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MH remix press compendium
Machine Head remix has certainly brought a wave of publicity to the band. We have collected them here instead of a multitude of individual posts.
Roger Glover spoke to the Polish radio station Eska Rock:
The Telegraph has a feature on the album based upon interviews with Gillan and Paice (caveat: it may or may not be behind a paywall depending on how the stars align over your head). Below are a few selected quotes from involved parties.
IG on touring routine in England back in the day:
We’d race back down the M1 as fast as we could. We’d all converge on the Speakeasy, which was the focal point for people who didn’t have far to go afterwards. You had to live in the London area so you could get home… But if you were in there with Keith Moon and a few others, and you were getting stuck in with the drinking and all the other pranks that went on, you could stay ’til they tipped you out at maybe five o’clock in the morning.
I didn’t smoke my first joint until I was 38 years old. We were a drinking band. Drinking and smoking. We grew up in pubs… we weren’t a drug band at all.
IP:
The management system we had in place at that time, every day we [played live] was a day they earned money. If we didn’t work, they didn’t earn money. So it was in their interest to keep us on the road. And if you look back, that short-termism was a big mistake. For them as well, because the band sort of imploded simply because of the pressure of work. Any decent management would have said, ‘Take [some time] off. Go and sit in the sun and relax’. But that never happened.
The time element was beneficial [to the recording process]. You had to apply yourself very, very diligently to make sure you did turn up for work every day in a fit state to do your job properly. For some musicians, who might have stayed in the bar a little too late at night, that can be an iffy thing. Because, to tell you the truth, there was nothing else to do.
A contemporary quote from Ritchie Blackmore, attributed to an unpublished 1973 interview:
Everybody’s out to kill everybody else in this band. Everybody thinks for himself. Every man for himself. We all go our separate ways… Nearly every American tour I leave. I was gone for about a month once. That was during a tour. We’ve all left it now and again. We’re about equal. Some of [us will] go on, play, nothing happens. Then we’ll have a big argument and a big scene. We have scenes all the time. We’re sadists, masochists at heart. That’s what keeps us going. We’re always having punch-ups. We usually beat up the manager about once a week.
IG retorts:
It’s not far from the truth. Apart from the fistfights. That was an exaggeration. There weren’t any fistfights.
[I] thought Ritchie was unbelievable. I thought he was amazing, and we adored each other in a manly sense… [he] was my roommate. We shared a lot of pranks together. We had a lot of good times together. We know a lot of each other’s personal secrets.
He hasn’t got anything electronic in his house, like a phone or a laptop or anything like that. I send emails… and I get replies saying ‘Ritchie thanks you’. It’s all third party.
Try your luck reading the whole thing in The Telegraph. Hint: turn off JavaScript in your browser if you hit the paywall.
Ian Gillan also spoke to the Super Deluxe Edition. It’s a long(ish) and insightful interview.
Have you been closely involved with the reissue and the remastering?
No – alongside it, we’ve been making a new Deep Purple record, so we were fairly remote. I think that’s a good thing because when we heard the first Dweezil Zappa mix, Roger and I were in Portugal at my studio – we were working on something else – and we went ‘What?’ And then we thought, ‘Hold on a moment – don’t compare it with the original…’
It is what it is, and we’ve got to listen to it for what it is and not compare it – it’s all different. I’ve seen the [new] video for ‘Smoke On The Water’, and it’s pretty good, so I’m looking at it from a fan’s point of view, rather than being in the band.
Do you like what it’s now possible to achieve with the latest studio technology, or do you not like messing with the past?
I don’t think it’s good or bad – you’ve got to take it for what it is. You can’t live in the past. Who’d have ever thought that Jane Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare would’ve had been made into movies one day? I think it’s fair game, and it’s exciting, and the material’s good enough to justify it – it’s survived all these years. It’s quite a nice feeling – I love it.
What do you think the new mix has brought to the songs?
Probably a fresh approach – technology has changed, the thinking is different now and so is the balancing of instruments. It’s a whole different process – around about 1982, when digital came in, it was absolutely shocking. I can tell you that when I heard Machine Head on CD for the first time, I nearly wept – it was so awful and so flat.
At that time, everyone was saying that vinyl sounded 10 times better than digital, and, of course, they were right, but the reason for that was because the engineers hadn’t caught up with the technology – they hadn’t trained themselves how to work it and make it sound good. It’s a completely different story today.
Continue reading in Super Deluxe Edition.
