SMOKE ON THE WATER

MUSIC LIFE

From Geneva, I made a special trip to Montreux to see the places where Deep Purple wrote the immortal Smoke on the Water thirty-five years ago. The train, swaying, walked a meter from Lake Geneva. On the other side of the smooth cold water were...

From Geneva, I made a special trip to Montreux to see the places where Deep Purple wrote the immortal Smoke on the Water thirty-five years ago. The train, swaying, walked a meter from Lake Geneva. On the other side of the smooth cold water were the Alps, which occupied half the sky. In the inner pocket of my jacket was an empty wallet, expertly cleaned yesterday by a pickpocket in the pavilion-restaurant of the Geneva Motor Show.

My relations with Europe were not easy. At the European Football Championship in Portugal, an English fan broke my rib, at the Geneva Motor Show they stole my cash. In the restaurant, I hung my jacket over the back of a chair and began eating sausages; at some point, I noticed a man who, sitting down at a nearby table, barely perceptibly pushed me in the back. I was surprised - pushing is not accepted in Switzerland. Three hours later, at the box office of the station, when I was about to buy a ticket, I found that my wallet had been completely cleaned out, they took not only six hundred euros, but also one and a half thousand rubles, which I put aside for a taxi from Domodedovo. However, deep European culture made itself felt here too: a wallet without money, but with a driver's license and credit cards, was politely put in place.

In the same carriage with me were two Swiss soldiers. Ordinary short-haired guys with round faces, who, if they talked about anything, it was only about twenty years of good nutrition. Their uniforms occupied me more than their faces. In their dark green uniforms and high leather boots, it would not be embarrassing to walk the catwalk of the Fashion House. But most of all, my eye was drawn to the massive, oily-shine plaques on which the battalion emblem was embossed. This one emblem - is it made of bronze, or what? - cost more than anything our soldier wore, whom I met time and again in Moscow, at the tobacconist on Shabolovskaya. Lanky, awkward, skinny, in a heavy tarpaulin dangling on his feet, with the thin neck of an undernourished child, the soldier looked wistfully at the audience, saying with all his orphan air: “We can’t ask for cigarettes, but we don’t ask ... But suddenly you yourself Guess, huh?"

Switzerland shines with wealth like fatty cheese. There are no cheap consumer goods in stores: everything is real, made of wool, silk and cashmere, and everything is expensive for any European, except for the Swiss. Ladies and gentlemen walk through the streets, their faces expressing polite complacency. Even rich people don't have such faces in Russia. To build up such a face, it takes three hundred years in a row, spreading butter on bread and sticking sausage on top, sweetly thinking about deposits in some Credit Suisse that grow ... and grow ... and grow. But even in this Switzerland, the town of Montreux gives the impression not of a rich, but of a mind-numbingly rich place.

In Montreux, high on the slopes of the mountains, villas with turrets hang, from afar they look like bird nests. Flags are flying in front of the hotels. Here, as you know, the esthete Nabokov lived in the Grand Hotel. In a luxurious suite overlooking Lake Geneva, this butterfly catcher very beautifully, very stylishly yearned for Russia.

This is a city where European millionaires like to relax, whose names and photos do not get into the press. Flashing in the newspapers for such people is a bad taste.

It was here in December 1971 that Deep Purple arrived to record the disc that would go down in history as Machine Head. Why, of all European cities, did they choose fashionable Montreux? I think the desire to shock a respectable audience with their obscene appearance is one of the driving motives for any renegade, and for a debauchee, appropriate scenery is always needed.

In Helsinki, where I lived in the early nineties, I was at first surprised that the main gathering of local alcoholics for some reason always happened in front of the presidential palace, on the elegant Esplanade. In the evenings, all drunken evil spirits crawled here; falling under a bench on the most beautiful boulevard in the city was a special thrill for these people with exhausted faces and red bare necks. I believe Deep Purple experienced something similar when they came to Montreux.

