Reader’s Choice/Tom’s Top Tunes…Song #51/250: Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple

The story behind today’s song is one of taxes, music history that didn’t involve Deep Purple and music history that did. How “Smoke on the Water” came to be recorded in the first place provides a real snapshot of one of the most prolific musical periods that England ever produced. It also shows how those in charge of the country threw it all away in jig time. It is a song that is based upon a true story. It is also a song that many in the band came to dislike, even though it is easily Deep Purple’s most well known song. Somehow, it all involves Beethoven. Buckle up, my sweeties! This is one song that unifies a lot of different storylines in the historical record of rock music history. Enjoy.

As the 1960s began, singers such as Petula Clark, Anthony Newley, Cliff Richard, Bobby Darin and Connie Francis ruled the top of the charts. Sugary sweet Pop was still the order of the day. But a closer look at the UK song charts for 1960 shows the first crack in Pop’s iron grip appearing in the form of a young man named Elvis Presley with a song entitled “It’s Now or Never”. With the exception of Elvis and The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me”, rock n’ roll had not yet fully arrived in the UK. However, the emergence of Elvis Presley changed everything, everywhere as we now know. The King’s ability to take the best of Black soul and R&B and package it in a way that would appeal to white audiences inspired a whole new generation of fellow white performers in England to follow suit. It is absolutely amazing to think that in the space of just one decade, the UK charts went from how it was in 1960 (which was OK for those who like their Pop sugary sweet) to charts filled with artists and bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Pink Floyd, Genesis, The Faces/ Small Faces, Cream, The Jeff Beck Group, Spencer Davis Band, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple…just to name a few. Wow!!! The evolution of UK music during the 1960s is easy to trace. It went from basic Pop songs, to the Pop/Rock of the early Beatles, to more Bluesy, bawdy rock from the Rolling Stones, to the much more guitar-oriented rock of Cream and Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, all the way to the hard rock/heavy metal trinity of bands Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. What an incredible explosion of talent and creativity and innovation and volume! But just as the 1960s can be said to be the birth of rock n’ roll in England, a second thing can also be said, and that is that the 1960s proved to be the time that money and business and greed ruined everything just as quickly as it had all begun.

Much has been written about The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and how badly both bands were taken advantage of early in their careers. In both cases, by the end of the 1960s, neither band had much to show for their enormous success. Almost all of the revenue generated from albums, singles, movies and merchandise sales went into the coffers of record companies or the pockets of record executives such as Allen Klein. For The Beatles, the death of their manager Brian Epstein forced the Fab Four to actually assume a greater role in their own financial affairs. The additional stress of managing their own money and signing their own contracts eventually played a contributing factor in causing the best band the world has ever known to give up and call it quits. The same financial shenanigans had caused the members of The Rolling Stones to almost declare bankruptcy as the 1960s ended. Having bad contracts is terrible enough, but there was a further complication that all of these new artists and bands had to deal with, and that was a UK tax rate that reached almost 90%!!!  It is difficult to imagine living in a society where you had to try and get ahead in life while being taxed on nearly every dollar that you earned. Beset as they were by mounting debts that ranged into the millions, the boys in The Rolling Stones decided to flip the bird to those in charge of the UK, and they opted to become tax exiles. Mick, Keef and the boys fled the UK and moved to various places in France. Once there, they put together a mobile recording studio and installed it at Keith Richards’ new home in Nice. The first album they recorded there was called Exile on Main Street.  The band was now a collection of tax exiles hiding in plain sight, hence the album title. But The Rolling Stones weren’t the only artist or band to leave England for greener tax pastures. Rod Stewart left with girlfriend Britt Ekland for California. His first album from the US was called Atlantic Crossing. David Bowie did some of his best work in Germany (as you can read about here, here , here and here from previous posts). But before landing on his feet in Berlin, Bowie set up shop in a trendy little spot called Montreux, Switzerland. Montreux sits just to the north of the famed mountain known as the Matterhorn. It is a place where the rich and famous settled to avoid paying high taxes in their homeland. It was also the place that became a musical refuge of sorts for musicians fleeing England’s punitive tax system. One of the most famous stories to emerge from Montreux is that it was there that David Bowie and the members of Queen wrote and recorded the song “Under Pressure” (You can read about that song here). The other famous song to emerge from the Montreux scene is the subject of today’s post, “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. Just before getting into that, it should also be noted that to this day, one of the world’s most noteworthy Jazz festivals is held in Montreux. As much as places such as Monte Carlo and the French Riviera are thought of as swanky locales, Montreux, Switzerland ranks right up there, too.