Analog Planet has a review of the remix, concentrating on the vinyl part, and sprinkled with quotes from Dweezil Zappa:
When I was recently contacted out of the blue and given the opportunity to take a ‘deep dive’ into the raw tracks recorded for Machine Head, I couldn’t have been more excited. The Machine Head multitrack recordings, in all of their 16-track, analog glory, found their way into my studio with the purpose of creating new mixes in stereo and Atmos. I was suddenly immersed in a rock and roll archeological dig of epic proportions, learning the secrets of the raw sounds on each track. For those of you who don’t know, the songs were recorded live with very few extra overdubs. A perfect example of this is ‘Space Truckin’.’ There’s a single guitar track and a single keyboard track. The huge sound of that song was the band itself, playing together in the room. Killer stuff!
Read more in Analog Planet.
The Tinnitist celebrates the reissue with an expanded version of their 2011 interview with Ian Paice. Which, in the grand scheme of things, had nothing to do with Machine Head, but is interesting for other historical reasons. It sounds quite prophetic at times — one can see how the things clicked together once they’ve met Bob Ezrin.
Speaking of pushing the envelope, is that the plan with the next album?
Every time you go into the studio, you try and have that possibility in mind. But it doesn’t always work. Really, it would just be nice to get a really strong album together with a really great sound. It sounds easy, but that’s really our downfall. We’re so egocentric — each of us — about our own sound that sometimes it can be negative in the end product. You really need a great sound guy to ignore all of our personal wants and just give us the best-sounding record we can get. Basically, we have to be outranked in the studio — even me. Because it’s quite simple: If you play straight up-and-down rock ’n’ roll, you can get an incredibly big sound. But all the little nuances that you play if you have a little bit of craft get lost, so you’re very protective about the bits that you play that you think people should hear. Whereas the producer will go, ‘That makes no difference to the guy listening to it.’ So you need that sort of cold, outsider point of view to say, “This is what’s needed; that really is unnecessary.” As the artist creating it, sometimes it’s very hard to disassociate yourself from what you did.
Read more in the Tinnitist.
Thanks to Blabbermouth, Georgius Novicianus, and Martin for the heads-up.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Yo,
This is a great post, lots of informed discussion & POV’s from everyone, & I’ve only read the shorts lol !
Peace !
April 3rd, 2024 at 10:52“Hint: turn off JavaScript in your browser if you hit the paywall.”
OMG 😮, Toto, I have a feeling we are not at The Highway Star anymore, we must be over in some hackers’ lair in the dark net … 😎
It actually worked. 🤩
“Constable, they forced me to do it, I swear I had no idea …”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L397TWLwrUU
****
That was a good article/interview by the way, danke schön.
Two observations on the basis of having listened to the Dweezil mix in the car (where it sounds great too):
– When A Blind Man Cries has never before (no pun intended) been restored to such aural quality. Great to hear it like that – it would have made the album even better. And it’s lovely to hear Ritchie channel his inner George Harrison during the solo. (Like many very good guitarists, Blackmore has always rated the Scouser’s feel and sense of melody.)
– Ritchie on the left channel, Jon on the right … I caught myself thinking, “Couldn’t they have done that properly for once after half a century, Jon was always on the left live with Ritchie in the band …”. And then I mused why Martin Birch did it like that in the first place and AFTER 49 YEARS AS A DP FAN IT FINALLY DAWNED ON ME: Ritchie on the left and Jon on the right was like the band heard itself on stage facing the audience!!! Of course they never saw themselves from the audience (unless they watched a film of their live gigs), standing on stage, facing the audience, Ritchie’s backline signal from the Marshall stack was to the left of Jon and for Ritchie Jon’s Hammond sound came from the right. They stereo mixed the albums like they heard themselves on stage (and not like the audience heard them)! 🤯
I know, to most of you this might seem to be a minor and blatantly obvious realization, yet for me it was a gigantic cognitive leap …
https://64.media.tumblr.com/e5ccd1f6e4f0ed51ca3ca9832e1ed973/tumblr_inline_pt21jtQZXX1tzhl5u_400.gifv
PS: I remain adamant. It happened. The moon landing I mean. Eat your hearts out, you deniers! (Watch Gregster argue against it …)
April 3rd, 2024 at 15:18Analog Planet writes:
“Perhaps the most important — and coolest, frankly — detail is that all surviving members of the so-called “Mark II” version of Deep Purple who recorded the album approved the final mixes.”
