Frank Zappa

During the “King Kong” solo

On Saturday 4 December 1971, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing in the theatre of the Montreux Casino, to a full house.

The fire did not break out at just any moment: it started at the beginning of Don Preston’s synthesizer solo on “King Kong”, when a member of the audience fired a flare towards the ceiling. That ceiling was covered in rattan. It went up instantly.

Swiss police would later identify a suspect. This site does not name him: to our knowledge, the man was never convicted.

The joke, then the evacuation

The band’s first reaction was comic, because they were a comic band. Backing vocalist Howard Kaylan shouted “Fire!”, then “Arthur Brown in person!”, a joke referring to the singer who came on stage with his head in flames. In the moment, nobody took it seriously.

Zappa understood very quickly. He cut things short and asked the audience to leave the building calmly. It is largely thanks to that composure, and to Claude Nobs going down to fetch the people trapped in the basement, that the toll of the evening was what it was: no deaths.

What Zappa lost there

That evening is often told from Deep Purple’s point of view, watching the smoke from across the bay. Seen from the stage, the story is less romantic: the fire destroyed the entire Casino complex, and with it all of the Mothers of Invention’s equipment.

Zappa came out unharmed, but he lost his instruments and his touring gear in a single evening. The rest of his December 1971 would be just as bad: a few days later, in London, he was pushed off the stage of the Rainbow Theatre by a member of the audience and seriously injured.

An involuntary place in rock history

Frank Zappa’s name, and that of his Mothers, opens the second verse of “Smoke on the Water”: the song names them as witnesses to the scene. Zappa composed nothing that evening, and yet his concert lies at the origin of one of the most played riffs in the world.

A commemorative plaque on the Territet quayside recalls the episode at the spot where Deep Purple fell back to record. The Casino was rebuilt and reopened in 1975: it was in that new building that Mountain Studios settled, bought by Queen in 1979. Everything that follows in the musical history of Montreux flows indirectly from that fire.