Duh, duh, duh. Duh, duh da-duh. It’s one of the most famous guitar riffs ever created. Along with Polly Wolly doodle it’s the first song learnt by a new guitarist. A song that made a concert venue and a person famous after a peculiar incident. This week the Beat Marches On to 4th December 1971 when a fire destroyed the Montreux Casino.
It’s weird telling a story about a song that tells a story. To be honest my job is done if you just listen to the song because of how poignant the story is. It is one of the best songs that tells a story and that is what makes it interesting. The events the song describes are real events that happened on that fateful December night.
So, as the story of the song is mentioned in the song, I thought it would be a good idea to provide more detail to the certain lyrics of the song.
“We all went down to Montreux//On the Lake Geneva shoreline,
To make records with a mobile//We didn’t have much time”
Deep Purple in 1971 was on the scene but not the huge band that they are today. They had a couple of singles charts, but no monster hits yet. The band at the time had not stopped to rehearse and write new material. They always wrote while touring before this except for a two-week stay at a haunted house in Devon when recording their previous album, Fireball. They decided to stop touring and to write and record their next album, Machine Head.
The band decided to go to Switzerland and as the opening lyric says, Montreux which is on the shores of Lake Geneva. The reason why the band chose Montreux is because it’s home to a famous casino that has hosted musical concerts and a two-week-long Jazz festival since 1967. They contacted the casino promoter Claude Nobs and asked if they could use the casino to record. Nobs agreed but there was only a three-week gap in the concert schedule. Deep Purple bought the Rolling Stones mobile recording studio with them and made the trip.
“But Frank Zappa and the Mothers//Had the best place around,
But some stupid with a flare gun//Shot the place to the ground”
Deep Purple arrived in Montreux the night before they were due to start using the casino. The was a performance that night by Frank Zappa and his band The Mothers of Invention (sidenote: Aynsley Dunbar was on drums and was featured in the last article) Claude Nobs invited the band to watch the performance which they did.
During the matinée performance, which was already delayed due to the drum kit falling apart, the “stupid” with a flare gun shot the flare and it hit the heating vent in the ceiling. The band stopped the current song they were performing and played the Arthur Brown song Fire. They then stopped as the fire spread, and they announced to evacuate the building.
Zappa and his band had to leave their equipment behind as the casino went up in flames. Miraculously that was the only thing that was of any value that was destroyed. Everyone got out of the building safely. Eyewitness accounts state that shortly before the flare gun was fired some of the audience decided to get some fresh air while the drumkit was being rebuilt. This obviously helped the evacuation. For this particular performance, they took out the seating and no one knows why.
This was the start of a bad week for Zappa as at a show a few days later in the Rainbow Theatre in London a manic fan approached him on stage and pushed him off! He landed in the Orchestra pit and was confined to a wheelchair for a few months sustaining injuries to his head, a broken leg and rib that had damaged his Larynx which permanently lowered his voice.
“They burned down the gambling house//It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out//Pulling kids out the ground”
Claude Nobs kept running in and out of the building risking his own life to help the audience members trapped in the casino. He helped save a lot of lives that day. He is also grateful to Deep Purple for mentioning him in the song. Knowing he will be forever remembered.
All Deep Purple could do was watch in disbelief as their plans were burning down to the ground. They had to think of something fast. Their recording plans were literally going up in flames. They needed to find somewhere else.
A couple of days later funky Claude had come to the rescue again as he found the band a new place to record. A place called the Pavilion. Unfortunately, the locals didn’t like what they were producing and called the police on them. The band only managed to record one backing track by the time the police arrived. The track that would eventually become Smoke on the Water. Roadies had to hold the doors shut while the band finished the song.
The name came to bass player Roger Glover whilst he was sitting in a bar overlooking the remains of the casino. Winds from the Alps had pushed the smoke from the building over Lake Geneva.
“We ended up in the Grand Hotel//It was empty cold and bare
But with the Rolling Truck Stones thing just outside//We made our music there”
When the police told Deep Purple, they couldn’t use the pavilion anymore they went to the Montreux Grand Hotel which was closed over the winter months. They rented a floor and completed the rest of the album. It was a compact place as was their rented “rolling truck stones thing” parked outside the building. They had a mission to get down to the as equipment blocked the lifts and stairs. Jumping across balconies and using fire escapes just to hear playback in the recording truck made it a difficult process.
Despite the obstacles in the way the band managed to record the album in the three-week period that was agreed. The album was released in March 1972 and became the group’s biggest-selling album. Smoke on the Water is the band’s biggest song too. It helped them break America and went on to conquer the world.
They were finally put in the same conversation as other heavy metal bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. They had a unique heavy sound with the Hammond Organ of John Lord who put the organ through a Marshall guitar amp rather than the typical Leslie speaker. This effect helped the Smoke on the Water riff have more depth and made it memorable. The Hammond organ effect gave the band a great live aspect too with often duelling between the guitar and organ.
The Montreux casino was rebuilt and was fully functioning by 1975 and is still in use to this day as a concert venue. They are still planning to hold the annual Jazz festival in July (pandemic permitting) Queen recorded seven albums there. A statue of Freddie Mercury was commissioned in 1996 outside the venue. Next to it, there’s a little cocktail bar called Funky Claude’s in tribute to the lyrics in the song and as a thank you for putting the venue on the rock map.
The Beat Marches On is a music blog written by Jimmy Whitehead. Jimmy has been blogging for six years specialising in Sports (especially American Football). If you want to follow Jimmy on Twitter: @Jimmy_W1987
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If anyone reading this would like to read more about this story, there are a couple of YouTube videos used for research. These are:
A Swiss Town, A Casino Fire And ‘Smoke On The Water’ : Parallels : NPR
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