We said, ‘Right, well let’s write some lyrics.’ And we wrote them quite as conversationally as I’m talking to you. "And Ian and I sat down and we listened to the song. "‘Let’s write a song about the adventure of actually coming to try and record, and the place burning down and ending up doing it in a hotel corridor. ‘Well what about that one jam we did at that other place?’ ‘Yeah, ok. And we finished all those and we were still short of a song. "We did Highway Star and Lazy and Pictures Of Home and all those. We threw some mattresses against the windows, brought a couple of industrial heaters to heat the place before we arrived there during the day. We arranged to have a carpenter put a couple of walls up. A cold sort of place, I mean it was freezing cold, after all November, December time. “So we came across the Grand Hotel,” Glover recalled, “which was then closed for the winter. There weren’t many options, and it took a few days to find a suitable space. So now the band had to find yet another place to record in this small, idyllic, quiet town. Montreux was then a very sleepy town populated mostly by old ladies who had tea in the afternoon.” And what we didn’t know is that the police were trying to get in and stop us because we were keeping the whole town awake. It was just a jam with a kind of rough arrangement to it. "We were doing the first take of this song – well, it wasn’t a song yet. How about this? How about that? Let’s do a solo.’ And by the time we started recording it, it was midnight. I don’t know if he had the riff beforehand or whether he made it up on the spot, but it was a kind of mid-tempo, ploddy kind of riff. The band took a break for dinner and returned to the studio around 9 or 10 p.m. The band set up on the stage and ran cables out to the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio. So he arranged to have us move into a small theatre nearby the old casino – the ex-casino, I should say.” “The guy who was in charge of the casino and kind of looking after us, came to us,” Glover recalled, “and he put all his problems aside and was worried about us. This was during a performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The story about the song’s creation somewhat mirrors that of Free's All Right Now and other classics written as toss-offs and in a hurry.ĭeep Purple were in the midst of recording their seminal 1972 album, Machine Head, at a casino in Montreux, Switzerland, when somebody set off a flare gun and the building burned to the ground. He had played around with that type of writing for a few years before stumbling upon what would become the iconic riff of Smoke On The Water. He wrote the riff in 'fourths,' which is a medieval style of writing. That may have been a joke given Blackmore’s sense of humour, but one thing isn’t. You turn it back, and play it back and forth, it’s actually Beethoven’s fifth. In the middle of the song, it says “Funky Claude was getting people out of the building,” and actually when I meet a lot of rock musicians, they still say, “Oh here comes Funky Claude.“I thought play backwards, put something to it,” he stated in a 2007 interview. They said, “Oh if you believe so we’ll put it on the album.” It’s actually the very precise description of the fire in the casino, of Frank Zappa getting the kids out of the casino, and every detail in the song is true. It’s going to be a huge thing.” Now there’s no guitar player in the world who doesn’t know. It’s a tune called ‘Smoke On The Water.’” So I listened to it. One day they were coming up for dinner at my house and they said, “Claude we did a little surprise for you, but it’s not going to be on the album. Finally I found a place in a little abandoned hotel next to my house and we made a temporary studio for them. Poor Claude and there’s no casino anymore!” They were supposed to do a live gig and record the new album there. How did the Deep Purple song evolve out of the ashes?ĭeep Purple were watching the whole fire from their hotel window, and they said, “Oh my God, look what happened. And the people were watching the fire thinking, “Oh, you know, Frank Zappa is just doing an incredible ending to his show.” The people went out through that exit, and within about five minutes, the 2,000 kids were out. Then a lot of people could go out through there. Frank Zappa took his guitar – a Gibson, a very strong one – and he smashed the big window down with his guitar.
#SMOKE ON THE WATER LYRICS MEANING WINDOWS#
It was actually not that difficult because we had big bow windows in the concert hall overlooking the swimming pool. There’s even a lyric about it in “Smoke On The Water.” You helped get people out of the burning building.