Gosh,I thought 70’s rock stars just trashed Hotel rooms,threw T.v.'s out of top storey windows and drove Rolls Royces into swimming pools-but to BURN DOWN a WHOLE Hotel puts Deep Purple into a whole different league! 
(tongue firmly in cheek!)
Just to clarify - Deep Purple wasn’t responsible for the fire. Here’s the story:
The Annotated Guide to Smoke on the Water
Smoke on the Water: words & music by Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice
Notes: Jim_Mc
We all came out to Montreux1
On the Lake Geneva shoreline
To make records with a mobile2
We didn’t have much time3
Frank Zappa and the Mothers
Were at the best place around4
But some stupid with a flare gun
Burned the place to the ground5
Smoke on the water
Fire in the skies6
Smoke on the water7
They burned down the gambling house
It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out
Pulling kids out of ground8
When it all was over
We had to find another place9
Swiss time was running out10
It seemed that we would lose the race
(Chorus)
We ended up at the Grand Hotel
It was empty, cold and bare11
With the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside
Making our music there
With a few red lights, a few old beds12
We made a place to sweat
No matter what we get out of this
I know we’ll never forget
(Chorus)
Notes:
- Members of Deep Purple traveled to Montreux, Switzerland, home of the famous jazz festival.
- The group had rented the Rolling Stones mobile recording studio – state of the art equipment all set up inside a truck.
- They could only afford to rent the equipment for three weeks.
- The Casino at Montreux, which was a popular venue for bands. It was a beautiful old wooden building, popular for it’s acoustics. Deep Purple intended to record a live album at the Casino. They arrived a day or two ahead of their scheduled shows, in time to be in the audience for the Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention concert at the same place.
- A Mothers’ fan was shooting either bottle rockets or a roman candle (Zappa’s version of the events) or a pistol shaped flare gun (Ian Gillian’s version) inside the Casino when one of the flares penetrated the ceiling. Unbeknownst to the crowd, a fire broke out between the ceiling and the roof. By the time the fire was discovered, most of the roof was engulfed in flames.
- Flames from this inferno were said to reach 250 feet in the air.
- The wind took the smoke out over the lake, where it appeared as a curtain stretching far out over the water. After escaping from the Casino, Roger Glover and Ian Gillian watched the fire from the restaurant of a nearby hotel. It was there that Glover suggested the song title. The basic chord structure and famous riff had already been worked out. The song had the working title, “Duhn Duhn Duhn.”
- Claude Nobs, the driving force behind the jazz festival and the arts in Montreux in general, heroically rescued several concert goers who had taken a wrong turn and gone into the building’s basement. The building’s heating system exploded, probably explaining the “awful sound.” Miraculously no one was killed, though there were a large number of minor injuries. Frank Zappa was said to be amazed at the calm and orderly way in which the 3000 or so concert goers exited the building. In some accounts, Zappa is given credit for this, as he stayed on the stage and exorted the crowd to remain calm.
- Obviously, the concerts at the Casino could not go on as scheduled, but the recording equipment rental had to be paid for. A decision was made to go ahead with the recording, but that it would no longer be of a live performance.
- Another reference to the three week window of the rental.
- Claude Nobs again came to the rescue, this time arranging for the band to be able to use the Grand Hotel, which was empty because it was closed for the season.
- Mattresses from the empty hotel rooms were used as sound baffles. The stairwell of a spiral staircase was used as an echo chamber. The resultant album was called Machine Head. It should be noted that the band was short of material for the album, but the new tune, which they worked out on the spot, filled it.
Please note that I’m writing this from memory – I read the story in Creem or Circus back in 1973 (the fire took place in December of 1972), and more details in Ian Gillian’s autobiography, Child in Time, and Frank Zappa’s The Real Frank Zappa Book. So forgive me if I got something wrong.
Jim
hey Jim, thanks for that interesting story. Of course I knew the song (who wouldn’t?) but had no idea what it was about.
Well, I guess I just proved how un-hip I am! 
I had a feeling it might have been something I didn’t get, but I went ahead and said something anyway…
Beth
I feel oooollllllddddddd…
Thanks for the story, Jim!
Ever saw a confused frog? well–here’s looking at you.
Is this another piece of Americana, with a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, just like there’s a Paris, Illinois and a Georgia on ma-ma-mama-mah mind?
Or do you live by the original Léman lake (aka lac de Genève on the French bank)?
Yes, there is both a lake and a city (next to the lake of course) called Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. It is a very popular vacation destination with the “flatlanders” as we call them from the Chicago area.
In Illinois there is also Cairo (pronounced KAY-ro), Athens, Crete, Marseilles, Havana, and Lebanon, among others, and in Wisconsin there’s another Athens, Belgium, Luxemburg, Verona, Waterloo, and others. When the immigrants came and founded new cities, they often named them after the homeland!
Beth
Wow Jim, now I feel complete. I finally understand the song.
On another note. Does anyone remember the old Faygo Red Pop commercials?
“When was the last time
You had a good slug of a Red Pop?”
