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

The Evidence

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

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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.

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🔬 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)

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🧬 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.

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