Exclusively Deep Purple: The Riff That's Actually a News Report
"Exclusively Deep Purple" is one of the highest-voted single-artist channels in Kalisha's Exclusive collection — 1,060 votes, running the catalog of one of the three bands usually credited with inventing heavy metal, alongside Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
The band formed in London in 1968, but the lineup everyone actually remembers — Ian Gillan on vocals, Ritchie Blackmore on guitar, Jon Lord on keyboards, Roger Glover on bass, Ian Paice on drums — didn't come together until 1969. That's the version of the band that, in December 1971, checked into the lakeside town of Montreux, Switzerland, to record their sixth album using the Rolling Stones' mobile recording studio.
On the night of December 4, they were in the audience for a Frank Zappa concert at the Montreux Casino. During the show, someone in the crowd fired a flare gun into the rattan-covered ceiling. Within minutes the building was on fire; nobody was seriously hurt, but the casino burned to the ground. Gillan was sitting close enough to see the flare go up himself. The band watched the aftermath from a nearby restaurant as a layer of smoke drifted out across Lake Geneva — and bassist Roger Glover, watching it happen, came up with four words: "smoke on the water."
The song they built around that night — chronicling the fire, the mobile studio, the whole unplanned mess of recording an album in a town that had just lost its only casino — became "Smoke on the Water," built around a guitar riff that's now taught to more beginning guitarists than almost any other four bars in rock history. It wasn't written as a legendary riff. It was written as a report.
One more thing worth knowing about this band: in 1972, the same year that album came out, Deep Purple were entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the loudest band on Earth, after a concert at London's Rainbow Theatre measured 117 decibels — loud enough that, according to reports from the night, three people in the audience were knocked unconscious.
That's the catalog running on this station: a band that turned a real fire into a riff, and got officially certified as too loud for their own audience along the way.
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