When Smoke Gets in My Eyes
Remembering Deep Purple’s hit
Pop music brings us together in ways we find hard to believe, and even fifty years later, there are moments in Pop we still don’t fully understand.
I was the kid who loved Neil Diamond more than I did Deep Purple, back in the summer of 1973. I can’t say I ever loved Deep Purple actually, but I appreciated them, and I also appreciated those who did love them — those cool guys who usually thought differently about me.
The Deep Purple I loved was the older, more prog or symphonic rock of them, like Deep Purple in Rock or The Book of Taliesyn, LPs you had to love the band to know. I mainly liked their slower numbers, though “Woman From Tokyo” is fine. I might have bought Fireball, their release just before Machine Head, too, but only to try to catch the cool factor in case anyone were to browse through my record collection. But I hardly ever played it.
When I finally bought Machine Head, it was from the Columbia Record Club, paired with Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death. Man, did I get cool fast.
Still, the only Deep Purple song I truly loved back then was “Anthem” from Book of Taliesyn. So dreamy and romantic:
