The Frank Zappa inferno that inspired Deep Purple’s classic ‘Smoke on the Water’
There are a few reasons your parents wouldn’t have wanted you to visit a Frank Zappa show in the 1960s and ‘70s. Not only was his music dangerously devoted to the sanctity of rock and roll, but the musician was also a serial provocateur. It was never a case of ‘if’ his performance might have offended or corrupted members of the audience, but just what percentage of the audience would leave his show a quivering wreck, changed forever. But one performance would stand out as the most dangerous of his career.
The leader of The Mothers of Invention, Zappa had gained a reputation as one of music’s most potent performers when he took the stage in 1971 at the Montreux Casino. His wild and wonderful shows were known for burning the house down. Little did they know, on December 4th that year, that analogy would be an all too real occurrence.
Frank Zappa was an agitator extraordinaire. His music was deliberately provocative and emotive, he relished the idea of freaking out the neighbourhood and encouraged it wherever he moved to. It became a signature move of Zappa’s to challenge the status quo, even provoking the supposed rebels to push their rebellions just that little bit further.
As well as being in the middle of it all, Zappa was a serial supporter of all things subversive. He was the jester in the court of rock and roll and his live shows followed suit. But at the Montreux Casino, Geneva, Switzerland things took a decidedly serious turn and though it may have gone on to inspire one of rock’s greatest songs, it nearly ended in a catastrophic inferno.
Frank Zappa and The Mothers took to the stage at Montreux and began to perform their intense, irreverent and intellectual music. Playful and poised, the set was as magical and transcendent as usual until the moment a deranged fan, seemingly for no reason, fired a flare gun at the band. Such occurences were hardly usual and naturally those who saw the evenet realised the seriousness of what might happen. It was the spark that would light the tinderbox of the old building.
It started a searing fire which would sadly leave several fans injured as they dashed to escape the flames, the band’s equipment destroyed, made their tour almost inconceivable and left the iconic venue in smouldering ruins. Initially, though, the group treated the flare gun with expected irreverence as mentions of Arthur Brown rang around the mics. However, things soon turned serious. “They were very organized,” Zappa said in an interview shortly after the blaze. “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.”
“The fire spread so quickly that all the people in the front were trapped,” Peter Schneider later recounted in a blog post from 2009. “There was a large door on the right hand side as you face the stage but I do not know if it was open or closed.
“I stood behind the crowd who were trying to get out through the large glass windows which covered the whole of the front of the building from one side to the other. I owe my life to a Swiss fireman who came in with a huge axe and started to break the windows one by one, starting from the left towards the stage,” Schneider continued.
“The glass smashed to the ground, and all the people in the front started to jump out. The building was on the second floor, or at least half a floor up, so it was quite a jump.” Shortly after the audience had made it safely away from the building, the venue’s heating system exploded and confirmed the building’s final moments would be spent in ashes.
Though the injuries suffered by fans were tragic, it could have been so much worse for the audience and fatalities could have marred the career of Zappa forever. There were several reasons that the fire did not cause any loss of life—the show started in the afternoon meaning nobody had quite gotten drunk enough yet to make terrible decisions, there were no chairs in the auditorium meaning that the audience could leave with more ease, and, thankfully, Ansley Dunbar’s drums had a malfunction during the set which caused many of the crowd to leave in dissatisfaction.
How did the fire inspire the Deep Purple song ‘Smoke on the Water’?
It was a hellish situation, and I saw the loss of an incredible building, the loss of equipment, and the injury to some members of the crowd. It also saw the birth of one of the most famous songs ever written, Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’. The lyrics aren’t afraid to be explicit: “We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline / To make records with a mobile – We didn’t have much time / Frank Zappa & the Mothers were at the best place around / But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground / Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky.”
Claude Nobs was helping to rescue people in the show but actually had a hand working with the band when they were creating ‘Smoke on the Water’: “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.”
Nobs continued to explain how the impressive track and riff came to pass: “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.'” Nobs saw the potnetial of the riff immediately.
“Now there’s no guitar player in the world who doesn’t know [he hums the riff],” he continued. “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.'”
It’s one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most insane tales, one that strangely coincides with Zappa’s death 22 years later and, most certainly, one we’re glad doesn’t have a more tragic end attached. Luckily, everyone made it out alive, and we all got Deep Purple’s classic tune ‘Smoke on the Water’ as a memento.
