Can it be the reason why Uriah Heep never were taken seriously....

Ah c'mon, that was his shtick. I always thought the contrast between his "femininity" and the heavy, aggressive, masculine nature of the music added to the band's image by making it more ambiguous, so to speak.

 

1985's Equator is pretty much the nadir of their catalog. It and Head First were milquetoast attempts at trying to be Foreigner or something akin to that.

 

It's pretty funny how everyone thinks that Lawton era Heep was pure pop. Well, in 1977 they released THE most metallic and NWOBHM sounding 70's song I can think of (sorry Priest!)

 

I just read through your post in the other thread - nice piece of analysis and writing. SH.tv would benefit from more posts like that.

 

Looking at record sales stats, especially before the system became more comprehensively developed in the late 70's (leaving out label non-reporting and inflated reporting issues) does not always give a good picture of an acts relative popularity. Its a piece of the pie, certainly not the pie.

Uriah Heep reminds me of groups like Blue Oyster Cult, Foghat, or Black Oak Arkansas who, in terms of RIAA stats (BOA had 3 Gold albums, none charting in the top 10 or 20, just one single cracking top 40 AM) headlined or were top billed at large festivals and could fill an arena with ease for half the decade. These groups were not superstars ala Elton John, Zep, Floyd, Wings, ELP, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Doobies, Deep Purple etc. of the mid' 70's.....but they were certainly 'big' and well exposed even though not as universally popular.

Several years ago I had an interesting conversation with a young agent/promotor who was intrigued by the changes in pop music and fan base since the 70's, the relative popularity of 'live' events & sales. In the 70's second / third tier groups like Foghat - who were probably not in the top 50 top selling acts in the US - often had sold out, back to back arena sized events. In the modern era, only the top superstars (Madonna, McCartney, rap superstars etc.) could fill the local coliseum. Todays 'relative' Foghat/Uriah Heep acts play 3,000 seat theater/club/casino size venues. Its an interesting perspective.

 

Whatever credibility you might have had after your first sentence, you totally lost with your second.

 

I think it's just another example of how lucrative a booming music business could be. One looks at chart stats on Wikipedia today and if a band doesn't have several platinum albums, it looks like they weren't successful. And yet so many of these bands were playing for hundreds of thousands of people every year. Things were very different.

 

That's the only good song on Innocent Victim. The rest of the album is piss awful, IMO. The first time I heard it, I thought I had put on a Doobie Brothers album by mistake.

 

Stats and latter day myth building also distort history. I've had young people (sincerely) say too bad Deep Purple were just a cult band in the 70's, that the Stones we barely known until Sticky Fingers, the Velvet Underground rivaled the Beatles & Elvis in popularity, and so on. Just insane stuff.

 

I think that's true as well for bands that have become much more obscure than Foghat or UH and to my knowledge mostly never issued big selling records. Prog band Renaissance sold out Carnegie Hall in NYC in the mid 70s for multi-night stands and could sell out relatively big places in the northeast. Same with Nektar and I'm sure there are other examples of artists that had pockets of followers in the US that never made it to superstardom but could still fill big houses. I could be wrong, but I don't think you see that kind of thing anymore.

 

I agree that the touring circuit was different in the 70s, as there were more acts who didn't sell all that many albums but who could pull in lots of fans at shows. I think album-oriented radio helped those acts a ton and made them bigger draws on the road than their chart popularity should've dictated.

Out of curiosity, I went to setlist.fm to see where Heep played in their heyday. Looks like about 2/3rds arenas and 1/3rds theaters in the 1973-75 era. Pretty good!

I think the escalation of ticket prices over the years did the biggest number on acts like that. When tickets were $7, people would flock to the shows, but when they got more expensive, the "popular but not superstar acts" lost the ability to play the bigger places consistently.

I guess the decline of "album-oriented rock" didn't help, either. Seems like those sorts of bands like Heep, Foghat, BOA and the like didn't really exist in the 1980s, and the kinds of "second tier" acts that replaced them didn't inspire the same kind of devotion to live shows.

Though I suspect the second-tier hair metal bands did pretty well in the 1980s - not sure they could sell as many tickets as their album-oriented 70s equivalents, though. That era of "moderately popular bands who could sell lots of concert tickets" really seems restricted mainly to the 70s.

Or I could be full of crap - I'm just spitballing!

 

I think this post needs a trophy. Worst mean spirited post!

 

That IS nuts - everyone knows VU were more popular than Elvis and the Beatles combined!!!

 

They certainly were electrifying onstage....

...according to Gary Thain.

 

Certainly one of the more ignorant in recent memory; he obviously has not read much Dickens. His spelling isn't great, either

 

Please post video of yourself fronting rock band + wearing tight pants, so forum members can comment.

 

No laughing matter to him, I'm sure. It's amazing how many musicians have been shocked like he was onstage and didn't die from it. I know it happened to Ace Frehley and a few others. The most tragic example is, of course, Les Harvey of Stone the Crows. Still, not a matter to make a joke about.

 

The vocal (ist)s in a lot of bands at around that time were for the most part hard to listen to for more than about 3/4 of a song -any more than that and your mind must be switched to 'I relate to what they are saying and don't care how bad they sound' mode.
for me, a lot of music could lose the whole vocal thing because for one thing if they could write well, then I might imagine them writing poetry or a book. But typically the writing in that era would have been roadkill sf or fantasy served with a side of whiny Tarzan wailing. I mean not just these bands but blues rockers, glam poppers or what have you as well -if you really examine or listen to the words they are assaulting you with they are typically pretty stupid.
From the late sixties until now the overload of painfully obnoxious vocal(ist)s has overrun us to the point where for the most part we just accept it I guess.
A while back I posted the McDonald & Giles lp into a thread for something and it is for the most part an instrumental album that is great the way it is, it does have minimal vocal parts and some choral flourishes on it but anyway someone posted that it might have been a great lp if it had vocals on it.
-Sorry but I just don't get that.


