There is a fire and why don’t we get out?” You’d be surprised how well people who speak only French can understand you when it’s a matter of life and death. I made an announcement- something like: “Please be calm. When the fire began, the audience was left with two ways out: through the front door, which was pretty small, or through a plate-glass window off to the side of the stage. Since more kids were outside, trying to get in, the organizers had cleverly chained the doors shut. There were between twenty-five hundred and three thousand kids packed into the room- well over capacity. Somebody in the audience had a bottle rocket or a Roman candle and had fired it into the ceiling, at which point the rattan covering started to burn (other versions of the story claim the blaze was the result of faulty wiring). In the middle of Don Preston’s synthesizer solo on “King Kong,” the place suddenly caught fire. On December 4, we were working at the Casino de Montreux in Geneva, Switzerland, right on the edge of the lake-just in front of Igor Stravinsky Street-a venue noted for its jazz festivals. The 1971 European winter tour gets the award for being the most disastrous. Here’s how Zappa later recalled the incident: in person” as it dawns on him what is transpiring.įrank Zappa was interviewed for French television soon after the fire.
And the people were watching the fire thinking, “Oh, you know, Frank Zappa is just doing an incredible ending to his show.”Īs if! If you listen to a bootleg recorded that afternoon, you can hear Howard Kaylan drily quip “Fire. 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. He later told įrank Zappa took his guitar–a Gibson, a very strong one–and he smashed the big window down with his guitar.
“Funky Claude” who was “running in and out” refers to Claude Nobs, the casino’s owner and the director of the Montreux Jazz Festival-and as luck would have it, a volunteer fireman-who helped some of the audience members escape to safety and to whom Machine Head was dedicated. There was an apparently easy and orderly exit for the crowd as the fire was slow at first, but as Deep Purple’s bass guitarist Roger Glover later said “when it caught, it went up like a fireworks display.” Two of Zappa’s roadies, the last to leave, were blown out of a window, but sustained only minor injuries.Įven if you don’t know what it means, it sounds good, right? Although no one was badly injured, the huge casino, along with its theater, restaurants and other entertainment facilities was burned to the ground and the Mothers’ gear was toast. The plan was to record their next album-what would become their 1972 classic, Machine Head-in the theater of the cavernous Montreux Casino, which was closing down for renovations after a matinee show by the Mothers of Invention.Īs the members of Deep Purple watched, the rockin’ teen combo led by Frank Zappa laid into their concert showstopper of the time “King Kong,” when an idiot in the audience fired a flare gun (or more likely a bottle rocket) into the venue’s rattan-covered ceiling during Don Preston’s MiniMoog solo. On DecemDeep Purple were in Montreux, Switzerland. It would just be confusing to most people hearing it for the first time playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band: Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” amirite?Īlthough it is among the most popular guitar riffs in history (if not the #1 most popular riff of all time, because virtually anyone, including your mom, can probably play it) and certainly a song that will never, ever fall out of the classic rock canon, the meaning of the song’s lyrics-once well-known-are becoming increasingly cryptic.
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