1972 · Behind the Songs
A journalist’s question, a tour bus, and an opening track that never slows down.
“Highway Star” opens Machine Head (1972), and it starts the way the album means to go on: fast. But the song itself began even faster — written, by the band’s own account, on a tour bus in 1971 after a journalist asked Ritchie Blackmore how the band wrote its songs. Blackmore picked up a guitar and began improvising a riff; Ian Gillan, catching the spirit, started improvising lyrics about driving, speed and a car no one could catch. By the time the bus reached the gig, the skeleton of “Highway Star” existed.
The band refined it in the studio during the Machine Head sessions in Montreux. What emerged was a perfect opener: Roger Glover’s galloping bass, Ian Paice’s relentless drive, and a lyric that is pure automobile fantasy — a love letter to a machine that outruns everything. Gillan sings it with a grin, and the band plays it like a chase.
The track is also a showcase for the band’s classical ambitions. Blackmore’s guitar solo, with its precise, Bach-like runs, and Jon Lord’s swirling organ solo — traded back and forth at full tilt — turned “Highway Star” into a proving ground for instrumental virtuosity inside a hard rock song. It set a template for the speed-obsessed metal that would follow in the 1980s.
“Highway Star” was never a single, but it never needed to be. As the opening track of one of the decade’s biggest hard rock albums, it became a concert staple and Deep Purple’s traditional show-opener for years — the musical equivalent of a green light.
What to listen for: the momentum. Notice how the band never lets the tempo sag across six minutes, and how the two solos — guitar then organ — escalate rather than simply fill time. Listen for Glover’s bass, which is the song’s hidden engine, and for the moment the whole band locks into the final verse at full speed.