Music
The arguments about the origins of Heavy Metal have been going on almost as long as heavy metal music has existed. For some it all goes back to the primitive chunka-chunka-chunk barre chords of The Kinks' 1964 hit, "You Really Got Me." For a select few, it's grizzly origins go back even further than that to the menacing reverberating fuzz tones of Link Wray's subversive 1958 hit, "Rumble."
Most rock historians however now agree that the first musical and cultural outlines of heavy metal , if not its entire substance, began in 1966 when Eric Clapton left John Mayall's Bluebreakers to form his own virtuoso heavy rock trio, "Cream." Cream's ground breaking Disraeli Gears album helped move pop music further into the realms of the improvisatory "psychedelic blues" that would become the musical foundation of what we now term heavy metal. Cream was part of the flower power era, something the earliest heavy metal bands all openly rebelled against.
The same goes for Jimi Hendrix, another flamboyant guitar virtuoso home many people credit as being the godfather of heavy metal and whose molding of the blues into something infinitely more fiery and colorful changed the way guitarists like Clapton, Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend thought about their craft forever. Like Cream, Hendrix was a preeminent member of the peace and love generation. Heavy Metal, real thunder and lightning Heavy Metal as it is now universally recognized has almost always been about something much darker lyrically, and even more convoluted musically. Jimi was searching for godhead. Heavy Metal was more concerned with communing with the Devil.
While Sabbath with their deliberately down tuned guitars and songs about paranoia, heroin and the atrocities of the Vietnam War, can safely lay claim to having kick started the heavy metal phenomenon in the U.K. an idiom which Sabbath drummer Bill Ward originally characterized as "Downer Rock and the roots of this most outré rock genre also stretch across the ocean to the United States, where by 1968 a new generation of hard and heavy bands including MC5, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly was also willfully taking the music to its very outer limits.
Along with Sabbath, all of these bands played an influential role in shaping the sound and fury of heavy metal bands that would follow in the '70s and '80s. As Motörhead Lemmy said, “When I got kicked out of Hawkwind and formed Motörhead, the whole thing was that I wanted to create the English MC5. ”Meanwhile Steppenwolf, of course were famously the first band to use the term "Heavy Metal" in a song on their 1968 worldwide hit “Born To Be Wild."
Not to be outdone, that same year Blue Cheer a trio of reputedly acid crazed bikers from San Francisco managed by a Hells Angel also released an early Heavy Metal classic of their own, though in their case it was a radical reworking of an existing tune that made heads spin, transforming Eddie Cochran's finger snapping "Summertime Blues" into a monolithic slab of teeth grinding noise, a veritable Frankenstein of a song.
From that point on, the floodgates were thrown wide open as a whole slew of next generation rock bands, disenchanted by the empty promises of the so called love generation, arrived like drunken, rabble rousing gate crashers at the party intent on ripping up the rulebook throwing love out the window, along with all the flowers and replacing them with a distinctly unsettling ambience all their own. From here on in, rock music would no longer be a dance, but it would become an arena to do battle in.
The cross pollination of musical ideas carried back and forth across the Atlantic, with Led Zeppelin the first British band to really grasp where rock would be heading in the '70, taking the new heavier form into breathtakingly original areas. Even though Jimmy Page favored tinkering around on the acoustic guitar when left to his own devices, when he'd toured the U.S. with The Yardbirds he had seen for himself the effect bands like Iron Butterfly were having.
Paying close attention were the boys in Black Sabbath.
As Sabbath bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler would later tell, "Even though we all had similar musical influences from the blues to what Cream were doing, we all worshipped Zeppelin in Sabbath lying on the floor smoking dope listening to the first Zeppelin album. That's where "Paranoid" came from, listening to "Communication Breakdown."
In fact, it sounded so much like "Communication Breakdown" when we first wrote it, I refused to record it! I thought everyone would see through it straight away. But guess who was wrong?"
It wasn't just music that was changing, or course. By 1969 the world of peace signs and happy hippy trails had been fatally holed beneath the waterline by twin horrors of Manson slaying and Altamont. Barley had the fog of marijuana smoke cleared from the Woodstock air, it seemed, when news reached the world of the shocking multiple murders of actress Sharon Tate and several other prominent Hollywood denizens by deluded followers of would be rock star Charles Manson, a ghastly event that single handedly introduced the concept of rampant paranoia to the hippy music community.
