Heavy Metal! 


Like many people I find Youtube to be a brilliant site for finding live clips of your favourite bands or seeing what sort of video someone has put together for tracks that you already have or know. The thing I find annoying or distracting are the comments, as quite often they are really moronic and sometimes completely ill informed. I've seen quite a few Black Sabbath clips and especially with their very first track entitled 'Black Sabbath'  lots of comments stating things like 'this is where it all started' 'this is the first metal track ever' 'the hippies are supposed to have run screaming when they heard this whilst tripping'. Inevitably these are comments from teen metalheads who werent around when it all happened, but I've also found older fans who also have the same view (but not old enough to have lived through it). It seems like there is a metal mythology that has built up about how and why it all happened.... and alot of it is NOT what happened. As someone that is old enough to have lived through it and was very much into it as it happened, I thought I might put together something about the birth and development of heavy metal, and if anyone finds it interesting then feel free to inform your fellow muthas.

So where did it all start? Well there really isnt a start, music evolves and whenever you find something that is really groundbreaking you find that there was always something that came before, something that lead up to that point, and sometimes unknowingly coming full circle, but for younger listeners its the first time. e.g. when Nirvana started grunge  - I remember listening to this 'new' sound thinking - ermmm this sounds just like 60's Kinks, Stones and lots of other bands that were around at the time. I'm sure a few will disagree.

Lets just dispel one myth - I hear people talk about liking Rock and Metal as if they are separate - what!!  Thats like saying I like Classical and Symphonies. Metal is a genre within Rock. Rock is that huge umbrella that encompasses a number of types of music. That period mid 60's to mid 70's was where just about every genre was given birth, and developed rapidly - apart from metal you had the likes of jazz rock, prog rock, blues rock, classical rock, techno rock, electronic rock, glam rock, fusion, folk rock and so on. It was a period of immense creativity where there were no barriers. You werent inhibited by being within a genre, or playing a particular style, or breaking new ground, anything went, everything was valid.    I hear people talk about being metal purists! what absolute bollocks, the whole impetus of original heavy rock/metal was that anything went and the more unacceptable or uncharacteristic it was, the better.

Heavy Metal - the phrase was first used in terms of music by the writer William Burroughs   to describe the music of an early 60's band I believe it was The Byrds  (there are some claims that it was other bands?) by todays standards or even by the standards of what was going to happen a few years later this wasn't anything like heavy metal. As the 60's progressed the electric guitar got heavier and more powerful, with bands like The Who and Cream, and especially with Jimi Hendrix. Steppenwolf are credited as first singing the phrase 'heavy metal' but this was actually in reference to motorbikes.

If there was ever an event or period when you could say that there was any form of heavy rock revolution then it would have to be 1968/69 with the formation of Led Zeppelin and their release of Led Zep I and II.  So why was this so significant? First of all  Jimmy Page adopted a cleaner crisper guitar sound that moved away from the prevalent grungy distortion of the 60's. It could be described as 'metallic' and it was 'heavy'. So Heavy Metal was a perfect description of the sound. Also just as significant if not even more so were Robert Plants vocals with his orgasmic howls, wails of despair and primal screams, and then add the very powerful rhythm section especially drummer John Bonham who if you ever saw live, looked and sounded as if he was trying to beat the drums through the stage floor.  Led Zeppelin had tremendous and rapid success especially in the US, and spawned thousands and thousands of imitators. In effect they created the blueprint for bands to come. There were other heavy rock bands around such as Iron Butterfly, but it was Led Zep's rapid success that spread this new sound around the world. To many they were anathema - blues purists hated them as they had taken old blues and charged it with a million volts. The power and energy and apparent brashness seemed a world away from the more cerebral climes of the hippyesque 60's, and for many they represented the decline and end of the 60's.

This heavy rock explosion was added to in 1970 by the emergence of two very significant bands - Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Deep Purple had been around for a couple of years but it wasn't until the arrival of vocalist Ian Gillan, and finishing off Jon Lords concerto for group and orchestra that they burst onto the scene with 'Deep Purple in Rock'. From the start the album assaults you with an electric guitar barrage which segues into a gothic organ before the whole band erupts. The effect at the time was sheer impact, there was very little to compare it to.

Black Sabbath released two albums that year - 'Black Sabbath' and 'Paranoid'. Where alot of mythology has built up about the effect and impact of their first album, for most people it was actually 'Paranoid' that put Black Sabbath on the map. The actual track 'Paranoid' was released as a single and was very successful, leading most people to the album. The album was another sonic assault with the massive rumbling heavy riff of 'War Pigs' accompanied by an air raid siren. Black Sabbath had a particularly heavy sound that was the result of an industrial accident. Guitarist Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial cutter, he made his own prosthetic fingertips to enable him to play the guitar, but had to lower the tuning of all the strings in order to be able to apply  finger tip pressure properly. For Black Sabbath it was 'Paranoid' that really kickstarted them and not their first album.

Although there were other bands emerging at this time, it was these three that were the pillars upon which heavy rock was built. At the time it was almost a genre in its own right - ZepPurpleSabbaf! Between them they wrote the vocabulary of heavy rock and set the way for thousands and thousands of imitators and followers. Its interesting that even in this young stage of heavy rock that all three bands were very distinctive in their sound, you could easily recognise which band was playing long before any vocals were heard.

Also interesting that year was Led Zeps third album, which was a complete change from their first two heavy rock classics. It was actually quite a shock at the time when they released an album of mainly acoustic guitar based tracks, and is by many regarded as the first real acoustic rock album. It did however open with a heavy rock classic 'Immigrant Song' which was the first time heavy rock was combined with viking imagery - 'Valhalla I am coming!'

Incidentally, there were no hippies running screaming away from these albums whilst they were tripping. If you've ever been into hallucinogens you'll know it doesnt work that way.

There were many many heavy rock bands that soon emerged Uriah Heep, Nazareth, Iron Maiden, Saxon, UFO, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Motorhead just to name a few.

Between the mid and late 70's, punk and new wave had emerged. You could spend forever discussing why punk happened, what the significance of new wave was and so on, but at the time most heavy rock bands and their followers basically thought it was a load of crap! They weren't interested in intellectualising about the progression of music, they wanted heads down no-nonsense mindless metal! A sort of new wave heavy metal was 'formalised' at that time. It was spear headed by Black Sabbath, and countless new metal bands emerged.

Of the 'big three' , Led Zeppelin had diversified into everything from folk rock to eastern exotica and become an unclassifiable global giant of a band. Deep Purple had gradually fallen apart but had lead to the formation of the likes of Rainbow, Gillan and Whitesnake. So Black Sabbath were left heading this new wave of heavy metal.

There was a danger at the time that heavy metal would get stuck in time, abit like the old rock and rollers of the late 50's. I can remember going into pubs in the 70's where you would see ageing rock and rollers wearing their drainpipes and beetlecrushers and trying to form a quiff on their balding heads, still listening to early Elvis or Bill Hailey as if time had stood still. I could see the same happening with metal, thirty years later aging headbangers in their denims and metal crucifixes still shaking their heads to 70's metal.

At that time metal didnt have the sort of geeky following or cultish appeal it has now. Geekiness went to prog rock and the intellectualising of jazz rock, and the sociological significance of post punk new wave.  Heavy rock was looked down on abit like the mentally challenged younger brother 'Duuuurh must bang head!'

Things changed, however, and not necessarily for the better. In the 80's there came a very corporate aspect to it (and to most music) and a large part became very glam, almost a caricature of what had gone before. We got the awful spandex brigade with their headbands and girlie hairstyles, the imagery and lifestyle seemed more important than the music. As long as you could play faster and louder it didnt matter that there was so little actual musical substance - Motley Crue being a prime example.     

Through the 90's and onwards we saw the emergence of allkinds of genres within metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, punkmetal, numetal, viking metal and on and on. I can even remember seeing online arguments about Norwegian v Finnish metal ... good grief! It was refreshing to listen to bands like Opeth who would break down a few of these pointless barriers and combine prog rock structure with death metal sounds and riffs. Heavy metal purists? what a contradiction in terms. You cant have purists in metal - anything goes and if you cant see that then you've lost the way. Thats how it all started, because people were prepared to break all rules.

So there we go. Where did it all start, well for every point at which you say it started here, you will always find something that came before it, and something which came before that. Alot of metal mythology points back to the first Black Sabbath track because it had that combination of threatening riff with Satanic lyrics, but then metal isnt defined by lyrics or by a riff of impending doom, and that album most people discovered after the impact of their second album. Certainly Led Zeps 'Dazed and Confused' and 'How Many More Times' on their first album had just as much of  the metal sound and drive, and how many people were aware that Jimmy Pages violin bow solos live were actually an occult ritual cleansing. You could also go back to King Crimsons '21st century Schizoid Man' in '69 for the themes and power, or Arthur Browns 'Fire' in '68 when he screams out 'I'm the God of Hell and Fire!'

Well you can actually go back alot further, e,g. listen to Tchaikovsky's symphonies. If he wasn't a riff master then I dont know who was. In his 1812 Overture written in 1880 he even punctuated the main riff with canon fire! now thats metal! Or listen to Bachs Toccata and Fugue in D Minor which was first published in 1833. Very gothy and very metal!

There is very little these days that can be called new, everything has been done before, and after the boom of the 60's/70's  in just about every genre and the mass marketing  business that took over as well as the rapid advances in music technology, everything is saturated. One day your kids will play you a new sound, a new band, psychoalienquarkmetal  and claim its the best thing ever, and you will groan as you preferred it when it came round the first time or was it the second.