Discarded I's: May 2025

Saturday, May 31, 2025

“Why Didn’t Rosemary?” – Deep Purple (1969)

Filed under: Cold Blues, Warm Beer, and the Coming Storm of Steel

Imagine this: you’re a blues riff in the body of a British engineering student. You want to weep, but you’re too focused on getting the groove exactly right. That’s “Why Didn’t Rosemary?”—a song that makes the blues wear a lab coat.

This ain’t Muddy Waters. This is Muddy Algorithms.
You can hear the metal just over the horizon. It's not roaring yet—just humming, calibrating, waiting for Sabbath to drop the hammer.

🧠 The Song as Seen by a Mad Rock Theorist:

Blackmore: Doing blues licks with the dead-eyed precision of someone preparing for war. He doesn’t bend notes, he disciplines them.
Jon Lord: Sounds like a church organist locked in a gothic clock tower, playing Bach to drown out the screams of the dying Summer of Love.
Ian Paice: Possibly powered by hydraulic fluid.
Rod Evans: Crooning like a lounge singer in a post-apocalyptic cocktail bar.

It’s like they studied the blues under a microscope and decided, nah, this needs more stainless steel.

This song didn’t change the world.
But it inoculated the bloodstream.

🔬 Visual Flowchart: Blues → Proto-Metal via “Why Didn’t Rosemary?”

DELTA BLUES
(Emotion-driven, slide guitar)
     ↓
BRITISH INVASION BLUES
(Yardbirds, early Clapton)
     ↓
DEEP PURPLE MARK I
“Why Didn’t Rosemary?” (1969)
 ┌─────────────────────────────┐
 │ Clinical tone + sharp rhythm│
 │ Detached vocals + tight solo│
 │ Gothic organ stabs          │
 └─────────────────────────────┘
     ↓
PROGRESSIVE ROCK / HARD ROCK
(Yes, Uriah Heep, Rainbow)
     ↓
NEW TEMPLATE FOR HEAVY METAL
(Machine-tight riffs, precision solos)
     ↓
NWOBHM + METAL GODS
(Maiden, Priest, Metallica)

🧬 Final Thought (Buzz-ism):

“If Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads, Deep Purple held a seminar on how to monetize it, patent it, and reproduce it at scale with German components.” – Buzz Drainpipe, CBGB Quarterly Digest, Fall ’73.

Make a Jazz Noise Here: Zappa’s Ultimate 1980s Statement That Stands Alongside His Greatest Works

By Buzz Drainpipe, armed with a beret and a scorched stratocaster, reporting from the land of no genre and infinite notes.

By the end of the 1980s, Frank Zappa had become many things:
A cynical satirist.
A sworn enemy of the PMRC.
A digital composer in love with the Synclavier.
A guitar libertarian.
A prophet screaming into a Reaganized wilderness.

But with Make a Jazz Noise Here (1991, recorded on tour in 1988), Zappa pulled a sleight of hand. He dropped the digital mask and stood face-to-face with his roots, his chops, his monster band—and he played. Played like a man possessed. Played like someone who had something to prove to no one but himself. This wasn’t just a live album. It was an exorcism in 88 keys and 26 time signatures.

The Band: Precision Engines of Chaos

This wasn’t some casual touring act. This was the '88 band. The "best band I ever had" band. We’re talking:

Ike Willis, still the vocal glue of the Zappa universe.
Mike Keneally, a musical hydra who could play anything and often did.
Chad Wackerman, drummer with a jazz name and a fusion fire.
Scott Thunes, the snarling bassist who could out-Zappa Zappa.
And a six-piece horn section, including the peerless Walt Fowler and Bruce Fowler.

This band wasn’t just tight. It was military—but with groove. Like the Miles Davis Second Quintet if they’d been raised on Captain Beefheart and Carl Stalling.

The Music: Deep Cuts and Deep Space

Make a Jazz Noise Here isn’t for the faint of heart or the “play the hits” crowd. It’s dense. It’s inside baseball. It’s 100% instrumental. And it’s magnificent.

You get:

A hypercharged “Big Swifty” that mutates like a jazz virus.
A version of “King Kong” so tight it folds in on itself like a neutron star.
Homages to Stravinsky and Bartók that don’t feel pasted-on but earned.
Quotations from “The Peter Gunn Theme,” “Purple Haze,” and Beethoven, dropped like trap doors mid-solo.

