Posted on 12/31/2021 9:15:33 AM PST by DoodleBob
I’d agree with Black Sabbath.
Honorable mention:
Talk, Talk- The Music Machine
Keep Me Hanging on-Vanilla Fudge
Center of Your Mind-Amboy Dukes
Hush- Deep Purple
Blue Cheer
I should have also stated-IMHO
I’m also good with Blue Cheer. What’s your thought on Mott The Hoople or Humble Pie in regards to this? The timing might be a little off, but they definitely contributed to heavy metal. Of course, Black Sabbath is our influence, broadly, for our realm. And hat tip to my bro Lemmy too.
Kick-em-out...
“Rumble,” Link Wray, 1958. The first intentionally distorted guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuAD_sQUgpw
In music historian circles this is the accepted seminal heavy metal song.
Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler is Heavy Metal?
“Butler is an avowed vegan and appeared in an advertisement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 2009.”
Yep, a nod to Jim Marshall along with Pete Townshend for the equipment. Townshend pushed for 100 watt amps. Townshend also had Marshall build 8x12 speaker cabs, but roadies balked at trying to move them, thus the Marshall stack of two 4x12 cabs was born. Of course Townshend would later move on to Hiwatt gear, but he used Marshall equipment in the beginning.
I think Sabbath gets the nod, because they tended to be more dark, than just signing bluesy songs about being cheated on. And so it seems to be “Heavy Metal” is to do songs about heavy subjects.
For example, that’s why I would have been hard-pressed to ever call Van Halen “Heavy Metal”, even though for sure EVH had a lot of metal influence in his playing, but I would just classify it as “hard rock”.
But Metal really coalesced into a genre after Motorhead came out - and advanced into its own during the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM, as it is known) - Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Saxon, etc. Metallica, who I had the privilege of seeing live several times in their very early San Francisco days, then became the leading band in trash/speed metal, and along with their peers Megadeth, Slayer, Exodus, and Anthrax refined the metal genre into the familiar sound that still persists today.
Today "metal" encompasses everything from symphonic metal performed by brilliant musicians to Hardcore with Cookie Monster vocals and guitarists who sound like they first picked up the instrument the day before the recording. I kind of checked out of following the genre when Cookie Monster became the default for newer bands - turn on Liquid Metal on Sirius XM at any random time for an example. But there are still some great bands out there, under the radar.
” sludge and stoner metal “
?????
It’s an interesting period in rock and roll. Partly because the genre labels were getting assigned after the fact by the press, the people making the music really weren’t thinking in those terms. The general consensus is that the psychedelic movement really spawned a great expansion in what rock could be. It broke away from the 2:40 3 verses with choruses and a solo structure and just did whatever. Jimi was kind of in the psychedelic movement, in so far as he got away from the structures.
Psychedelic faded out fast but it spawned 2 things. In the London area where you had classically trained musicians you got progressive rock. Taking this freedom into longer wider forms, borrowing from classical and jazz. In the north where you had less “educated” musicians things got loud, metal.
But what was first for what? Who knows. Certainly plenty of Jimi’s stuff showed the way for metal. But of course we can’t discount Dave Davies putting distortion, arguably the most important single sound in hard rock, in years before.
And we have to remember that the band largely credited with creating the genre, Black Sabbath, generally insist that they were never a metal band. When they’re in a good mood they’ll often admit how much metal took from them but as far as they’re concerned they didn’t make metal. They made loud music they liked. And in a fun indication of how close metal and prog really are Sabbath even has songs that have “including” in their title, which is usually the dead give away of prog.
So who knows. Just have fun with it.
I’m with you on Blue Cheer. I have the original Highs of the 60s album with a number of songs that fit the category. Black Sabbath probably wins the title.
im talking dive bombs...volume...feed back.....
saw them opening up for Ozzy and Randy Rhoads at the Masonic Temple Theater in Detroit...1981...i think they could be heard in Toledo that night...
or “pop metal”...
Edvard Grieg did it in Peer Gynt.
"In the Hall of the Mountain King" is heavy metal.
Townshend allegedly moved on to Hiwatt after a billing dispute between Marshall and The Who's management.
That's one story, anyways.
Interesting thing about Townshend's Hiwatts is that he had his amp technician take all of the tone controls out of the circuit, so there was pretty much nothing working except the volume knob, nothing to degrade the signal between the guitar and the amp's power section.
I have a Gibson Les Paul with a similar feature. If you pull up on one of the tone knobs, it takes all four of the knobs out of the signal chain, adding a noticeable bit of boost to the output. Great for solos.
It was Black Sabbath.
It was only Black Sabbath.
The term was coined by a reporter referring to Black Sabbath.
“At first there was...but this guy...on this album...”
No, it was Black Sabbath.
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