Smoke on the Water

The song describes the fire that destroyed the Montreux Casino during a Frank Zappa and the Mothers concert, which forced the band to record in a hotel. Roger Glover woke with the title and Ian Gillan wrote the lyrics. Gillan has said the riff and backing track had been recorded on the first day as a kind of soundcheck, and that he and Glover later wrote a biographical account of the making of the record. Blackmore told BBC Radio 2 that they did the whole thing in about four takes because the police were banging on the door.

The riff is a four-note melody on the blues scale in G minor, played in parallel fourths. Blackmore played it on a Stratocaster while Lord doubled it on a distorted Hammond C3. Blackmore compared it to Beethoven's Fifth, and Paice said it was so gloriously simple that nobody had done it before.

Released as a US single in May 1973, it reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two in Canada. Its B-side was the live version from Made in Japan. Rolling Stone placed it in its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2017, and the first official music video appeared in March 2024. A 1989 charity version, Rock Aid Armenia, reached number 39 in Britain.

Claude Nobs, the Montreux Jazz Festival founder to whom the album is dedicated, is the funky Claude of the lyric who rescues the children. He died on 10 January 2013 at the age of 76, and the BBC mentioned the song in its report.

Live

The Made in Japan version comes from Osaka on 15 August 1972. It is the band's most played song, with more than 2,000 performances logged. Rainbow played it in 1981 to 1983 and in 2016, Gillan played it with Black Sabbath in 1983, and the band played it at the 2016 Rock Hall induction.