Who is smoke on the water by

What not everybody knows is the real episode behind it. It happened in Montreux Switzerland in when, around the end of a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, a spectator fired a rocket that ignited the whole casino it had to shut down and reopened only in The title Smoke on the Water , credited to bassist Roger Glover, refers to the smoke spreading over Lake Geneva from the burning casino, while the members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel. The event and the track that recalls it is still commemorated by a sculpture that shows the title and the initial riff in the form of a music sheet, located right below the casino, on the lakeside.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. About Team Privacy Policy Contact. So he arranged to have us move into a small theatre nearby the old casino — the ex-casino, I should say.

Recording began in the afternoon. The band took a break for dinner and returned to the studio around 9 or 10 p. It came together fairly quickly. How about this? How about that? It was just a jam with a kind of rough arrangement to it. Montreux was then a very sleepy town populated mostly by old ladies who had tea in the afternoon.

So now the band had to find yet another place to record in this small, idyllic, quiet town. A cold sort of place, I mean it was freezing cold, after all [it was] November, December time. We arranged to have a carpenter put a couple of walls up. We threw some mattresses against the windows, brought a couple of industrial heaters to heat the place before we arrived there during the day.

And [we] basically recorded there. And we finished all those and we were still short of a song. Well, what are we going to do with it?