The disastrous outcome in December of the same year The Rolling Stones; free show at the Altamont Speedway on the outskirts of San Francisco was another huge turning point, Meredith Hunter, an 18 year old Black man was stabbed to death by Hells Angels as the band blasted out “Under My Thumb.” Three others also died at Altamont. With President Nixon choosing just that moment to step up the bombing of Vietnam, suddenly the age of Aquarius seemed like a desperately dark place to be.
As Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler explains, "People always look back now and call the music we made unduly negative, but these were the times we were living in. The peace and love thing was over, and everybody was suddenly getting into the occult alternative religions, black and white magic, stuff like that."
Meanwhile, a whole raft of the new self styled heavy bands was suddenly emerging. From Britain came album oriented heavy hitters like Deep Purple and Uriah Heep. Purple had already enjoyed limited pop success in the U.S., but by 1972 and the release of their ground breaking Machine Head album they had reinvented themselves as the loudest band in the world.
It was a claim which almost certainly wasn't true but proved to be the perfect advertisement for their strenuous new insanely pumped up music as evinced here by the track that always opened their shows, "Highway Star." Uriah Heep was a similarly bombastic proposition, musically. Named after a villainous character from the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield, they followed in the comet trail of bands like Sabbath and Purple, their chief calling card was a marvelous slice of protean rock titled “Easy Livin'.”
As Heep guitarist Mick Box says. "Because the emphasis for bands like us, Purple and Sabbath was always on albums and live shows, on good musicianship, we really felt we could take the music anywhere. Consequently we wanted to explore every possibility. To be as way out as possible."
Rock n' Metal History
(from metal eddie's perspective)
KISS 1973
🎸⚡️💀☠️
By 1971, such was the grip these quintessentially English bands radon the American rock market, critics began talking of a second British Invasion. It was not long however, before American bands began to reassert themselves, and by the mid '70s the rock market had shifted again as more party oriented, guitar driven outfits like Montrose "Bad Motor Scooter" began to inject some fun into heavy metal.
Leading the way was weirdly named Alice Cooper, whose 1973 album "Billion Dollar Babies" successfully fused the best of the Detroit Rock City sound of the MC5 with the makeup of the momentarily fashionable glam rock movement and ironic Hollywood satire of Frank Zappa (the man who first talent spotted Alice Cooper.)
It was a heady combination that would turn Alice Cooper into a superstar and prove that heavy metal could be just as potent while wearing a smile on its face even if that face was made up to look like the Devil himself.
RUSH
Legends of Rock Music
Neil Ellwood Peart was a Canadian-American author and musician, famous as the drummer and lyricist for the progressive rock band Rush. At the age of 31, he was the youngest to be inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame. In his early career, Neil’s performances primarily focused on hard rock style. In later years, Peart became one of the innovators of the genre by incorporating jazz and swing components in his playing style. Peart was renowned for his technical proficiency and stamina apart from including universal and diverse subjects of science fiction, fantasy and philosophy as a lyricist. Besides his luminous career as a musician, Peart was also famous for being an author of seven non-fiction novels which were loosely based on his traveling and adventure escapades. He also got recognition as an author of ‘The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa’, ‘Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road’ and ‘Far and Away: A Prize Every Time’. Neil Ellwood Peart is truly a legend of rock music.
Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow
With Vocalist Ronnie James Dio
Ronnie James Dio considered this release
his favorite Rainbow album
Meanwhile, back in Britain the mid to late '70s would herald its own reconfigured generation of metal bands. Leading the way was Rainbow, the band Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore formed with ex-Elf vocalist Ronnie James Dio in wake of Blackmore's decision to leave Deep Purple because they were straying too far from their hard rock roots.
As you can tell from "Man On The Silver Mountain,"
Blackmore was determined that Rainbow would be different.
As Dio remembers (R.i.P)
“Although Ritchie and I always had a lot of laughs together on the road, once we got onstage together it was straight down to business. We weren't making fun, we were very serious about what we did. Rainbow was meant to be our joint attempt to take heavy metal to a new level.”
UFO
blue oyster cult
🎸⚡️💀☠️
By the start of the '80s another new generation of heavy metal bands were ready to storm over the cultural horizon and pose their own challenge to the status quo.