Smoke on the Water: The Fire That Became Rock’s Most Famous Riff

In December 1971, Deep Purple traveled to Montreux, Switzerland, with a clear plan: record their next album in the theater of the town’s casino, which closed every winter for maintenance. They had rented the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio.

The night before they were set to start, the casino hosted its last concert of the season: Frank Zappa and his band, The Mothers of Invention. The members of Deep Purple were in the crowd.

Near the end of the show, someone in the audience fired a flare at the ceiling, which was lined with wicker. It caught fire, and before long the whole casino was in flames. No one was seriously hurt, but the building was completely destroyed, and with it all of Zappa’s band’s gear.

From their hotel, the musicians watched the smoke from the fire spread across Lake Geneva. A few days later, bassist Roger Glover woke up from a dream with a phrase in his head: smoke on the water. There was the title.

With no casino, the band had to improvise. They ended up recording in the hallways of an empty hotel, with the mobile studio parked outside. The song tells what they went through those days, almost like a news report.

The riff is Ritchie Blackmore’s, and Jon Lord doubles it on his Hammond organ, run through a distorted amp: that’s why it sounds so thick. Blackmore himself once said the idea came from flipping a theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony around.

“Smoke on the Water” came out on Machine Head in 1972. Over the years it became Deep Purple’s signature song, and in 2017 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

More than fifty years later, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover and Ian Paice are still playing it. And on December 8 they’ll play it at the Santander Arena in Santiago, on Deep Purple’s ninth visit to Chile.