Deep Purple’s Album Machine Head is one of the first albums that is considered as Heavy Metal. The album’s most familiar song is Smoke On The Water, but another popular song from the Album is Highway Star.

Highway Star opens the album as the first song on side 1 and was written, as were all of the songs on the album, by group members Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice.

For many years Deep Purple opened their show with this song, although lately it has been used as an encore. Not bad for a song that never had a single release, although it got plenty of radio play on album rock stations of the 1970s.

The song has just been introduced as the opening of NASCAR on TNT 2009′s race day program. This version was recorded by Buckcherry.