Records are meant to be broken, not the vinyl kind. We are talking about the Guinness Book of World Records kind.
On June 23, 2007, the Largest Guitar Ensemble, 1,802 guitar players, strummed our Song of the Day.
The session, near Stutgart, Germany, broke a record set 20 days before in Kansas City when 1,721 guitarists the song. The German record didn’t last long, either. Nor did the record set in India or the one at the first Thanks Jimi Festival in Poland in 2008. The festival keeps beating its own record. It’s now up to 7,676 guitar players.
It’s hard to top the story about “Smoke on the Water.” Deep Purple band members never thought the song would be a hit.
Ritchie Blackmore, who wrote the opening guitar riff, was embarrassed to show it to the band “because it was such a Neanderthal tune for a guitarist of his caliber.” The band, at first, didn’t play it at concerts. They didn’t release it as a single until 1973, two years after recording it. It reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100.
The opening guitar riff is the best ever, according to a 2008 survey of students from music schools in London.
Ian Gillan wrote the lyrics after the band witnessed a fire during a Frank Zappa concert at the Casino at Montreux, Switzerland. The smoke on the water was the smoke over Lake Geneva.
"Funky Claude was running in and out pulling kids out the ground," was Claude Nobs, a man who helped rescue people in the fire and find the band a new hotel.
"Every detail of the song was true,” Nobs said on songfacts.com. “It’s what really happened.”
Song of the Day is a collaboration of Sheldon Zoldan and WGCU Public Media. Simon Dunham edited the audio story.
