“Smoke on the Water” was born from a real disaster and remained in history as one of the clearest examples of a song that narrates, almost journalistically, almost cinematically, something that had just happened. The trigger was the fire at the Montreux Casino in Switzerland, on December 4, 1971. Deep Purple had gone there to begin recording Machine Head, using the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio. Time was tight. As the lyrics themselves say, “we didn’t have much time.”