Wot?! Ritchie is supposed to have heard the Dweezil Remix and given it his blessing? 🤨 Probably Candice listened/whistled to it for him while she was chopping vegetables in the Long Island kitchen for Autumn’s and Rory’s favorite veggie lasagne. 😁 As we know, Ritchie’s judgment on past remixes of MH has not always been that magnanimous …
https://media2.giphy.com/media/FDQDfS4G8g1tCQtRrU/200.gif?cid=790b7611x8eap807nyfeeu6f574nj8m0vzg9i4j77bcu3g7q&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=200.gif&ct=g
“I’ll teach you to ever mess with my solos again, Glover!”
https://j.gifs.com/vZXeLq.gif
April 3rd, 2024 at 16:44Uwe @2:
> OMG 😮, Toto, I have a feeling we are not at The Highway Star anymore, we must be over in some hackers’ lair in the dark net … 😎
i don’t know in what dystopian society do you live, but in my heck of the woods it’s still not illegal to turn off the javascript 😉
> Ritchie on the left channel, Jon on the right
i seem to recall an interview with martin, where he said it was basically due to a screwup during MiJ mixing — channels got switched accidentally, and by the time it was discovered, it was already too late. like so many things in life, it didn’t have a very deep meaning behind it.
April 3rd, 2024 at 18:25Nick, I live of course under the prophecies and scriptures of the METAL GOD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMJF37BVGTA
Up here in space
I’m looking down on you
My lasers trace
Everything you do
You think you’ve private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
I’m watching all the time
I’m made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I’m elected, electric spy
I’m protected, electric eye
Always in focus
You can’t feel my stare
I zoom into you
But you don’t know I’m there
I take a pride in probing
All your secret moves
My tearless retina
Takes pictures that can prove
I’m made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I’m elected, electric spy
I’m protected, electric eye
Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
There’s nothing you can do about it
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows
I’m made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I’m elected, electric spy
I’m protected, electric eye
I’m elected, electric spy
I’m elected
Protected
Detective
Electric eye
**********************
Re left and right, I haven’t checked, but my hunch is that on In Rock, Fireball and WDWTWA Ritchie occupied the left channel too. As he did on MIJ, though they might have intended it differently for that album because they wanted to reflect the live experience viewed from the audience.
Simon Robinson’s 1993 Live In Japan 3 CD resurrection/remix then switched channels so Jon was on the left and Ritchie on the right. But he caught flak for that from fans who wanted the SOTW riff to start on the left speaker (as it always had), so the MIJ single CD remaster that followed retained Ritchie where he doesn’t stand on stage viewed from the audience: the left side.
The most recent 2014 Martin Pullan 4 CD remix of Live In Japan also has Ritchie on the right and Jon on the left, but due to some glitch not for the encores of all three nights (CD 4) which retain Blackers on the left. Which bugged Martin endlessly, but I guess we can all just barely survive it. 😎
April 3rd, 2024 at 22:30Yo,
qt.”Ritchie on the left channel, Jon on the right”…
All you have to do, is imagine yourself on-stage / in-studio with the boys, & all your troubles fade away…
Why be out in the audience when the opportunity to be on-stage is provided yo ?…
Peace !
April 3rd, 2024 at 23:56Aha, Judas Priest & Screaming for Vengeance. I own that cd believe it or not & Electric Eye is a damn fine rock song with rather good lyrics. I am not a Priest fan overall though. Some of those late 70’s into the 80’s songs are good here & there.
April 4th, 2024 at 08:02Like Iron Maiden I do think their best material is from the 1980’s. Now about that 15 cd Iron Maiden set Uwe, I do feel for your wife there indeed. Please as I have said before do NOT ruin her rather good hearing. She already doesn’t like Bonnet & Hughes & that is fine & I can relate to that indeed in certain aspects. Not that I think Bruce is a poor or irritating singer at all, but 15 albums played to death? Cheers.
Because I like to witness Ritchie’s disability at improvising from upfront, lieber Gregster! 😛
When I hear Mk II, I always imagine them in classic sequence: Jon far-left, Roger left, the two Ians in the middle, front and back, and Ritchie prowling stage right. Yet when I hear formations featuring Don, I always place him rightish and elevated on his keyboard pedestal.