I was searching on the history of nachos, and turned up this, by a reasearcher for the Oxford English Dictionary:
In September 1988 a slip of paper (the usual 4 x 6) for this word came from one of the editors, stating that the earliest quotation in the OED files was from a 1978 issue of the Tucson (Arizona) Magazine, but that the recently published Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary showed 1969 as the earliest date in their files. Could I antedate? Added was a postscript asking if I could find its etymology. WNCD had suggested it might be ‘fr. Sp. “nacho” flat-nosed’. Could I confirm this? I had only learned of nachos a few years earlier when a Mexican restaurant opened in our Capitol Hill neighbourhood. Those nachos were delicious! I could have made them my entire meal, but how could anyone who has looked at and eaten nachos see any relationship between one of these and the adjective flat-nosed?
I received my mail from the OED at my home address so it was early evening when I pondered over this slip. I called several Texan friends in Washington that evening and each of them wanted to tell me all about nachos but none knew how the name had been derived. After three phone calls (and three different recipes for perfect nachos) I gave up on nachos that evening.
The next morning I began my search in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and started with the handbooks of Mexican, Chicano, and Tex-Mex words and phrases, but found only ‘nacho, adv. = naturally, of course’. The head of the Division, soon joined by her assistant, asked if I needed help. The staff members of LC were always intrigued by my word searches and most gracious in assistance. I showed them the slip of paper I had received. Convinced the word was truly derived from Spanish, they showed me the scholarly Spanish language dictionaries and together we pored over the entries for nacho, hoping to find another clue, but we met with no success.
As I walked down the long corridor leading back to the central core of LC, I heard a voice softly calling my name. There was a young woman I recognized as a staff member of the Hispanic Division. She had overheard our discussion of nacho in the reading room but had been reluctant to interrupt us. She told me she had been born and raised in Mexico and there nacho has only one common usage: it is the word used as a diminutive for a little boy who had been baptized Ignacio. His family and friends call him Nacho. She thought I should know this. What a wonderful bit of information! We beamed at each other. I thanked her profusely, and later I told her she was the true reason for my success in solving the etymology of nacho(s).
Without this clue, it would have been a hopeless search, taking far more than the allotted time, since there were usually 15-25 queries per week. Now I was convinced there was a real Nacho somewhere who had dreamed up a combination of tortilla pieces with melted cheese and jalapeño peppers.
Instead of browsing the cookbook section of LC’s collection which has an elaborate classification for the miles of its cookery collection, I tried a short-cut: calling the food editor of the Washington Post. My imagination had already created a marvellous feature on nachos; perhaps President and Mrs Lyndon Johnson (1963-68) had served them at a cocktail party in the White House! But, alas, the food editor could not help in the nacho cause; she suggested that I call the food editor of the San Antonio Express. As the largest city influenced by Tex-Mex trends, San Antonio might possibly yield a clue to nacho. This phone call produced pure gold! This food editor knew all about nachos; she had written a column for that newspaper in 1986 (11 Mar. 2D) and credited Ignacio Anaya, chef at the old Victory Club in Piedras Negras (a small Mexican town just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas) as the person who assembled the first nachos for some Eagle Pass ladies who were on a shopping trip during the 1940s. LC had this newspaper on microfilm, so I read the entire article. This feature story revealed that a cookbook published in 1954 by the Church of the Redeemer in Eagle Pass had used the word in an advertisement for the Victory Club. This cookbook was not listed in the National Union Catalog, so I wrote to the public library in Eagle Pass. (While waiting for a response, I tackled other OED queries which had been put aside!) Within a week I had a response - they did not have the 1954 cookbook, but they did have a later cookbook (1970) published by the same church, and enclosed in that letter was a copy of page 89 from the 1970 publication that not only supplied the recipe but also gave the complete story of those first nachos.
I still had not found a pre-1969 quote. It was ‘browsing time’ in the LC cookery collection and I limited this search to the class number assigned to Texan cuisine. Several 1965+ quotations surfaced, and eventually I found A Taste of Texas, edited by Jane Trahey in 1949 with a perfect nachos quote on page 27:
“Pedro left. Sometime later he returned carrying a large dish of Nachos Especiales. ‘These Nachos,’ said Pedro, ‘will help El Capitan - he will soon forget his troubles for nachos make one romantic.’”
A wonderful sentence. My search ended. I knew the estimated two hours permitted for a word search had far exceeded its limits, but a 20-30 year antedating and its true etymology had been worth it. And to add to the satisfaction, we have recently, with the help of the Rector and one of the parishioners of the Church of the Redeemer, Eagle Pass, Texas, been able to verify a quotation from that elusive 1954 St Anne’s Cookbook which confirms the existence of Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Anaya, gives the Victory Club as the place in which he invented his ‘nacho specials’, and provides his own original recipe.
The 1995 News and Observer (Raleigh, NC) 8 Nov. 2E (my daily newspaper now) reprinted a feature story from the Dallas Morning News, datelined Piedras Negras, Mexico. October 21 had recently been declared International Day of the Nacho, and a bronze plaque had been installed in honor of Ignacio Anaya (who died in 1975). The author had interviewed Ignacio Anaya, Jr., a retired banker from Eagle Pass, Texas, who gave 1943 as the date his father first served his nachos especiales to those ladies on a shopping trip. Others interviewed offered varied opinions on the subject of nachos and sources of the original recipe, but whatever the opinions, the word nacho is here in the English language to stay. Someday a 4-5 year antedating for nachos may yet surface when every published word is available electronically. But the fun part of the search will be gone.
I love etymology, and I love a good story, and I love a good nacho. Thanks Walden! Now I need a snack…