Deep Purple - "Flight of the Rat"
1970
Deep Purple in Rock was the debut of the fabled Mark II edition of the band. As Billy Altman wrote in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (original red edition, 1979): “(Ritchie) Blackmore began to pull feverish and original solos out of nowhere, as he and (keyboardist Jon) Lord began to serve as counterpoints to each other.” The best case of this on In Rock is “The Flight of the Rat.” The album also has one of the great seventies album covers. In Chuck Eddy’s excellent tome Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, he writes that Deep Purple disguising themselves as Mount Rushmore on the cover of In Rock was “a very Spinal Tap thing to do.” Thinking of this made me note other Spinal Tap-ish things that have occurred in real life. Soon I will be listing others here and maybe I’ll actually write something instead of quoting others. To get the writing juices flowing, I can look to the lyrics that came with Deep Purple’s Machine Head (Mark II's masterpiece), they’re hanging in my office.