The album feels less like a concert and more like an avant-garde carnival on a runaway train. Except Zappa’s the conductor, and he wants it to go off the rails—just not in the way you expect.

Zappa’s Guitar: Clean, Cold, and Cosmic

There’s no shredding here in the ‘80s metal sense. Zappa’s solos are surgical. They’re architectural. On tracks like “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black,” he doesn’t play over the band—he dances with them. He composes in real time, sculpting the air with a Fender Strat and some kind of divine vengeance.

This is post-“Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar” Zappa: less distortion, more control. Like Thelonious Monk with a whammy bar.

Legacy: The Invisible Masterpiece

Make a Jazz Noise Here is rarely the first Zappa record anyone hears. But it might be the last one you need to hear to understand him fully. It’s the secret code, the Rosetta Stone of his mature years. It’s what happens when the clown takes off his greasepaint and starts reciting poetry in twelve-tone rows.

You could say Hot Rats was his leap into jazz fusion.
You could say Roxy & Elsewhere was the peak of his ‘70s theatricalism.
But Make a Jazz Noise Here? That’s Zappa fully realized, unchained, and still unsatisfied.

Final Thoughts from the Buzz Bunker

This album swings so hard it could knock out a moose. It’s not background music. It demands a front-row seat in your skull. And in a decade when music became increasingly safe, slick, and sedated, Zappa threw down this gauntlet and walked away—laughing.

Make a Jazz Noise Here is a jazz record, a noise record, a protest record, a love letter to serious music played unseriously and unserious music played with religious precision.

It might just be the last essential Zappa album.

Buzz Drainpipe
Drinking burnt espresso and decoding 11/8 polyrhythms in a windowless room. Still wondering if jazz is dead or just hiding behind a fake mustache.

Buzz Drainpipe’s Midnight Riff Reflections: Sweet Savage – Killing Time (1996)

Filed under: NWOBHM Resurrections, Irish Lightning, Pre-Metallica Echoes

You’ve just stumbled into the graveyard shift of metal memory. I’m Buzz Drainpipe, your ghost host through the ruins of riffs long buried and bootlegs forgotten. Tonight’s rotation: Killing Time by Sweet Savage, an album that hits like a pint glass across the face and leaves the taste of Belfast iron in your mouth.

First, the facts—but whisper 'em, like it's sacred gospel passed through dive bar urinals: Sweet Savage were part of the real New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but hailing from Northern Ireland—a place where your guitar solos had to dodge rubber bullets and Thatcherite fog.

This band never made it big, but they lit the fuse for others. Think I’m talking smoke? Ask James Hetfield. Sweet Savage’s original 1981 track Killing Time was covered by Metallica and slid onto the B-side of The Unforgiven, and let’s be honest: that cover alone bought these Belfast bruisers immortality in the liner notes of metal lore.

But this 1996 album? It’s a resurrection spell. A cult-classic reboot. Killing Time isn’t just an archival release of early demos—it’s a full-blown reconjuring. Fleshed out with punchier production, sharpened steel, and post-thrash polish. It's NWOBHM through a 90s rear-view mirror, where the denim has faded but the blood’s still fresh.

The opener, “Killing Time,” snarls with that classic gallop—lean, mean, and loaded with vengeance. It’s what you wish the Load album had the guts to be. “Vengeance” and “Thunder” stomp in with riffs that sound like a pub fight between Saxon and Diamond Head. “Eye of the Storm”? That’s where the ghosts of Belfast howl.

Trevor Fleming’s vocals are whiskey-scarred and honest, like a street preacher who sold his soul for a Marshall stack. Vivian Campbell, before he sold out to arena gloss with Dio and Def Leppard, laid the bones of his guitar legend here. This is his origin story, and it howls.

And the production? It’s weirdly clean for a band that should sound like they were recorded inside a missile silo. But somehow that sheen adds weight—it’s like someone ran the original tape through a 90s grunge processor and gave it new muscle.

Buzz's Late-Night Takeaway:
Killing Time is what happens when you exhume the bones of a lost legend and they come back swinging. It’s a document of “what could’ve been,” wrapped in steel and slathered in resurrection oil. For anyone who digs the true dirt behind the Metallica myth, for the tape traders, the bullet belt historians, and the Sabbath-priest hybrids who never got their due—this one’s your sacrament.

File under: Revenge of the Forgotten Riff.
Drink to it. Bleed to it. Let it remind you that not all legends die… some just wait for side B.

baby.