They arrived and it started. It seems that their arrival moved some bolts of the universe. In the casino hall, where they were supposed to record their new disc, Frank Zappa was giving a concert. Deep Purple came to the concert in full force, one of the audience enthusiastically fired a flare at the ceiling, and the roof blazed with bright flames. Zappa, a rock and roll eccentric with a pointy beard and shoulder-length hair, remained on stage as if the fire were part of the show. From the stage, he directed the evacuation of the audience. But part of the public rushed not to the street, but to the basement. Claude Nobs, then a young music salesman who is now a solid 70-year-old guru and permanent director of the Montreux Music Festival, returned to the burning building and led people out of the basement a few minutes before the roof collapsed. For this feat, Deep Purple named him in their song funky Cloude - cool Claude.

After walking for a quarter of an hour along the shore of the lake, along a path lined with pine trees, intended for exercise, I found the place where it all happened. Now there is a new casino building: a concrete cube with glass doors, because of which the gatekeeper looks at you with polite suspicion. The casino is so solid, so respectable and so boring, as if it is waiting for the next arrival of Deep Purple, who, of course, will not fail to burn it down again.

Smoke on the Water, the great dark song, was scribbled by Glover and Gillan on a napkin in a lakeside café the day after the fire. Where is this legendary napkin now, I do not know. I found a cafe where all this tentatively took place: a round glass rotunda on the shore of the lake. The waiter in a snow-white shirt and with a black bow tie was full of aristocracy, as if he were the Duke of Lorraine, secretly moonlighting in these places. I ordered a pizza and looked at the lake. I saw the lake, the mountains, and the city from exactly the same vantage point that the anonymous photographer whose photo went down in history took on the day of the fire. Everything was the same as then, there was only a huge column of smoke above the Alps, half the sky high.

In decent Montreux, events of this kind - fires, fights, brawls and riots - had never happened before the arrival of Deep Purple. Here, on the shore of the lake, near the Alps, it is not customary to even raise your voice, not to mention squealing and yelling, as Gillan knew how to do. Therefore, when he took up his own in a hotel hastily rented instead of a burnt down casino, the police appeared there. Then the musicians covered the walls of the hotel with old mattresses and continued to work. Where did they get so much junk in Montreux? It's impossible to answer this question, but you can imagine a long-haired Ritchie Blackmore in company with an overgrown Jon Lord, prowling along the main street of Montreux in search of old mattresses. I'm sorry I missed this spectacle.

One day, I left the Dom U Doroga club late in the evening with rock and roll photographer Alexander Osipov. It's in the Pirogovka area. Doctor Agranovsky had just played in the club, now another team was tuning the instruments there - I don’t remember now which one. The photographer and I walked along the street between the two poles of being - from the blues-rock club to the first Moscow hospice. Thirty paces separated them. In the dark cold air, the small windows of the club burned brightly, and heated happy faces, beards, denim jackets, bottles, guitars glided behind them. The hospice nearby was quiet and dark, and not a soul could be seen in the windows. We instinctively crossed to the other side of the street, to the deli. And Osipov told me that here, next to this grocery store, he heard the most amazing performance of Smoke on the Water.

In short, simple phrases, he described to me three peasants from a nearby courtyard who entered the wine department at the evening hour. They were all in sweatpants, one in slippers. This one, in slippers, had a button accordion with him. Throwing themselves off, the natives of Pirogovka took a bottle of vodka for three and settled down to drink it on the bench at home. I well imagined their puffy faces, their graying hair, their mighty fists clutching a bottle. They drank, of course, from the throat. Then the accordion player stretched out the furs, stamped his foot in his slipper, and sang Smoke on the Water. The other two, standing nearby, sang along. Their eyes were covered with a veil, their faces turned to stone.

Smoke, listen, on the water,

Fire, damn it, in the sky,

they sang with gloomy force to the groans and sobs of the button accordion. Life and death, water and fire, fashionable Montreux, bustling Moscow, a graduate of the Blackmore Conservatory in London, an unnamed Moscow alcoholic with a button accordion - everything connected together at that moment.