River Deep, Mountain High 3

For their third single, Deep Purple chose to do a version of this song,an Ike & Tina Turner song that was a flop in the U.S. but a huge hit everywhere else two years before. On the album version, from their second album, it was a bombastic, lengthy ten minute plus tune with introductory music from "2001" which was of course an important movie at the time. The single version was a tight but merely ok edit of that tune that did not make the top 40, stalling at only # 53. That seems to be both because it was merely decent and because it was the third cover in a row, and, as in Britain, many must have been catching on to the idea of Deep Purple being only a (largely) Vanilla Fudge-esque covers act.