One of the longest-running feuds in rock history was put to bed last Wednesday, for one night at least, when guitarist Ritchie Blackmore joined the current iteration of Deep Purple onstage in Jones Beach on Long Island for their signature song, “Smoke on the Water” – 33 years after he quit the band, saying he’d never work with lead vocalist Ian Gillan again.
Blackmore didn’t even join the rest of the band when it was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016. Shamefully, that was 23 years after they become eligible, a long oversight that brought the electors plenty of criticism for failing to realize their stature as progenitors of heavy metal. They were mostly an album-oriented band, played more on FM than AM radio, yet they had a handful of hit singles, none bigger than “Smoke on the Water.”
The song relates a real-life incident, the Dec. 4, 1971, fire that destroyed the casino at Montreux, Switzerland – as the lyrics note, it stood (and its replacement still stands) on the shoreline of Lake Geneva. The Montreux Jazz Festival, founded four years earlier, was hosting an afternoon concert by Frank Zappa when a fire started in the room’s low-hanging ceiling.
Initial reports claimed someone had fired a flare gun at the wooden ceiling, but other eyewitnesses said a concertgoer was flinging lit matches up there; still others blame a short-circuit in the lighting. Whatever the cause, the flames spread slowly at first, and some people thought it was part of the show. Zappa told the crowd, “Fire! If you’d kindly move calmly toward the exit, ladies and gentlemen. Calmly.” He later recalled, “”I was just lucky that many of [the fans] were able to speak English, because I didn’t know what to say to them in French.”
It only took a few minutes to get most of the approximately 3,000 people out, but some had taken refuge in the basement. They could have been trapped there, but Claude Nobs, founder of the festival – “funky Claude” in the song – returned to the burning building to lead them to safety. He was never officially honored for his actions, but the song immortalized him. He ran the festival for years before his death at age 76 in 2013 after a skiing accident. Today there’s a bar called Funky Claude’s on the Avenue Claude-Nobs along the lakefront.
Blackmore said the song’s opening riff is just an inversion of the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Total Guitar placed it No. 4 on its list of the Greatest Guitar Riffs Ever. The song was released on “Machine Head” in 1972 but only released as a single a year later, when it reached No. 4 on the Hot 100. It didn’t chart in the UK, where the band was never as popular as it was in the States. This music video wasn’t produced until 2024.
The concert at Jones Beach wasn’t a proper reunion, because organist and founding member Jon Lord died in 2012, but they don’t sound bad for a bunch of old geezers.
