The Greatest Songs Ever! Smoke on the Water

Durh durh durh! Durh-durh de durh! The ominous metal riff that groans at the start of “Smoke on the Water” is acknowledged as one of the greatest rock riffs of all time by fans, critics and Beavis and Butthead — but it never could have happened without Frank Zappa, a flare gun and flaming casino.

Having decided to record their seventh album, Machine Head, in Switzerland, Deep Purple descended on the tiny lakeside resort of Montreux in late 1971. The British band, formed in 1968, had recently abandoned their early aesthetic — fusions of classical music and rock that had yielded such clunkers as Concerto for Group and Orchestra — for harder sound.

Switzerland wasn’t exactly famous for recording facilities, but the band were bored with the sterility of studio sound and hankering for live ambience. They were friendly with Claude Nobs — destined to become “Funky Claude” in the song’s lyrics — who ran the Montreux Jazz Festival. “He suggested that we should check out the Casino where they held the festival,” rememebrs singer Ian Gillan. “It was a fair-sized hall, a beautiful old wooden building on the banks of Lake Geneva.” The idea was to borrow the Rolling Stones’ start-of-the-art mobile recording truck, park it outside the casino and perform (virtually) live inside.

On the night they arrived, December 3, 1971, Frank Zappa’s Mother of Invention were playing in the Casino, so Gillan and his bandmates trooped along to check out the show and the hall’s acoustics.

“It was a great show,” Gillan recalls, “until some guy pulled up outside in a big car. There was virtually no security at concerts in those days, so he was able to walk straight into the hall, and he pulled out a Verey pistol, one of those old distress flare guns. Nobody took any particular notice of him, because anything was likely to happen at a Frank Zappa gig, so it seemed like a happening when he suddenly appeared and fired this thing up towards the ceiling.”

Two thousand pairs of eyes turned upwards as a brilliant, incendiary light shot up and lodged itself in a decorative cornice. The crowd assumed it was all just part of the fun — until a raging fire took hold and smoke began to fill the auditorium. “Zappa was brilliant,” says Gillan.“He stopped the band, and started calmly directing everybody to leave the building in an orderly fashion.”

Despite Zappa’s advice, panic ensued. This was to the particular dismay of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who was in the bar with a well-endowed young lady: “People were running past me with white faces. I presumed it must be an intermission and they were going to get ice creams until I saw the smoke coming out and realized something was wrong. Otherwise I’d have been with this certain young lady in some kind of cupboard, up to some sort of mischief, and I would have been burnt down with the place.”

Ian Gillan remembers a particularly horrifying moment. “The plateglass windows exploded out with the heat, and some kids tried to jump through to safety, but they got pretty bad lacerations.” Other ran in confusion through the wrong doors and became lost in the basement where, fortunately, “Funky” Claude Nobs found them and led them to safety.

Half an hour later, with everyone safely outside, the members of Deep Purple watched flames licking 200 feet into the air as the Casino turned into an inferno. Returning to their hotel, Gillan remembers, “We could see the Casino burning from our windows. We were watching the smoke roll out over Lake Geneva, and Roger wrote the words ‘smoke on the water’ on a paper napkin right then. We didn’t have a song at this point; it was just those words.”

Bassist Roger Glover disputes Gillan’s version, claiming the song came to him three days later. “I woke up sweating all over and actually said ‘smoke on the water’ aloud to myself,” he says. “The next day, I suggested that we write a song about what happened to us.”

Meanwhile, Claude Nobs saved the group’s bacon, arranging for them to record their album in Montreux’s Grand Hotel. Moving into the Grand, they immediately got off to a flying start, penning the famous guitar lead almost instantly. “It was a riff that Ritchie put down,” says Jon Lord. “Its working title was ‘Durh Durh Durh.’”

The song was laid down in a hurry — in only four takes, according to Blackmore — because the band knew that the police were on their way to throw them out of the hotel, which was technically closed for redecoration. “We were waking up the neighbors five miles away because the sound was echoing through the mountains,” he says. “We had just finished it when the police burst in and said we had to stop, and since we’d finished, we did.”

All that remained was to couple the track to Glover’s lyric about the fire — but when it was finished, the band were unimpressed. “We were really approaching it as just a throwaway,” reveals Gillan, “a filler track to finish the album off.” They also felt the title, “Smoke on the Water,” sounded too much like a drug reference, and concluded that it would probably be best to consign the song to the vaults. Despite the band’s apathy, “Smoke on the Water” was chosen as a single and entered the Billboard charts on June 16, 1973, where it peaked at No. 4, going gold just two months later.

Over the years, the song has attained all-time-classic status. Blackmore’s sludgy lick was chosen as the No. 4 Greatest Riff Ever in Total Guitar magazine, and a new generation of rock fans saw Jack Black pay it homage in 2003’s School of Rock.

As Gillan points out, “It became one of the most successful things we ever did.” It was certainly the most imitated: New Wave goofballs Mental As Anything covered it, the song was reggae-fied by a novelty group called Dread Zeppelin and crooner Pat Boone re-envisioned it as a lounge number for his In a Metal Mood album. Gillan’s favorite interpretation, however, remains the one by “a South American stripper” he watched performing “the bump ’n’ grind to this really rinky-dink little version.”