The story of Deep Purple is one that is interwoven with the musical history of their times and of past times in Europe. First things first: let’s get to know the band. As mentioned earlier in this post, Deep Purple are one of three UK bands that many critics and fans hold up as being one of the founding members of the genre known as Hard Rock or Heavy Metal music in the UK. The band lasted for several decades and went through four distinct lineup phases that saw members come and go. The original idea behind Deep Purple was that it was going to act as a musical collective. That means that it was going to be a supergroup that employed members who came and went, as the needs of other side projects came up. The first, and longest serving member of the band was Jon Lord. Lord was a classically-trained organist. This turned out to be important, because as Deep Purple evolved as a band, their sound went through various iterations. One of those iterations was evident on albums such as Concerto for Group and Orchestra which was an album that combined hard rock with that of a symphonic orchestra. The theatrical bent that Jon Lord brought to Deep Purple made that band one of the first to mine this musical territory. (You can trace Deep Purple’s foray into the rock/classical hybrid as bearing fruit a half century later when punk rockers NOFX performed their epic nineteen-minute song “The Decline” with the Denver Symphony Orchestra at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, which I wrote about just last week. You can read that post here). Counterbalancing the classical music influence of Jon Lord was, arguably, Deep Purple’s most famous member, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. Blackmore is regarded as being one of hard rock’s greatest guitarists ever. As much as anyone in the band, Blackmore became the face of Deep Purple during its most successful days. Let me tell you, the band had many successful days. Over the course of their career, Deep Purple has amassed album sales of over one hundred million records worldwide. They are highly regarded as one of the most influential bands in rock history, and yet they had an terribly difficult time getting inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. One of the reasons given for this snub (which lasted from 1998-2016) was that the band, for all of its success, had only ever had “one hit”. That this “one hit” was a song that almost every aspiring rock guitarist since 1971 first learned to play held no sway with the nominating committee of the Rock Hall for many years until, under incredible public pressure, Deep Purple finally received their induction in 2016. The “one hit” that is being referred to is, of course, “Smoke on the Water”.

The story of how “Smoke on the Water” came to be written ties into everything you have read in this post so far. In 1971, Deep Purple left England and traveled to, wait for it, Montreux, Switzerland to record the album that would be called Machine Head. In order to record this album at the Montreux Casino, the band had rented out the very same mobile recording studio owned by The Rolling Stones that was used to record Exile on Main Street. Deep Purple was slated to begin their recording sessions at the casino at the conclusion of a concert being given by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Unfortunately, someone in Zappa’s audience decided to launch a flare into the air during the show. That flare lodged itself into the roof of the casino, causing it to catch on fire. The Montreux Casino ended up burning to the ground as Deep Purple watched from their hotel room. The smoke from the fire gently blowing across the nearby waters of Lake Geneva inspired the lyrics of what was to become Deep Purple’s best known song.

