The Deep Purple song inspired by ‘Batman’
Of all the progenitors of heavy metal, there’s a good chance Deep Purple could outplay any of their contemporaries with their eyes closed. As much as Led Zeppelin might have had the heaviness of John Bonham and Black Sabbath had the riffs of Tony Iommi, Deep Purple’s influence from the world of jazz and classical music gave them the chance to improvise jam sessions on the fly during every show. For a band that technical, there was one rule that they were going for when making Machine Head: simplicity.
After becoming one of the bigger names in hard rock on In Rock and getting funkier on Fireball, the need to aim higher started to catch up with them with their new lineup of Ian Gillan and Roger Glover. Although the band may have had a songwriting team leading the charge, Ritchie Blackmore was still the riff master, making some of the most basic songs sound gigantic, like ‘Smoke on the Water’.
Once the band settled down to record using The Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, most of Blackmore’s lines were straightforward, like the verse part in ‘Pictures of Home’ where he stays on straight 12-bar blues lines underneath the main vocal melody. Although Blackmore got the chance to stretch out during the solo sections, one song was too simple for his standards.
Instead of taking inspiration from classical musicians like Bach, Blackmore remembered one of the shows that he was watching at the time, telling Classic Albums: “In those days, there was a show called ‘Batman’, and I thought that the theme song was so symmetrical. ‘Space Truckin” originally began as a finger exercise that I was using to play with my thumb.”
Much like the Adam West TV theme, the main riff of ‘Truckin” is focused on a descending chromatic figure, sounding like the listener is going down a sonic rollercoaster as they listen. Even when he had the building blocks for the song, Blackmore was still nervous to present it to Gillan because of how rudimentary it was.
After taking him aside during a record session, Gillan took to it immediately, even when Blackmore questioned it for being much too simple. Regardless of how easy it was to play, the main driver of the song came from Jon Lord, who fed his organ through a Marshall stack, leading many people to think that the song kicked off with a distorted guitar line instead of a piano.
Gillan’s lyrics were also more sarcastic than usual. Borrowing a page from the same theme of the album opener ‘Highway Star’, ‘Space Truckin” was a fictitious tale about Gillan working his way through the cosmos, which made the perfect analogy for a travelling musician going out on the road to see wherever the world will take him.
Though that simplicity was pivotal to the album’s success, it wasn’t meant to last very long, with Gillan and Glover leaving after one more album before bringing in Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale to replace them on the album Burn. Blackmore might have been able to play as many notes as possible in a single sitting, but the beauty behind ‘Space Truckin” is the amount of restraint he puts into his playing.
