Deep Purple remastered: It’s burning in Montreux

In hard rock historiography, the year 1972 is firmly in the hands of Deep Purple. Their album »Machine Head« immediately entered all the charts and finally established the band at the top of the genre alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. And a song is now out in the world whose ingenious four-chord riff has served so well as a training unit for guitar clip students for decades that it is banned in instrument shops around the world with maximum punishment.

A riff is a sequence of individual chords that combine to form something coherent. Perhaps most comparable to words that form a sentence. The signature riff of “Smoke On The Water” is a fairly short, concise and appellative main sentence with an exclamation point. It works like a slogan that everyone can immediately say. That’s why it’s so popular with novices and hated by everyone else. Not least with its inventor Ritchie Blackmore, whose concentrated listlessness has repeatedly led to strange and even ingenious gambles, as can be heard, for example, on Deep Purple’s live document “Made In Japan”, which was published soon afterwards. This modification has also long since entered the collective memory.

At some point the song became annoying. Only “Satisfaction” was even worse used and tattered. Something so archetypal can only be appreciated as a relic of pop history and can no longer really be reactivated, I thought and then heard the late Deep Purple formation with Steve Morse on guitar at the Wacken Open Air a few years ago. Morse took this song as seriously as if he were playing it for the first time, and indeed he managed to bring this riff to life once again.

Curiously, the band and label only recognized the commercial potential of “Smoke On The Water” late. Maybe because the piece is nothing more than a filler to get to the usual album playing time of around 40 minutes and because it’s so easy for them to do. It will be their fourth and final single release, and by this point the tough guys have long been on the dance floors of rock discos and playing air guitar.

The genesis of “Machine Head,” which the song describes, is now part of the popular legends of rock music. The band is dissatisfied with the lifeless sound of their predecessor “Fireball”. In order to better capture their live qualities on tape, they try to fake a stage situation. They book the Montreux Casino, which they still remember fondly from their April 1971 gig, and bring in the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio. However, on the day before the sessions, at the last event before the winter break, a concert by Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention, a confused fan torches the casino with a flare gun.

The band retreats to their hotel and notices the huge cloud of smoke drifting over Lake Geneva. This is how the title was born. The text of “Smoke On The Water” outlines its own creation almost like a diary. Without any great lyrical ambitions, but the facts are correct. »We all came out to Montreux / On the Lake Geneva shoreline / To make records with a mobile / We didn’t have much time / Frank Zappa and the Mothers / Were at the best place around / But some stupid with a flare gun / Burned the place to the ground…”

Ian Gillan also dutifully recorded what followed the fire in shorthand. They need an alternative location, so they quickly change to the rocky concert hall Le Pavilion, but the police sack the band after just a few days for noise pollution. Once again Deep Purple are lucky; the Grand Hotel in Territet, just outside Montreux, is also on winter vacation. They simply rent the entire house and now pull their strings here. The recordings are not without problems because the mixer has to be placed outside the hotel and as a result there are problems with communication.

But the spiritus loci is right and they are happy to have finally found a place where they can work in peace. They still don’t have much time, but unlike in the past, they’ve collected enough song ideas – and are doing things together one last time. So two weeks, albeit with daily 16 to 18 hour sessions from the early afternoon until the next morning, are enough to get “Machine Head” onto the tape. It will be the deep purple classic par excellence, which has four eternal live standards to offer with “Highway Star”, “Lazy”, “Space Truckinʼ” and “Smoke On The Water” and occupies top chart positions all over the world. With 2.8 million copies sold, it remains the band’s most successful album to this day.

Two years late, the “Super Deluxe Edition” has just been released for the 50th anniversary – for the addicts who already have everything. The “stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes” by Frank Zappa’s son Dweezil are a sacrilege because one cannot mistreat works of art of such radiance. He knows this too, which is why his sound interventions are more of a homeopathic nature and therefore unnecessary. More interesting are the attached live recordings, including the unreleased recording of the groundbreaking Montreux gig. What you’re hearing here is an obsessive jam band that hasn’t yet found its balance between entertainment and self-absorbed egomania. However, there was probably nothing that could be done about these tapes. The recordings are at best bootleg quality. So it’s best to stick to the original, which sounds here in a remastered version and thus in its old freshness.

“Highway Star” opens the album furiously. For Lester Bangs, who wrote a eulogy in Rolling Stone, the song’s tempo is “breakneck and almost uncomfortably high.” And so, as an anticipation of speed metal, it finally gets its entry in metal history primers. The final track, “Space Truckin’,” is Bang’s second favorite, and between “these two classics you’ll find nothing but good, hard-hitting music.” The fans saw it the same way.

During the subsequent tour around the world, however, the long-simmering conflict between the Bonsai Napoleon Blackmore and his gifted lead singer Ian Gillan, which the many problems in Montreux, but also the sheer fun of the production, were able to forget for a while. The two hardly exchange a word with each other.

But as if their rivalry was just another catalyst, Deep Purple are now surpassing themselves live. They are incredibly attuned to each other and still have fun stretching their songs to twice as long in extended jams without boring the audience. Buoyed by success, they last another year. But after the second Japanese tour in 1973, Deep Purple’s classic formation fell apart. The purists mourn this to this day.

Deep Purple: »Machine Head« – Super Deluxe Edition (Universal)