I'll just come right out and say that if you only own one Deep Purple album in your entire life, make it this one. While diehard fans will pick apart the album when comparing it to others, making one doubt if this is really their best work, it is indisputably their most important, love it or hate it.
Machine Head is sort of an calm island in a sea of calamity that is the history of Deep Purple prior to 1976. After flipping the script and coming into prominence in Europe with Deep Purple In Rock (1970), the band seemed a little rudderless on 1971's Fireball. Just to compound problems, illness and the stress of ceaseless touring nearly wrecked the band. Just when it seemed like things couldn't get any crappier, at one of their shows in Montreux the venue burned down thanks to "some stupid with a flare gun" during Frank Zappa's performance, also forcing them to drastically change how they were going to record their next album.
Somehow, fortune smiled on the band or the stars aligned and the band ended up recording their most famous album ever, though they didn't know it at the time. The whole recording process was remarkably smooth, with Ian Gillan coloring within the lines, Ritchie Blackmore playing well with the others, and the others playing more aggressively, especially Jon Lord, who by this time had abandoned the whirring Leslie speakers and straight up distorted the Hammond organ with a relentless buzzing. About half the songs are riff-centric: "Maybe I'm a Leo", "Never Before", "Smoke on the Water", and "Space Trucking", something bands like Led Zeppelin were using to great success, but Purple had sort of an on/off relationship with. The other three were more classic Purple solo-intensive numbers: "Highway Star", "Pictures of Home", and "Lazy". At least one of the songs had already been road tested ("Highway Star" - with a number of documented pre-album performances). "Never Before" was written to be the single, being the shortest of the seven and jollier in tone (lyrics aside) than the rest. "Smoke on the Water", essentially the story of how the album was made, was considered a throwaway track. Finally, and unusually, the slow song, "When a Blind Man Cries" was relegated to the B-side of a single, yet many years later would end up being a staple of the Deep Purple live show (and so well-respected it would be covered by Metallica on a recent tribute album).
You don't need me to tell you that things obviously didn't turn out as expected. The plans for the "Never Before" single failed so miserably I don't think I've even heard in on the Deep Tracks station on satellite radio. Meanwhile, "Smoke on the Water" has become so well-known (thanks in part to a complete misinterpretation of the song leading people to think it was about drugs) that it is routinely banned from being played in Guitar Centers across the nation. While it is fairly common for artists to disparage their most popular songs, Deep Purple has never removed it from their shows, even when the lineup bore virtually no resemblance to the original performers (check out a 1976 performance with Tommy Bolin, Glenn Hughes, and David Coverdale to see what I mean). Not only that, but Ian Gillan almost always has whatever band he's a part of make the song part of their live act. Therefore there are numerous versions of the song by pretty much every Ian Gillan solo band as well as Black Sabbath.
The version of the album I have is the 25th anniversary two-disc set that restores "When a Blind Man Cries" to the album as the eighth track. Additionally, there are two quad-mixes of "Maybe I'm a Leo" and "Lazy" which make Gillan sound like a four-man vocal unit and Blackmore like an all-guitar mini-orchestra. The second disc is a complete remix of the album (with "When a Blind Man Cries" included) that lets each track run past the fade-out. Those seeking bonus tracks will be let down, but the liner notes say that thanks to the sheer fame of the album virtually all scraps of rehearsal material have vanished into the black market. Oh well.
The band turmoil would promptly resume following this album (see Who Do We Think We Are for the continuing story). However, to quote the most notorious Deep Purple song of all time, "No matter what we get out of this, I know we'll never forget."
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