Highway Star

The Zoo Crew has got something loud on the turntable, and the Zoo Freaks already know the riff before the needle settles. Highway Star, cut by Glenn Hughes, Steve Vai and Chad Smith, comes off Re-Machined: A Tribute to Deep Purple's Machine Head, the 2012 album Eagle Rock put out to mark forty years of Machine Head. It sits on the record as a bonus track, a studio take running a little over six minutes, with Australian keyboard man Lachlan Doley filling the organ chair. Chickenfoot, Chad's other band at the time, had already put a live Highway Star on the same album. This second pass is a different animal.

The original Deep Purple track was born on a tour bus in 1971, headed for a BBC Radio 1 session. A writer along for the ride asked how the band wrote songs, and Ritchie Blackmore, never one to miss a dare, started a riff on the spot. Ian Gillan scribbled lyrics about a fast car and a faster life, Jon Lord and Roger Glover and Ian Paice piled in, and by the time they hit the studio the thing was already a set opener. Blackmore later said he wrote that guitar solo out, note for note, about a week before the Montreux sessions in December 1971, one of the few times he ever did that. Lord built his own part around it. Onstage the whiskey made the tempo climb, and Lord used to get annoyed about having to chase those sixteenth notes faster every night. That is the ghost sitting under this cover.

The Hughes, Vai and Smith version was not part of the original plan. Glenn told Noisecreep that Black Country Communion had been lined up to cut Highway Star, but Joe Bonamassa was booked solid, so Glenn went in with Chad Smith and guitarist Luis Maldonado and cut Maybe I'm a Leo instead. Then, in July 2012, Jon Lord died. Glenn had just stepped off a plane when he heard. He said he was crushed, and he wanted to do something for Jon even though Chickenfoot already had a Highway Star in the can. He called Steve Vai, they booked a quick live session, and Doley handled the organ lines that had been Lord's. Glenn's line on Vai was pure rock-and-roll respect. He is the king of that genre, Glenn said. He just runs the controls of his spaceship. The engineer pushed Glenn to open his pipes, and he did. People around the project called it one of the greatest performances Glenn had put on tape. A Blabbermouth review later said Vai's solo dusted the Chickenfoot take, and that this closing track was the album's moment of climax.

Re-Machined was stacked. Santana and Jacoby Shaddix on one Smoke on the Water, the Flaming Lips on another, Metallica on When a Blind Man Cries, Iron Maiden on Space Truckin', Black Label Society, Kings of Chaos, Jimmy Barnes with Joe Bonamassa. The record landed on September 25, 2012, and climbed into the Billboard independent albums chart. Nielsen SoundScan had it around five thousand copies in the States not long after release. Zoo Freaks who lived with the 1972 album will hear the difference right away. Gillan's scream is still the template, but Hughes sings it from the soul and funk side of the house, the same voice that carried Burn and Stormbringer. Vai does not photocopy Blackmore. He tips the hat and then takes the spaceship somewhere else. Chad plays it like a man who has already lived with the song on a Chickenfoot stage, which he had.

If you want the long version of how these three got here, start with Glenn Hughes, the Voice of Rock, out of Cannock in the English Midlands. Born in 1951, he was in a local outfit called Finders Keepers as a teenager, then joined Trapeze around eighteen and cut a run of hard-rock records that the musicians noticed before the radio did. Deep Purple called in 1973 for the Mark III lineup with David Coverdale, and Burn and Stormbringer followed. After Purple he sang with Black Sabbath on Seventh Star, fought his way back from the rough years, and later fronted Black Country Communion with Bonamassa. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally put him in with Deep Purple in 2016. His official home on the web is glennhughes.com, and the long-running Glenn Hughes Fan Forum lives on that same site, moderated, with Glenn known to drop in. You can also find him on Facebook, Instagram and X.

Steve Vai came up on Long Island, born in 1960 in Carle Place. He picked up the guitar in his early teens after Led Zeppelin hit him between the ears, then studied with a local teacher named Joe Satriani, which is a sentence that still makes guitar players shake their heads. As a kid he transcribed Frank Zappa's The Black Page and mailed it off. Zappa hired him in 1980 as a transcriptionist and stunt guitarist. From there it was David Lee Roth's band, a turn with Whitesnake, and his own records, Passion and Warfare foremost among them. Vai's official site, vai.com, still carries the note about him cutting Highway Star for Re-Machined. He is on Facebook, Instagram and X.

Chad Smith is the Michigan kid who started on ice cream buckets and ended up in arenas. Born in 1961, he came out of the St. Paul area and grew up around Detroit, played every local band that would have him, and auditioned for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988 after they had already been through a parade of drummers. Blood Sugar Sex Magik made the band a household name, and Chad has been the engine ever since. Chickenfoot, with Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani and Michael Anthony, is where the other Highway Star on Re-Machined came from. His foundation for music education is at chadsmithfoundation.org. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram and X. Deep Purple lifers still gather at The Highway Star, the long-running fan site named for this very song.

That is the spin on THE ZOO. Three players who were never a band, one song written on a bus, one tribute cut in a hurry after a friend was gone, and a riff that still sounds like the hammer down on an open road. Turn it up, Zoo Freaks. The Crew is not done with this one.