio, I was doing the dishes in rehab,” Eddie tells us incredulously. “I said to myself, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ” (Eddie Money with Ronnie Spector)
Can’t Hold Back yielded two more hits, “I Wanna Go Back” peaking at #14 and “Endless Nights” at #21, in addition to “Take Me Home Tonight” reaching #4, all the while the real-life Edward Mahoney torpedoed his marriage, his health, and almost cost him his singing career as well as his freedom. Eddie Money joined me here In the Studio for this often funny, yet at times harrowing, classic rock interview. We received word in September 2019 that Eddie Money passed away with stage four esophageal cancer. May God give him a real one-way ticket to heavenly Paradise that never expires. –Redbeard
Without fanfare, and without more than Midwest regional radio airplay, to be frank, the self-titled Ted Nugent album came out in September 1975 and proceeded to sell over a million copies, purely on the strength of his gonzo live concerts. This was a time when Nugent was not a threat to anyone unless you were a deer or maybe a cape buffalo. Then Ted Nugent’s Free for All changed the national radio reception and over-amped its way to #24 on the Billboard album chart in 1976, becoming his second consecutive multi-platinum seller. And barely a year later, Nugent would take Cat Scratch Fever‘s instant success and transform it through the remainder of 1977 into the top-grossing rock concert act that year. But it hadn’t always been that way for Ted Nugent. Far from it.
“Stranglehold” would get tons of listener requests, and some of us rock radio night deejays would risk getting called on the carpet by station management by playing it, but I swear Nugent remembered every one of us when his star rose soon after. “Dog Eat Dog” certainly has its inspiration in the Detroit regional music scene which Ted found after moving from Chicago circa 1968-72, and we reminisced about him playing the tiny Findlay (Ohio) College gym with the Amboy Dukes in Fall 1971 to an audience of about 100. Or the following late Summer 1972, playing in a cornfield outside North Baltimore Ohio, where someone in that crowd had tossed a Big Boy Ohio tomato at Ted’s head during a guitar solo. Even though blinded by the glaring stage lights, Nugent miraculously caught the incoming produce grenade one-handed, while never missing a note on the guitar’s neck with his left. When the song ended, Ted stopped the show, calling out the cowardly perpetrator in the inky blackness of the crowd, while holding the tomato in his fist and shouting,”Is this what you wanted to see?” With that, Nugent suddenly smashed the softball-sized tomato on his face, then launched into a blistering song while the audience absolutely erupted!
Back then Tyrannosaurus Ted was an interviewer’s dream: colorful, quotable, always “on”, and hilariously entertaining as you clearly will hear in my classic rock interview covering “Hey Baby”,”Stranglehold”,”Free for All”,”Dog Eat Dog”,”Cat Scratch Fever”, and “Workin’ Hard, Playin’ Hard”.
There is no denying that in the past, Ted’s Motor City motormouth has gotten his rabbit rump in hot water with the Secret Service, and his celebrity was unable to overcome either a lapse in good judgment or an inability to count to “two” while black bear hunting in Alaska in 2009 (the $10,000 fine he paid was probably only half of what it cost him in losing a U.S. Army gig at Ft. Knox at the time). But love him or loathe him, there is no denying that it’s truly remarkable…even admirable…that after more than fifty years, Ted Nugent is not only “workin’ hard and playin’ hard”, but working at all.
In the Seventies with the triple shot of Ted Nugent, Free for All , and Cat Scratch Fever fired off in rapid succession, Ted Nugent was FUN because he was outrageous but harmless, just like Alice Cooper. It was when their respective stage acts broke through that invisible third plane barrier at the lip of the stage and entered real daily life that it became an issue for both. It almost destroyed Cooper’s health; it only practically derailed Nugent’s music career. – Redbeard
The story behind this free concert performance by Van Halen of “Poundcake” in the streets of downtown Dallas in December 1991 gets filed under Urban Legends that are actually true. That’s me introducing Van Halen from the stage set up in an intersection packed with an estimated 50,000 very lucky Q102 listeners (Note: Sammy Hagar f-bomb at very end).
