Montreux, Heh Heh Heh, and Shameless Promotion

If you're wondering what Cindy Margolis has to do with Frank Zappa, perhaps this will fire up your imagination.

The date was December 7, 1971. It was thirty years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Maybe that should have been an omen. Certainly this was not an insignificant date in history.

Anyway, Deep Purple...was setting up their camp in Montreux, Switzerland to record their next album. They were going to use a mobile recording studio to do this which they rented from The Rolling Stones, known as their Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. They set up at the Montreux Entertainment Complex which was part of their casino....

Well, on the eve of their recording session Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention were performing live in concert at the casino's theater....However, before they could really get into the meat of their performance a fire broke out during the concert. It was said to have been caused by a Swiss fan shooting a flare gun at the ceiling...that ultimately destroyed the entire casino complex, along with all of Frank Zappa and The Mother's equipment....

From their hotel across the way from the casino, the members of Deep Purple watched the fire burn and the smoke cover the lake....

The aftermath of all this was that Deep Purple had no place to record and Frank Zappa and the Mothers were part of the most famous concert in history to get cancelled mid way through.

Subsequently immortalized in a song performed by everyone from Beavis and Butt-Head to (in my alternate universe) Cindy Margolis.

december041971

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