The lyrics actually tell the story of the recording of Machine Head .
Deep Purple were originally all set to record the album at the Casino in Montreux. Beginning December, 1971, Deep Purple had set up camp in Montreux to record an album using a mobile recording studio rented from the Rolling Stones at the entertainment complex that was part of the Casino. (referred to as “the gambling house” in the song lyric. The famous Mountain Studios did not yet exist at that time). On the eve of the recording session a concert featuring Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention was held in the casino’s theatre December 4th 1971. But it burnt down during the concert, after some stupid had fired a flare gun into the Casino's ceiling. It destroyed the entire complex. On the near side of the rain-slicked road a crowd of well-dressed people stood shivering, huddled together, watching as flames leapt from the doors and windows. On the far side of the road, in a muddy field close to the Casino, two roadies ran to the side of a 32-foot-long mobile trailer, stopped next to the cab, tried to figure out how to open the locked door without a key, then picked up a stone, smashed the side window, scrambled into the front seat, revved up the engine, and drove the trailer out of reach of the spreading blaze in the direction of the lake. (The Casino is situated just near the lake of Geneva) Hours later, when the 250-foot-high flames died down and the crowd had dispersed, Montreux’s casino had been leveled to the ground. In the ashes were the charred remains of $48,000 worth of amps and instruments: every last bit of the equipment that Frank Zappa and the Mothers had been playing onstage when the fire broke out. The actual Zappa concert has turned up on one of the Beat the Boots recording called “Swiss Cheese” and “Fire”.

Purple were in the audience. And in a hotel nearby, the exhausted members of Deep Purple, just wondered where they would be able to record their album, "Machine Head" (on Warner Bros. Records). The next day, bassist Roger Glover, organist Jon Lord, drummer Ian Paice, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, and lead singer Ian Gillan combed Montreux to find a building they could convert into a studio. After being thrown out of the Pavilion by the police because they were raising too much racket, they passed up the use of a bomb shelter, a cavernous cellar that had once protected war treasures, and a chateau in the mountains, they finally found what they were looking for - the luxurious but nearly empty Grand Hotel, which not only had hallways spacious enough for the band, and a management that wouldn’t toss them out, but offered a spiral staircase that could double as an echo chamber.


The recording eventually commenced during December 1971. They recorded the album with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, also mentioned in the lyrics. "We actually went to the Casino in Montreux to record, but as you know it burnt down," says tall and powerful looking Jon Lord as he settles into an overstuffed chair in his London hotel room. "Our roadies just that morning decided not to put our equipment into the Casino, so we were really lucky. Frank Zappy lost everything in the fire. I think there was one molten cowbell left. So we went all over Montreux to find a place to record and finally settled on an old hotel which was empty for the winter except for one deaf old lady." A quick lick between the mattresses: "We cordoned off a corridor and put mattresses in and built a little studio," he recalls, stroking his mustache. "It was so easy and relaxed because we could record when we liked and didn’t have to worry about booking studio time. It gave the LP a much more immediate feel and a continuity we haven’t got on any of the other LP’s. This is much more how we are, and our first three LP’s were the most unrepresentative of a group’s sound onstage I’ve ever heard. The album combines the best points of "In Rock" and "Fireball", our last album (both on Warner Bros. Records). It’s exciting and musically valid. Most important is that it was done in three weeks instead of the usual six months." The flames that reduced the Montreux Casino to black ash still spurt furiously from "Machine Head’s fifth track, ‘Smoke on the Water.’ The rhythmic squeals of Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar leap like tongues of fire into the intro, then rise higher as Jon Lord’s throaty organ and Ian Paice’s rumbling bass enter one by one to feed them fuel. Finally, the soft, charcoal grit of Ian Gillan’s voice eases the story of the Montreux fire into the rocking blaze:

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
Some stupid with a flare gun
Burned the place to the ground.