We are all familiar with modern urban myths and notorious conspiracy theories, compounded to a ridiculous degree over the last twenty years by the internet, including President Kennedy’s assassination ( “Castro did it”, “the Mob did it”,”Hillary Clinton did it”); the American lunar landing (“faked on tv in the Arizona desert”); Saddam Hussein, Dick Cheney, and weapons of mass destruction; Big Foot (” Hillary in a gorilla suit” ); the “birther” fixation by one particularly high profile but, as we’ve recently come to find, low credibility source; and my new fave: that COVID-19 is actually the lovechild spawn between Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton! But the biggest urban legend in Dallas/ Ft. Worth rock history over the last thirty years is that Van Halen once blocked off downtown Dallas city streets at 4 pm on a sunny December weekday afternoon in 1991 and played a free concert. ( Above Sammy Hagar with Van Halen headling the 1986 Texxas Jam in the Dallas Cotton Bowl)
The story’s beginning actually pre-dates Sammy Hagar joining as Van Halen’s lead singer in 1985. The Red Rocker was a star in Texas bright enough to sell out Reunion Arena there back-to-back nights as a headliner in1984, but a particularly potent pollen season gave him partial laryngitis and Hagar apologized several times during both nights. Two years later and now lead singer with America’s premiere hard rock band Van Halen, Hagar returned with them this time to headline the legendary Texxas Jam at the massive Cotton Bowl, and again the notorious North Texas climate and astronomical pollen count conspired to wreak havoc with Hagar’s platinum tonsils. And although few if any in the teeming crowd of 70,000 were disappointed, Sammy did make mention several times between songs that he was sorry for not being in his best voice that day. But when Van Halen rolled back into the Dallas Cotton Bowl for their own rock’n’roll circus they branded as the “Monsters of Rock” July 3, 1988 , the third time was NOT the charm for Sammy Hagar. “The Monsters tour wore me down,” Hagar admitted to me. The Dallas performance was practically a repeat of the laryngitis nightmare that Sammy had experienced on his own there in 1984, only now he felt that he was committing the Unpardonable Sin: letting down his band AND letting down their fans.
He just had to do something to make it right. So between songs from the stage, Sammy Hagar promised everyone in the audience a free Van Halen concert. The loud gasp and then blood-curdling shriek of “Nooooooo!” heard from backstage was the cry of Van Halen manager, the late Ed Leffler. But it was too late. The crowd of 55,000 heard him promise it, the local reporters heard it, and we at Q102 broadcasting live from the concert had just aired it to all of North Texas as well. Ooops.
Now it did take three and a half years of speculation which, as you can reasonably imagine, ran the gamut from Sammy Hagar insisting in subsequent interviews with reporters that he was dead serious and considered it a promise, to Van Halen’s manager and Hagar’s longtime mentor Ed Leffler wanting to strangle him because the logistics were impossible. Where? When? How do you verify who gets in? And who is going to pay the minimum $100,000 costs just to stage such a thing? With every passing year, the inquiries to radio station Q102, from fans who were at the July 1988 concert and heard Hagar make the promise, grew fewer and fewer, as did the stories by writer Robert Wilonsky in the Dallas Observer weekly. But very quietly, between Thanksgiving and the first full week of the holiday shopping season, a public permit was granted for an event just a platinum card’s toss away from the festive Neiman Marcus store display window. My radio station Q102 had sponsored several Summer seasons of successful free big-name outdoor concerts there in the West End entertainment district, so the permit application didn’t necessarily raise any red flags on the location or the necessity to block off city thoroughfares for a few hours to allow a crowd to fill the street at an intersection. Only the name of the performing act was unfamiliar to the city official, and it wasn’t because he or she was not hip to popular music.
