Whenever the conversation of the greatest guitar riffs of all time crops up, Smoke on the Water is usually the first uttered. It was voted the best ever, according from a 2008 survey of students from music schools in London.
Despite the riff's popularity, its origin is still something of an enigma. Back in 2007, Blackmore said he conceived Smoke on the Water after listening to the foreboding chimes of Beethoven’s track: “I thought [I’d] play [Beethoven’s fifth symphony] backwards, put something to it… that’s how I came up with it.”
When asked to clarify if Smoke on the Water really was just Beethoven’s fifth backwards, Blackmore explained, “It’s an interpretation of inversion. You turn it back, and play it back and forth, it’s actually Beethoven’s fifth.”
However, Blackmore's tongue-in-cheek humor is well documented, meaning the riff may have just been a classic example of “talented guitarist plays guitar and stumbles on something that sounds good”. Judging by the comments used in the latest Classic Rock, though, this looks far more likely.
In the winter of 1971, when Purple began work on the Machine Head album in Montreux, Switzerland, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore played the riff in their first jam session, and as Gillan recalled: “We didn’t make a big deal out of it. It was just another riff. We didn’t work on the arrangement – it was a jam.”
But by the end of the recording sessions they came up short of material, and so, in Gillan’s words, “We dug out that jam and put vocals to it.” Blackmore played his Strat and was plugged into – as far as Gillan could recall – “a Vox AC30 and/or a Marshall”. Over that mighty riff, the singer told the true story of how the Montreux casino – where Purple had been scheduled to record – burned down in a fire that started during a Frank Zappa concert. And with that, a deathless rock classic was created.
If you were a WestPac sailor anytime between 72 and 78 (my years) you heard this in every "sailor" bar you went into. And most of the hotels and restaurants. I still remember walking across the bridge over shit river (yea, that's what we called it) in Olongapo separating the town from the base and hearing Smoke on the Water.
Just one of my remembrances of WestPac 72 - 78.