There has always been a question about how “Smoke on the Water” came to have one of the most famous opening riffs in rock history. The answer to that brings us back to founding member Jon Lord. Because the Montreux Casino fire ruined their recording plans, the members of Deep Purple were left scrambling to find recording space because they were being charged to rent the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio whether they made use of it or not. Since time was of the essence, the band recorded in nearby abandoned hotel corridors until the police came due to noise complaints. However, because they were hurriedly recording, there was no time to argue, debate and craft new songs. So when it came to “Smoke on the Water”, the first person with an idea for the musical structure was Jon Lord. He drew upon his classical music training and suggested that they should use guitars to emulate the famous four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony *(which you can read about here). The band went with that, and the famous opening riff was born. That opening riff has been played in guitar shops ever since by everyone and anyone who has picked up a guitar with dreams of being in a band. The song “Smoke on the Water” was one of the few Deep Purple songs to ever chart on the rock charts of the world, reaching #2 in Canada and #4 in the U.S. However, like many bands who quickly cobbled together a song only to see it take off, “Smoke on the Water” becoming a hit was something that no one in the band expected. In time, it became a song that Blackmore, in particular, came to loathe playing in concert. To him, there were so many other Deep Purple songs in their musical catalogue that better represented the soul of who they were as musicians. But all that anyone wanted to hear after a while was “Smoke on the Water”.  In the end, the ever-evolving roster of musicians and singers who became members of the Deep Purple family came to outgrow Ritchie Blackmore’s initial displeasure at the notoriety that “Smoke on the Water” received. In fact, after Blackmore left the band, along with “Smoke on the Water” era singer Ian Gillan, Gillan’s place was taken by a young man named David Coverdale. When it was Coverdale’s turn to leave in the 1980s, he went on to form one of the most well known “hair metal” bands of all time, Whitesnake. While Whitesnake had their own hits during the 80s, they were known to, from time to time, cover “Smoke on the Water” during their live shows because, unlike Richie Blackmore, David Coverdale regarded the song as a gift that just kept giving.

As this post draws to its conclusion, I want to take it back to the issue of taxes and finance. For what it is worth, I have no problem paying my fair share of taxes because I know that in return, my family and I and our community benefit in the form of being provided many services such as police and fire protection, having clean water available from our taps and having good schools and hospitals around should we need those services, and so on. But even I would have to agree that a tax rate of 90%, which it was in England in the 1960s, is a tad excessive. There was a debate at the time about whether artists and bands who willingly left England as tax exiles were traitors who took from the UK public in the form of album and ticket sales but refused to give back to those same communities in the form of taxes or whether they were a type of freedom fighter who were using their public platform to apply pressure on the governments of the day to reduce the tax rate and enable more citizens to earn a brighter future. There is a famous version of this debate that is told by Rod Stewart. Apparently, before he actually made the move to the U.S., Stewart found himself in Elton John’s house. With both men earning millions of dollars and being taxed on almost all of it, the topic of conversation soon came around to Stewart’s idea that it was time to leave the country for somewhere in the world with a more favourable tax rate. According to Stewart, talk of leaving England and her people behind caused Elton John to fly into a rage. In response to Rod Stewart’s suggestion, Sir Elton John played Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” at ear-splitting volume and told Stewart that if he was going to speak of such treasonous things that he could leave!  As you know, Sir Elton John was one performer who opted to remain in England. Whether his legacy of loyalty registers any more prominently than the actions of someone like Rod Stewart or David Bowie is not for me to say. It is for the people of England to weigh in on. But for me, the larger issue is that arguments over money once again ruined something vibrant and beautiful. Many people claim that history is boring or that it is irrelevant, but the story of rock’s UK tax exiles is just one in which greed among the ultra wealthy and those who wish to divest them of their riches has taken us off course. The same stories can be read today with regard to ultra-wealthy people such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, not to mention Jeff Bezos, and how getting out of paying taxes is such a core principle by which they operate. Somewhere in the middle of all this talk about the financial freedom and social obligations of the wealthy, there arose the circumstances that led to the creation of one of rock music’s most iconic songs, “Smoke on the Water”. What an amazingly interconnected world we live in and always have!

The link to the official website for Deep Purple can be found here.

The link to the video for the song “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple can be found here. ***The lyric version is here.

The link to the official website for Montreux, Switzerland can be found here.
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