The name on the permit was fudged. The “Christmas band” didn’t exist. But as you can clearly hear, the identity of the band that showed up December 4, 1991 at 4 pm in downtown Dallas and played a complete concert…for FREE..was unmistakably Van Halen! ( Warning: “f-bomb” at very end ) – Redbeard
Men at Work’s first US release may have been titled Busines As Usual, but the way it re-wrote the record books on sales was anything but. When The Monkees lead singer Davey Jones passed away, I was reminded that their 1966 introductory album held the record for most weeks at #1 by a debut in the U.S. until 1982. That was when this unknown group from the Melbourne Australia pub scene called Men At Work managed to occupy the peak slot in America for 15 weeks with their Business As Usual! The songs “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Down Under” followed the Business As Usual debut album from Men At Work to #1 sales for all three in the U.S., something never before done by a rookie band, not even the Beatles. And the phenomenon repeated worldwide. Now exactly how did that happen?
The Men At Work numbers are staggering: two #1 singles; an unprecedented 15 weeks at #1 for their first album; the winners of the “Best New Artist” Grammy award in early 1983; and total international sales of over 15 million copies of Business As Usual, placing Men At Work on the same all-time debut album list with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Crosby Stills Nash, Chicago, Boston, and Guns’n’Roses.
It also bears noting that a significant amount of this Men at Work phenomenon is directly attributable to Americans’ fascination then with the new cultural entrant MTV, and the upstart’s paucity of videos to play from North American acts. It forced MTV to repeatedly play UK, Irish, and Australian bands simply because those regions had been making music videos for almost twenty years then.
But Men At Work have the dubious distinction of occupying the “one and done” list of top-selling debuts alongside Hootie and the Blowfish and Alannis Morissette, the rock equivalent to what deep-sea divers call “the bends” from coming up too fast. Men At Work’s lead singer/songwriter Colin Hay ‘fesses up here in my classic rock interview.
After this interview program was recorded, sadly Men At Work sax/flautist Greg Ham was found dead in his Melbourne home in April 2012. Our sincere condolences to his bandmates, friends, & family. –Redbeard
* The original Australian release of Business as Usual; the US would not get the album until June 1982.
Time flies when you’re the biggest band in the world, and that was certainly the case when Achtung Baby was unleashed by U2 in Fall 1991. No less than Elvis Costello called U2, reverently, “The Last Rock Stars”. I have all four members of U2, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen jr here In the Studio to share true confessions from behind the former Iron Curtain of East Berlin over thirty-five years ago with memories of making one of the biggest albums of the Nineties. Achtung Baby hit #1 sales in the US and subsequently was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine writers at #62 on their Top 500 Albums of All Time.
In the U2 Academy Award-winning From the Sky Down directed by documentary film maker Davis Guggenheim ( An Inconvenient Truth, my favorite It Might Get Loud ), you saw confirmed what U2 drummer Larry Mullen jr blurted out in my In The Studio classic rock interview: that the Dublin-based quartet nearly broke up in the Berlin recording studio after reconvening following theirRattle and Humfirst flirtation with Hollywood.Bono, The Edge, and Adam Clayton join Larry to present “Mysterious Ways”,”Even Better Than the Real Thing”,”Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”, the powerful “Until the End of the World” , and the bonus studio song from the Achtung Baby sessions called “Blow Your House Down”. – Redbeard
Listening over half a century later to the goosebump-inducing remastered version, there is no indication whatsoever that Deep Purple’s Machine Head album was made amidst a virtual minefield of misfortune. Missteps lurked seemingly in every direction, any one of which had the potential to blow the effort sky high. And judging by this March 1972 album’s iconic place in hard rock history, these hardships merely served to steel Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan, wayward guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, bass player Roger Glover, under-rated drummer Ian Paice, and the late esteemed organist Jon Lord, against adversity on all sides.
Nevertheless, the songs “Highway Star”,”Maybe I’m a Leo”,”Lazy”,”Space Truckin’ “, and the timeless but true “Smoke on the Water” recorded by Deep Purple in a most unconventional way erected Machine Head as one of the pillars of hard rock to this day. The absolute essence of timeless rock music is contained in the music of Deep Purple’s Machine Head . We already knew it when we asked my guests Ian Gillan and Roger Glover to share their recollections in this classic rock interview about making this album which went to #1 sales in the UK a week after release fifty years ago, but no one outside of Deep Purple’s inner circle knew the unbelievable back story against which this entire project hinged until then. –Redbeard 
