ShadowAngel

Actually the Album is called Machine Head. It was supposed to be recorded at the Casino in Montreaux, which is in Switzerland not France. The place indeed did burn down the day before their recording session was to be started, during a concert of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention when an audience member shot a flare gun at the rattan covered ceiling. The Band was at the concert watching it. A picture of the burning Casino and the "Smoke on the Water" (over Lake Geneva) is in the inside of the LP Gatefold. The story gets even more interesting later on. The band, with the help of Claude Nobs ("Funky Claude" in the song and manager of the famous Montreaux Jazz Festival), relocated to a nearby Theater, called the Pavillon but where kicked out from the Police after neighbours complained about the noise (at the time Deep Purple was by far the loudest band in concerts and recordings). Though not after the roadies of DP and the swiss Police fought it out, the roadies tried their hardest to keep the band in that theatre. So they again relocated to a closed-down Hotel (The Montreaux Grand Hotel). The entire album was recorded in a hallway of the Hotel (a picture of which is on the cardboard sleeve of the Anniversary Edition CD release) with all the cables running through several rooms, corridors and down some windows to the Rolling Stone Mobile Truck. Which proved to be a problem since for every take they would've to walk through the entire Grand Hotel down the street to the van to listen to what they recorded. Annoyed by that, they just stopped going to the van. Machine Head's song therefore mostly recorded in 1 take live.