If a music piece sounds awesome with no vocals, you had better be one hell of a singer if you want to tack that on.
Anyway these guys kind of epitomize that vocal ruining the whole shmear effect for me and there are plenty others that are worse or as bad and I think UH didn't go far because it is just a matter of how much saturation of that can the pop world accept.
Well I suppose today's pop world is much more accepting of the annoying vocal and has actually created some new types..

 

No, your post gets it. There was a shift in the whole ethos as well, the rise of indie / DIY / punk etc. I was pretty much over herding into arenas like cattle and was digging the smaller venue scene watching Black Flag, where the show was more intimate and primal. And you could get a beer and not have it become a half hour event with the music echoing in the passageways while you waited.

 

I think there is quite a bit of revisionism going on in the view of our own part of music history here in Sweden. I am about the same age as the OP, born in 1974, so I was not around in those days, but my musical interest has always been centered around the 60's/70's and therefore I have ended up talking to and listening to reminiscences from those that were there, like my long time guitar teacher, many record store owners and just general music fans. My impressions is that the early "heavy rock" bands that were really popular here were Deep Purple and Uriah Heep, while Black Sabbath had their fans but were seen as a bit of an outsider's music, and Led Zeppelin were really more of a cult band (the latter is maybe not so surprising since Zeppelin only played in Sweden at the very start of their career and never visited after '70 and had no real precense here). But music history is nowadays written and presented from a US or UK viewpoint and that is how my generation and younger have been getting most of their information. When I started listening to these bands in the 80's no one seemed to know Zeppelin and it was viewed as "wierdo" music, while Purple, Sabbath and yes, Heep, were viewed as classics, even though not so many my age knew them well. Nowadays everyone knows Zeppelin and Sabbath and they are seen as legends, while Purple and Heep are getting forgotten and written out of history.

I saw the Ken Hensley Band (with guest voclist John Lawton) at the Sweden Rock Festival some years ago, and when Ken took out his acoustic and started to play "Lady In Black" the crowd immediately started singing the "la-la-la" refrain so loudly that my hairs stood on end and Ken had to wait a long time and eventually try to settle the crowd down so that he could start singing himself! So at least the old timers and the real fans remember...

Agree with all of this. Ken Hensley really was the center of the group, he may not have been the greatest keyboardist (nowhere near Jon Lord's capabilites), but he made up for it with being an accomplished guitarist (better than Box in my opinion), great vocalist, and perhaps most importantly as a composer. David Byron's lead vocals are of course a given highlight, but it must not be forgotten that they were all great vocalists, another strenght. One more thing that I, as a musician, take away from their sound is the melodic and inventive bass playing of both Paul Newton and Gary Thain, amazing that they had two such players after one another. The weak point in my opinion is the guitar playing of Mick Box, he seems to mostly try to make as much racket as possible, both when playing rhythm and lead, and he can get tiresome, especially his overuse of wah-wah. The drumming is also often along these lines, a bit too noisy and busy.

I do agree that Byron (or the rest of the band for that matter) don't come off too flattering visually, and he often seems to be quite drunk in most live clips, sheepish grin, pointing and waiving at the crowd, kicking or grabbing his band mates from behind, singing off mic etc. But I don't think this can have affected the view of them much, I can't imagine these clips being seen by too many people back then and being there in person at a concert is a different thing than analyzing YouTube clips in hindsight. It does them no service nowadays though...

I also think that they had a kind of "joke" attitude live that doesn't go well together with the music and is not there to be found on record. An example of this is how they treat the old Rock 'n' Roll numbers in concert, compare this to how for example Zeppelin or Purple perform oldies.

-

Edit: here is an excellent overview that presents plenty of reasons why Uriah Heep should be taken very seriously indeed:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/travellers-in-time-anthology-vol-1-mw0000454569
Spotify link:
Uriah Heep – Travellers In Time: Anthology, Vol. 1

 

I grew up on 70s hard rock, but to this day I've never heard one of their albums. I was always under the assumption they were awful and a bit of a joke. They weren't popular at all when I was in school, when all the other bands of their era mentioned in this thread were.

I suppose I should check them out on Spotify, out of curiosity, but I'm expecting cheesy over-the-topness.

 

I think Anton has a point with this one

 

You may find some over-the-topness of some tracks, I know I did even back then (didn't really bug me) but their first six-seven albums are laced with some truly great hard rock as well.

 

Loved the band up to and including Sweet Freedom, then Abominog and Head First caught the ear. Drifted away again until Sea Of Light, and have been a fan of every album since. Too many line-up change perhaps, but they just seemed to keep losing their way.

Salisbury is one of my favourite songs of all time, barmy and magnificent.

Philip

 

Of the various 70s bands now largely forgotten, Heep made the least impression on me. I at least know some of the songs from others like Blue Oyster Cult and Foghat, but I looked over the tracklist for a Heep compilation and none of the titles rang a bell.

Maybe I'd know them if I heard them, but as titles... nuttin'!

Asterisk: BOC and Foghat had their hits a little later in the 70s than Heep did, so that might be why I remember them better. I was born in 1967, so I wouldn't have personally been aware of rock acts in the 1972-74 range - I didn't start to pay attention to rock until 1975, and even then, I leaned top 40. I was 8 - whaddya want???