music

During one of these lost and searching days, I awoke one morning in my room at the Europe [hotel] and, in that moment between sleep and wakefulness, with eyes still closed, heard myself say the words “smoke on the water” to the empty room. Opening my eyes I wondered if I had actually said it out loud or had I been dreaming? No, I concluded, I’d actually spoken those words. Mentally filing it away I thought nothing more about it until later, when I told Ian Gillan. “Sounds like a drug song,” he observed, and since we were devoutly a drinking band, we dismissed it.

Roger Glover

Here’s some trivia on what is easily the most renowned hard rock song.

The lyrics are telling about a fire that actually happened while they were trying to record the Machine Head album that includes the song.
At the time Deep Purple thought of Smoke On The Water as of ‘just another song’ and didn’t even choose it for single.
It was the last song from Machine Head to make it into live set.
In an 1997 remix you can hear Gillan say ‘Break a leg Frank’, which sounds somewhat dark because by the time of recording Frank Zappa did break a leg in London, pushed off the stage by a jealous fan.
They say in an instruments store in Moscow there was a notice that run ‘Thank you for not playing Smoke On The Water on guitars!’

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