Highway Star
| Highway Star | |
|---|---|
| Deep Purple | |
| publication | March 1972 |
| length | 6:09 |
| Genre (s) | Hard rock , heavy metal |
| Author (s) | Ritchie Blackmore , Ian Gillan , Roger Glover , Jon Lord , Ian Paice |
| Publisher (s) | EMI Group ( UK ), Warner Bros. Records ( US ) |
| album | Machine head |
Highway Star is a song by British hard rock band Deep Purple that was composed in 1971. It was used as the opening track for the 1972 album Machine Head and was also released as a single in Japan and the United States. Highway Star is one of the first and most important pioneers of heavy metal and speed metal .
background
According to Ritchie Blackmore, the song was composed on September 13, 1971 in a touring bus on the way to Portsmouth when a journalist present asked him how he arranged his songs. Then Blackmore played him a riff he had just improvised on his acoustic guitar , while Ian Gillan provided the song with vocals. After some refinements, the song was premiered the same evening in Portsmouth and presented in September on German television in the Beat-Club program. Even before its first release on the album Machine Head , the group began to open their concerts with this song and did so for the next two years. After that, Burn took over this role, but Highway Star remained firmly in the live repertoire of Deep Purple. At the reunification in 1984, Highway Star was used again as the opening track. The song has been played at the end of live performances since 1993, after being replaced as “concert opener” by Fireball . A very "impulsive-stormy" live version of this song was published on the live album Made in Japan .
A distinctive characteristic of Highway Star is the guitar solo played in the middle of the song by Ritchie Blackmore . This solo was listed at number 15 of the “100 Greatest Guitar Solos” by Guitar World magazine . Another characteristic is the organ solo by Jon Lords , whose chords are supposed to be reminiscent of a sequence by Johann Sebastian Bach . The song was listed on the 5th place of the Greatest Driving Song of All Time by the British car magazine Top Gear . Bassist Roger Glover himself certified that Highway Star was "the definitive Deep Purple song". Ultimate Classic Rock magazine listed Highway Star as # 2 in the Top 10 Deep Purple Songs .
structure
The song begins with a 35 second bass or guitar intro before the band plays the riff for the first time. After 55 seconds, Ian Gillan's vocals begin, after the first two verses Jon Lord begins his one-minute organ solo, after which Gillan sings the third verse. At the end of the third verse the guitar solo starts. Then the fourth and last stanza begins, which was originally a repetition of the first stanza. The piece ends after that, in some versions of the song there is a 15 second long outro.
During live performances, Gillan often improvised the text, as seen in the official music video.
Highway Star in popular culture
Because of its speed and subject matter, Highway Star became one of the most popular rock songs. It was used in various movies, TV shows or computer games, and metal and other styles of rock music from many bands from the genre of speed gecovert .
Soundtracks
- Films: Chicks , El Lobo - The Wolf, A Summer in Provence and Confusion - Summer of the Freaky
- TV Series: CSI Vegas , CSI: NY , My Name is Earl , The Simpsons , The Roaring Seventies , Ash vs. evil Dead
- Computer games: Rock & Roll Racing , Rock Band , Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony , Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned , Rock Revolution , Elite Beat Agents
Cover versions
- The Dead Daisies
- Night Ranger (cover of the guitar solo)
- Faith No More (a live version on the compilation album Who Cares a Lot? )
- Metal Church
- Buckcherry
- Type O Negative (on their albums NASCAR: Crank It Up and The Best of Type O Negative )
- Alter Bridge (live)
- Dream Theater (live, along with the rest of the Made in Japan album)
- Do As Infinity (live)
- Chickenfoot (live)
- Puhdys
- Point blank
- Stryper (on the album The Covering )
- Angelus Apatrida
- Gwar / Projekt X-Cops (Cover on the album You Have the Right to Remain Silent ...)
- Glenn Hughes
- Steve Vai
- Chad Smith
Miscellaneous
- In the 1990s the Ruhrpott cabaret artist Herbert Knebel built a version of Highway Star into his program.
- The band Stiff Little Fingers called themselves Highway Star in a previous incarnation .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ The Highway Star: Deep Purple Vinyl Singles Bar .
- ↑ Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, Paul D. Greene. "Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World," Duke University Press, p. 47
- ↑ Robb Reiner from the band Anvil.
- ↑ Google Book Search: Camion Blanc: Riff story du hard rock au heavy metal
- ↑ Roger Glover Interview on www.stevemorse.com.
- ↑ Jürgen Roth and Michael Sailer: Deep Purple, the story of a band . Verlagsgruppe Koch GmbH / Hannibal, 2005.
- ↑ 100 Greatest Guitar Solos - Highway Star ( Memento of the original from April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Jürgen Roth and Michael Sailer: Deep Purple, the story of a band . Verlagsgruppe Koch GmbH / Hannibal, 2005. p. 172.
- ↑ Ultimate Classic Rock, Top 10 Deep Purple Songs
- ↑ Cranna, Ian (1979) "Rough Charm", Smash Hits, EMAP National Publications Ltd, October 4-17, 1979, pp.6-7
