Home · Songs · Deep Purple · Smoke on the Water
From album
Machine Head
Deep Purple · 1972 · Track 5
Details
TonalidadG
Compás4/4
Tempo117 BPM
Duración5:40
ÁlbumMachine Head
Año1972
The story behind
The main riff of Smoke on the Water, that instantly recognizable pattern, is born from a four-note melody in the minor blues scale, presented in parallel fourths. Ritchie Blackmore played it on his Fender Stratocaster, and soon the hi-hat and a distorted organ joined in, followed by the rest of the drums and bass, before Ian Gillan's vocals took center stage. Jon Lord, for his part, doubled the guitar with his Hammond C3 organ, running it through a distorted Marshall amplifier to achieve a sound very similar to the guitar. Interestingly, Blackmore once commented that this riff was an interpretation of the inversion of the main theme of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, joking that he owed the composer a lot of money.
The story behind Smoke on the Water is as vivid as its sound. The lyrics narrate a real event: the fire at the Montreux casino, in Switzerland, in December 1971. The band was there to record their album Machine Head, using the mobile studio of The Rolling Stones. The night before the recording session, a concert by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention was taking place at the casino. During Don Preston's synthesizer solo in the song King Kong, someone in the audience fired a flare gun towards the rattan-covered ceiling, causing a fire that consumed the entire complex and Zappa's equipment. The title, which came to Roger Glover in a dream days later, refers to the smoke that spread over Lake Geneva from the burning casino, as the members of Deep Purple watched from their hotel. The "Funky Claude" mentioned in the lyrics is Claude Nobs, the director of the Montreux Jazz Festival, who helped some people escape the fire. With nowhere to record, and the mobile studio in tow, the band had to look for alternatives, even trying to record in a local theater, the Pavilion, but the noise disturbed the neighbors and the police arrested them. Finally, they found refuge in the Grand Hotel, which was closed for the winter, and adapted it to be able to record.
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