By summer, it was in heavy rotation on FM, eventually climbing to No. Finally, in a half-hearted attempt to revive the album’s sales, an edit of “Smoke on the Water” was sent to radio in early 1973. “Lazy” was released as the first single, but failed to chart. They hardly even played the song during their tour the following year. Slotted in as track five on their Machine Head album, the group hadn’t a clue they were sitting on a smash. Glover and Gillan finished the lyrics to Blackmore’s tune and “Smoke on the Water” was born. Resettled at a nearly empty Montreux Grand Hotel, the band set up amps and mics in hallways and stairwells. Finally, we got it with no mistakes-and they kicked us out.” But we didn’t want to open up until we knew we had gotten the right take. “The police were outside with a whole fleet of cars,” Blackmore recalled, “and they kept hammering on the door. As neighbors complained about the noisy rehearsals, the band managed to cut one track, dubbed “Title #1,” based on a caveman-simple riff, sliced out on Ritchie Blackmore’s Stratocaster. Two days later, Montreux Jazz Festival director Claude Nobs (“funky Claude” in the lyric) loaded the band into another recording space-a local theater called Le Pavillon. Roger came up with the title ‘Smoke on the Water.’” Later, as the inferno waned, we looked out across Lake Geneva and saw that it was covered with a layer of smoke. Singer Ian Gillan recalled, “We sat in the restaurant of the hotel and watched the flames racing into the sky, fed by the wind from the mountains. They’d escaped the fire, but lost their recording studio-the ballroom had been rented for a month to cut their new album. Amazingly, there were no fatalities-though the ballroom burned to the ground.ĭeep Purple fled to their nearby hotel.
The band smashed the window and helped fans to safety. As Zappa urged calm, the balcony collapsed. There were only two ways out-through the front door or through a plate glass window at the side of the stage. Sparks ignited a canopy hanging from the balcony, and the flames spread quickly. During the encore, a fan shot a flare gun at the ceiling. On December 4, 1971, the five members of Deep Purple were in the ballroom of Switzerland’s Montreux Casino watching a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. It’s the heavy metal version of “Chopsticks.” Metallica’s Lars Ulrich dubbed it “the riff of life.” Some kid somewhere at this very moment is plonking out those opening notes: “Dun-dun-duuun …” It’s a riff so ubiquitous it’s easy to forget there’s an actual song attached to it-one that took Deep Purple into the Top 5 in 1973.īefore there was smoke, there was fire. RECORDED: THE PAVILION AND GRAND HOTEL, MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND WRITTEN BY: RITCHIE BLACKMORE, IAN GILLAN,
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