“That doesn’t sound right to me”: The classic song Billie Joe Armstrong thought sounded ugly
Not everything in rock and roll is intended to sound all pristine and nice. Some of the greatest acts in the world benefit from having something more than a little bit messed up in the mix, and it usually takes a legend in the field to take those ugly pieces and turn them into something brilliant. Although Billie Joe Armstrong could usually take the same chord progressions and get a million different tunes out of it, he originally repulsed when he started listening to one of the all-time classic rock guitar riffs.
Then again, anyone who has ever played guitar for more than two days will probably get an earful of which guitar riffs are mandatory to learn. ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is up there, and ‘Iron Man’ keeps a resident, but ‘Smoke on the Water’ really is in a class by itself. Throughout their time in the spotlight, the hard rock legends were already one of the biggest names in British music, but given how well they worked making impressive runs with their songs, ‘Smoke on the Water’ is as simplistic as it gets for rock bands.
Ask any Guitar Center employee, and they will tell you how simple the tune is and how much they hate anyone who comes within earshot playing it for them. Despite only being four notes, though, it’s equally effective in doing what it needs to do, especially when it becomes a bed for Ian Gillan to sing about playing on Lake Geneva and watching the venue they were due to work in burn to the ground.
Before they had even cut it, though, Ritchie Blackmore admitted to having reservations about making a tune that was that straightforward. Every one of their previous tunes had benefited from broadening out, if only for a few minutes, and to see them go from something like ‘Speed King’ to something this amateurish felt like regression as far as he could tell.
But when they cut it, they made sure to coat it in the most menacing tone that any guitar player had ever attempted before. Despite having to blend in with Jon Lord’s piano, Blackmore’s tone on the record feels like it’s coated in some sort of heavy reverb, which makes the entire track feel like it’s being played through mud half the time.
Even though Armstrong loved almost any rock song that came on the radio, he felt something different happening listening to this tune, saying, “The first time I heard ‘Smoke on the Water’, which is supposed to be the quintessential rock song if you’re a guitar player. I remember hearing it and saying, ‘That sounds ugly. That doesn’t sound right to me.’ I don’t know what it was about it, but I moved on to Chuck Berry or something.”
But as Armstrong later learned, that kind of ugliness is what people worldwide flock to rock and roll. Throughout the biggest years of the 1970s, everyone was pulling out of that same playbook trying to get a similar sound, whether that was Black Sabbath’s doomy riffs from Tony Iommi or even when shoegaze bands made tracks that had the guitar buried beneath a layer of distortion.
So, despite having a visceral reaction to seeing it for the first time, there’s no shame in liking something that sounds that dirty. Because if you look at what it meant for rock and roll, ‘Smoke on the Water’ walked so that ‘Brain Stew’ could run.
