OK music fans..

My friend Katy Lundeen turned me onto the Japanese orchestra performance of:

Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple

This is a very popular song because of its catchy chord combination:

Pretty good, unique arrangement, and a big sound.

But, then I desired to remember what really attracted me to the song when it came out on August 16, 1972 – also played IN JAPAN by Deep Purple.  So, I went looking for the song and found STEVE MORRIS is now playing this song with Deep Purple.

Smoke on the Water tells the true story about December 4, 1971 when the Deep Purple band was set up in Montreux, Switzerland preparing to record an album.  The Montreux Casino (referred to as “the gambling house” in the song) was hosting Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (another favorite group of mine)  with a concert held in the casino’s theater.  During the show, in the middle of Don Preston’s synthesizer solo on “King Kong”, the casino caught fire when someone in the audience fired a flare gun into the rattan covered ceiling, which is mentioned in the song as  “some stupid with a flare gun.”  The fire destroyed the entire casino complex, along with all the Mothers’ equipment. The “smoke on the water” that became the title of the song (credited to bass guitarist Roger Glover, who related how the title occurred to him when he suddenly woke from a dream a few days later) referred to the smoke from the fire spreading over Lake Geneva from the burning casino as the members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel across the lake.

Now you know the rest of the story!

Steve Morris is a hard-rock  guitar player’s envy!  Watch what this young man can do with left-handed hammer-ons (no picking).

So, what say you?  Do you like Deep Purple and this song? How about that story in the song?

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