It’s Pavlov’s dogs conditioning, tried and trusted over 50 years, and you’re telling me now I should beam myself up on stage?! 😂
https://www.troublefreepool.com/media/were-not-worthy-waynes-world-gif.186565/full
April 4th, 2024 at 12:24Re Iron Maiden: At this point, after having listened to six albums intensely from all of their eras (Di’Anno/Dickinson/Bayley, Burr/McBrain, Stratton/Smith/Gers) I have a mounting suspicion: It is the same album with the same compositions/ingredients with new song titles and – kind of – different album covers reissued every few years! 🤣
In most songs there is a whimsical slow part,
endless harmony guitar melodies (but nothing ever approaching Wishbone Ash ingenuity)
with very few pronounced or memorable riffs (so not like Judas Priest at all who excel in riffs),
the trademark Harris gallop or even faster,
sudden breakouts into PROGish parts seemingly lifted off early Jethro Tull albums
+ the various singers earnestly declaiming about subjects they (or Herr Harris) have apparently just picked off some Wikipedia page wishing to communicate their newfound knowledge to the denim-clad masses. Iron Maiden are community college educational, no wonder their front man is a former teacher! 😁
All the time underpinned by Harris’s overtly busy, jammy bass playing (with the high midrange pitched in his sound to make it constantly über-audible on the recordings) that according to Janick Gers’ perceptive observation has more of a rhythm guitar function/quality in Iron Maiden and is not really foundational OR THAT HEAVY if you ask me … Harris has also been playing the same little fills and embellishments for 40 years (employing the same scales), there is hardly any development in his playing.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e6/fc/57/e6fc5735b11f83a272b7c6cc2ee9ebee.gif
Between Burr and McBrain, I lean towards the former, not because he has better chops (he doesn’t), but because his frantic/punkish energy meshed closer with Harris’ bass playing, the two together sounding sort of “ant-hill-organic”, i.e. an overtly busy melee at first sight, but following some primal, instinctive pattern.
Oh, and I’m surprised how much keyboard playing there is on various albums, I wasn’t aware that for the better part of their career they’ve had an off-stage keyboarder doubling as Harris’ bass tech.
Does that sum up Iron Maiden sufficiently for you? 😎
You can’t really dislike them, they’re a people’s band and prepare their own musical stew over and over with commitment. But I’m slightly bemused at their huge success. It’s pleasant music to listen to, but very interchangeable. Heavy Metal Grateful Dead?
April 4th, 2024 at 14:05Hearing you big time regarding Iron Maiden. I only own the Live After Death double cd from the 1980’s & I purchased that in a pawn brokers for very little. It has the songs I like on it. After hearing them a zillion times Maiden sounded more melodic than the other metal bands to my ears. Those influences you mention helped there. I heard them a lot along with Judas Priest & a myriad of other metal bands at a friends house where I lived for a few months in the early 90’s. They are very repetitive in their arrangements to me also, Dream Theater anyone, another band that seems locked into it’s own void, same with Priest.. But a lot of those bands sound ‘limited’ to me after a while. I really enjoyed the Maiden concert in 2008, I went because they were featuring that 80’s era & had all that Egyptian stage set up, it was a feel good concert & they played well as they always do no doubt. A enjoyable night & I have never been surrounded by so much denim before, he he he. There was a good vibe there though & I made sure I wore a Sabbath t-shirt to gel into the mob. I remember it fondly. Fifteen albums though, are you sure that you can get through that unscathed Uwe? It sounds like some sort of torture ritual you have deliberately set upon yourself for some reason. I hope you get through to the other side ok. Cheers.
April 4th, 2024 at 20:12@8 said…
qt. “Because I like to witness Ritchie’s disability at improvising from upfront, lieber Gregster! 😛”
I completely understand lieber Uwe, I often turn-off when Space Truckin’ comes on, & Jon has finished his bit…
Anyhow people, the simple fix to this L-R, R-L dilemma, is to simply swap your speakers over, or place your headphones on the other way around…Silly simple ! Or yes, simply imagine being up-on-stage per-se with the band, playing IG’s conga’s or something.
Peace !
April 5th, 2024 at 00:29“Anyhow people, the simple fix to this L-R, R-L dilemma, is to simply swap your speakers over, or place your headphones on the other way around …”
That’s real good hardy Aussie advice, Gregster, danke! So all I need to do is overturn my Volvo V 90 and then while skidding on the roof across the road enjoy Ritchie on the right side, brilliant! 🙃🚗🙃
“I drank a bottle of tequila and I felt real good
I had the tape deck roaring
But on the twenty-fifth lap at the canal turn
I went off exploring
I knew I wouldn’t make it, the car just wouldn’t make it
I was turning, tires burning, the ground was in my sky
I was laughing, the bitch was trashed
April 5th, 2024 at 15:22And death was in my eye …”