“Highway Star” by Deep Purple

"Highway Star" kicks the door open on Deep Purple's Machine Head in 1972, the fastest thing on the record and the one with the most gas in the tank. It was born on a tour bus headed for Portsmouth in 1971, when a reporter asked how the band wrote songs: Ritchie Blackmore picked up an acoustic and hammered one note over and over, Ian Gillan made up words on the spot, and they had it polished enough to play that very night.

It stayed a stage opener long before it was pressed on vinyl. On the album it's a flat-out drag race, Ian Paice and Roger Glover pushing the pedal down while Blackmore and Jon Lord's Hammond organ trade long, classically minded solos that turn the whole thing into a duel. The band produced it themselves, and Martin Birch engineered.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.