Posted on 08/05/2014 12:43:42 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
...You Really Got Me delivered something very different. It is taut but increasingly hysterical, hard driven and explosive, an out-and-out rocker. It is more riff than song. And what a riff. It consists of just two power chords, three strings of the guitar, sliding up and down over two frets, striking five times in three beats of the bar then restarting after the fourth beat. It has a feeling of being chopped off in its prime and constantly restarted, spluttering like a motorbike getting ready to race, a jerky, stop-start quality that creates an incredible sense of urgency.
It was their third single for Decca, and after two flops, everyone knew this was make or break. Ray wrote the song, influenced by the riffs of American blues, and was the driving force in the studio. In the days when recording sessions tended to last about as long as it took to play the song once, Ray rejected several early takes, insisting on re-recording it to try and capture his band’s live energy. He was unhappy with the slow, bluesy tempo and kept urging the band to play faster....
Released on August 4, 1964, You Really Got Me crept up the charts for a month before eventually giving the Kinks their first number one. Heavy rock, as we think of it now, took a few more years to get a grip, and it wasn’t really until the last years of the decade that it became almost the definitive sound of a more adult popular music. The Who blatantly imitated The Kinks on their classic Talmy produced debut, I Can’t Explain, in 1964. The Rolling Stones fuzzy riff (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction appeared in 1965....
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Steppenwolf.
I don’t know what I’m doin’....
First one to make an international mark, maybe.
Link Wray had played up distortion (and Paul Burlison in the Johnny Burnette Trio before that; and noted by the Yardbirds in their cover of the JBT’s cover of Train Kept A Rollin’).
By the early 60s, the Sonics were howling up in Tacoma Washington.
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-sonics-mn0000428717/biography
In 1964, Buck Ormsby, who played bass with Northwest heroes the Wailers, was impressed with the Sonics’ new lineup and became their manager, as well as signing them to Etiquette Records, a local label he helped run. For their first single, the band took one of their few original tunes and changed it from a number about a proposed dance craze into a cautionary tale about a treacherous female; the results, “The Witch,” had a dark, sinister undercurrent and between Parypa’s guitar, Bennett’s drumming, and Roslie’s vocals, it was louder and crazier sounding than anything else a Northwest band had committed to tape. Backed with a manic cover of Little Richard’s “Keep A’Knockin’,” the single was too much for many local radio stations, but eventually it broke through in enough smaller markets that the record became a major hit in the Northwest; enough so that rather than continue to pay publishing royalties to Little Richard for the B-side, the band recorded another original, “Psycho,” that soon turned the 45 into a two-sided hit.
The Witch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVWAE6n_G4Q
I thought it was Bill Haley and the Comets with ‘Rock Around the Clock’?
That was a milestone, no doubt. However, I would say that Link Wray laid the groundwork for the Kinks, as he was playing with guitar distortion and “heavy” sounds on his instrumentals for a few years already before they scored their hit.
Haha, I just posted to point out Link Wray myself, but you beat me to it.
Good song but I go with Cream for first real hard rock group. Of course I grew up drinking beer to their stuff so I’m prejudiced.
50 years! Wow. I feel old. Then I remember that I still listen to music of J. S. Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos. Those six concertos were already written and publicly performed by 1721. Or “the Red Priest aka Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, who died in 1741, So when it comes to music, fifty years is not truly ancient. Disregard that descriptor of “Dinosaur Rock”.
Girl you’ve really got me going
you’ve got me so I cant sleep at night..
that’s all I can remember but I liked that song...
:)
“..Ray rejected several early takes, insisting on re-recording it to try and capture his band’s live energy. He was unhappy with the slow, bluesy tempo and kept urging the band to play faster.”
In the concert I went to several years ago Ray Davies credited his brother Dave with making the song an uptempo rocker. Ray said he wrote it more as an R&B song and Dave didn’t like it and wanted to play it faster as a rock song. He said Dave turned his back on the band, faced the studio wall, and in Ray’s words, played the chords that put the Kinks into rock and roll history.
The Train Kept a-Rollin'--Tiny Bradshaw (1951)
Space Guitar--Johnny "Guitar" Watson (1954)
Spencer Davis Group
It was Freddy Fender working with Dick Dale that gave us amps that could handle the overdrive. Dick Dale kept freezing the cones and causing the speakers to catch fire.
I don’t know enough to make an educated decision as to the first hard rock tune, but for me life changed when Jon Lord hooked up his Hammond organ to a Marshall amp and Deep Purple covered “Hush.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KcdZFJ-FRk
Then there is the yardbirds’ version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd1gRHk28IE
Rock and roll is not gentle or polite.
The Kinks released “You Really Got Me” in August 1964
The Animals released “House of the Rising Son” in June 1964
I guess hard rock pre-dated heavy metal
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