But as the four members of Deep Purple worked in the cluttered hotel corridor, surrounded by used mattresses and wardrobes jerry-rigged to work as sound baffles, fire was not the basic element they used to give "Machine Head" its fist-like impact. Rhythm - brutal, throbbing, primitive rhythm - was the raw material with which they built each track, whether it was the slow pulsation of flame in ‘Smoke on the Water’ or the hammer blasts that raced like an engine through the auto song ‘Highway Star.’


Time for some interest:

Back in his London hotel room, Jon Lord stands up for another group that relies heavily on rhythm. "As a matter of fact, I thought the last Grand Funk album wasn’t at all bad," he says, leaning forward so that his long hair swings down past his cheeks and throws his face into shadow. "You can run the terrible risk in this business of attracting the wrath of certain people. That awful word ‘hype’ gets thrown at you. I had been on the road for seven years and that was a heavy scene trying really hard. From when Deep Purple started we never hyped a record into the chart, and our first hit album, "In Rock", came two years after we had formed the band. That doesn’t sound like hype to me. But King Crimson and ELP got the same treatment. But what do they want?" Jon smiles. "Do they want us to starve and slap up and down the M1 highway in a Commer van for another ten years? We’ve paid our dues, and now we would like some interest on those dues." In the case of "Machine Head", the dues were a little stiffer than usual. They included three weeks rental of the Stones mobile unit, the price of a few dozen used mattresses, the loss of $48,000 worth of Frank Zappa’s equipment, and the destruction of one large, elegant, and overly-flammable Swiss casino


Who's "Funky Claude" ?

Funky Claude in the lyrics is Claude Nobs, who helped them out. He started the Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux in 1968, and he is a very important man in the music business. As stated in the lyrics, he helped saving some kids during the fire at the Casino. He was also the man who found the Grand Hotel for them. There's a picture of him on the gatefold sleeve on the original LP release of the album.


"Break a leg , Frank!"

Actually, these were troubled times for Frank Zappa, who first lost all of his gear in the fire in Montreux. A couple of days later, when he played in London, a fan tore him off stage, and Zappa broke his leg as he fell into the orchestra pit. This, again, led to Ian Gillan dropping the comment "Break a leg, Frank!" near the ending of Smoke on the Water at a March 1972 concert recorded for the BBC, available on the excellent EMI 2CD set Deep Purple in Concert. The song itself was created more or less spontaneously; Roger Glover had the picture of the smoke spreading over the Lake Geneva in his head, and the line Smoke on the Water eventually stuck. He suggested to Ian Gillan that they should use it as a song title, but Ian shrugged it off, saying people would believe it was a drug song. Then Ritchie suddenly came up with the later hierostratically famous (and notorious!) riff, and things fell into place.


Here's the story about the lyrics and the title, in Roger Glover's own words:

"The only deviation to the story that IG has sometimes claimed is that it was written on a napkin as the fire burned. Actually it came to me in a sort of dream 1 or 2 mornings after the fire: I was alone in my bed (in the Eurotel, not the Eden Au Lac as IG insists although it's a better sounding name for the story) in that mystical time between deep sleep and awakening, when I heard my own voice say those words out loud. I woke up then and asked myself if I actually did say them out loud, and I came to the conclusion that I did. I pondered upon it and realised that it was a potential song title. "This is how I characterized it later to IG but we both came to the conclusion that it sounded like a drug song and it was promptly filed away under "drug songs - not to be used." (what clean living boys we were!) "Only later did it suggest itself as the vehicle by which we could tell the story of the fire. Even now, I've no idea where it came from but it's difficult not to start believing in some divine providence when one considers the subsequent history of the song. "All I know is that I have always listened to my random thoughts ever since."
Roger Glover, Tue, 20 Aug 1996 21:35

Deep Purple themselves didn't seem to notice that the song had any potential, they hardly played it live early in 1972, and Never Before was chosen as the first single from the album. (An edited version of Lazy was chosen in the US.) It wasn't until 1973, when a single consisting of two edits of Smoke on the Water, studio version one side and Made in Japan version on the b-side, was released in the USA, that the song became the rock anthem that it later has become, and helped Deep Purple sail up as on of the world's biggest selling artists.