Deep Purple - "Smoke on the water"

The song is about a fire in the Casino at Montreux, Switzerland. The band was going to record "Machine Head" there (and had rented a mobile recording studio), but someone (during the concert) fired a flare gun at the ceiling which set the place on fire. The "smoke on the water" that became the title of the song 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.

Left with an expensive mobile recording unit and no place to record, the band was forced to scout the town for another place to set up. One promising venue was a local theatre called The Pavilion, in an effort to capture a reverberative sound; but soon after the band had loaded in and started working/recording, the nearby neighbors took offense at the noise, and the band was able to lay down backing tracks for only one song before the local police shut them down.
Finally, after about a week of searching, the band rented out the nearly-empty Montreux Grand Hotel and converted its hallways and stairwells into a makeshift recording studio, where they laid down most of the tracks for what would become their most successful album.
Ironically, the only song from Machine Head not recorded in the Grand Hotel was "Smoke on the Water" itself ; the basic tracks for the song had been the only things recorded during the aborted session in the Grand Hotel.

The song is known for and recognizable by its central theme, a crunching four-tone minor key blues progression (I-III-IV with a passing flat V) that is perhaps the single most famous riff in heavy metal music history. The riff is properly played without a pick, using two fingers to pluck two adjecent strings held in a IV interval. The riff, played on electric guitar by Ritchie Blackmore, is immediately joined by drums and contrapuntal electric bass and organ parts before the start of Ian Gillan's vocal. Despite the heaviness of the guitar part, constant movement and interplay within the supporting parts keeps the feel of the song from becoming leaden. The song's structure takes a contrasting verse-chorus form, with the driving verse sections building musical tension while the soaring chorus releases it.

The band did not think this would be a hit [!] and rarely played it live. It took off when they released it as a US single over a year after the album came out.

Available on the album "Machine Head" (hence the name of the 90's metal band)