"Under my charter, managing the catalogue from 1968 to '76, I'm always looking for ways to reinvigorate certain albums. What was the genesis of the idea for Re-Machined? Interview: Executive Producer Drew Thompson Deep Purple knew that instinctively, and it's something we tried to capture with our version of Highway Star." "As the years go by, I realize how unique a style rock music is and how delicate you have to be with it sometimes otherwise, you turn it into pop music or progressive rock or something else. But it stays rock, which is very special. They afford me a lot of space to do some crazy stuff. The pulse and the rhythm those guys put down, it's always fun, it's always exciting to try to fly on top of that.
"They're a double freight train, just out of control. That's the one thing that any guitar player knows when they go to play the solo from the record - that there's two guitars there. Then I tried to faithfully reproduce Ritchie Blackmore's double-tracked solo. "For my solo, I couldn't re-create the keyboard part exactly, so I tried to establish the right vibe and get to the beginning and the end points of the arpeggios that Jon Lord was doing. There's just the right amount of classical influence, the right amount of blues, the right amount of irreverence, and those were all things I was trying to capture. They didn't take it into progressive-land - they held back. But Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore and Roger Glover and Ian Paice, they had a knack for going the perfect distance with musicianship and with harmony, melody and rhythm to create incredible music that rocked really hard.
Rock music is a funny thing: You can actually take it too far sometimes, and then it's not rock music anymore - it's something else, but it's not rock. "To some degree, I wanted to make sure that I honored the harmony, rhythm and melodies that Deep Purple created. So every time you go to play something like Highway Star, you're thinking, OK, this is the way that Ritchie did it, and how does it that work with how I'm doing it? There's the rub."ĭid all of that come back to you when you played the song with Chickenfoot? I already felt the pain and confusion of trying to replace Ritchie Blackmore, which is a difficult thing to have in your head - since the time when you were a kid, that guitar sound and approach is what you associate with Deep Purple. "Yeah, It's a funny thing, my relationship with Deep Purple. Now, you have some experience with the song - back in 1993, you performed with Deep Purple. At the time, there was no way to get us together in the studio, but then somebody remembered that we did the song live, so we had a look at the film and had Mike Fraser mix it, and it came out great." "Actually, we never gave it a lot of thought to the track until Dr Drew, as we like to call him, came to us with the idea of contributing. How did Chickenfoot come to be involved with Re-Machined? We do crazy things, and sometimes you just have to go with it." It's just the experience of how Chickenfoot does things sometimes. There's a great clip of it - I think for the second verse, Sammy is literally on his hands and knees reading the lyrics. So this is us doing the whole thing live in front of an audience. Usually what happens is, when somebody throws a song out there in rehearsal, we only do half of it. It was our first time playing it from top to bottom. So I had to kind of segue into it." Įven so, it's a ferocious take on the song. But as I was finishing the intro, Chad, in a most mischievous way, started playing Highway Star. At the beginning of the song, you hear me starting up Bad Motor Scooter, because that's what was on the setlist. But somebody printed them up and threw them on the stage. Funnily enough, I don't think Sammy wanted to do it he'd never really memorized the lyrics. "Then what happened was, we started our first tour with a show at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and we were threatening to play it. I remember having a Pog pedal and imitating Jon Lord's keyboard sound with it. One day we just started playing Highway Star. Everything we did in the early days involved us writing and recording, so to blow off steam, we'd play things by Humble Pie, the Stones and then Deep Purple. "It was pretty much when Mike, Chad and I were goofing around in the studio. How did Chickenfoot's live version of Highway Star come about?
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