Deep Purple – Smoke On The Water lyrics

Actually, being a Deep Purple fan from way back. The song is a true story of what happened. The band was in Montereax with the Rolling Stones Mobile recording truck and staying at the same hotel as Frank Zappa when it was burned down. The smoke on the water was the smoke from the fire over Lake Geneva. Claude Knobs was their producer and he was rescuing people from the burning building. They had to move to the Grand Hotel to finish recording. Photo's of the fire are on the inside cover of the Machine Head album. They didn't even expect the song to be released as a single let alone become the anthem that it was.

You helped get people out of the burning building. There’s even a lyric about it in “Smoke On The Water.”

It was actually not that difficult because we had big bow windows in the concert hall overlooking the swimming pool. Frank Zappa took his guitar – a Gibson, a very strong one – and he smashed the big window down with his guitar. Then a lot of people could go out through there. The people went out through that exit, and within about five minutes, the 2,000 kids were out. And the people were watching the fire thinking, “Oh, you know, Frank Zappa is just doing an incredible ending to his show.”

How did the Deep Purple song evolve out of the ashes?

Deep Purple were watching the whole fire from their hotel window, and they said, “Oh my God, look what happened. Poor Claude and there’s no casino anymore!” They were supposed to do a live gig [at the casino] and record the new album there. Finally I found a place in a little abandoned hotel next to my house and we made a temporary studio for them. 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. It’s a tune called ‘Smoke On The Water.’” So I listened to it. I said, “You’re crazy. It’s going to be a huge thing.” Now there’s no guitar player in the world who doesn’t know [he hums the riff]. 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 what really happened. 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.”

Bulletbilly, you're just stupid. You don't know the history of this band. They wrote this song on a rock festival in Montreux ("We all came out to Montreux, On the Lake Geneva shoreline."), Switzerland. They watched a concert of Frank Zappa and his crew ("But Frank Zappa and the Mothers,
Were at the best place around"), but then suddently someone set the building (gambling house is the concert hall!!!) on fire ("But some stupid with a flare gun,
Burned the place to the ground. "). And then there was smoke on the water and fire in the sky. Next time please don't write just anything from your fantasy.(and btw sry about the bad english. I'm Swiss.)

This one is just easy. You just need to know the history of the band. The studio of the band burned down and they need to find another one, but cheaper, because they don't have a lot of money and it burned all their records and the 'master tape', so they had to record all their music again. Gambling house in the song means the studio, because music is a risk to take. And it's all easy to under stand. And this song rocks!