We're not talking about (Don't Fear) The Reaper. They have plenty of very heavy tunes and live they can destroy eardrums quite nicely.
Seems like in the genre heavy metal/hard rock a band that has been around for a period of 10 or more years are considered "classic' weather they started out Metal or hard rock Metallica for example I've always known to be a metal (thrash & speed) now I hear them in regular rotation on my local classic rock station which has a playlist usually regulated to bands from the 60's and 70's
Yes, older metal is heavy by classic standards but not by contemporary standards. Back before anyone would have used terms like 'hard rock' all branches of rock music then in existence were hard rock by standards of the time.
All I know is that Steppenwolf's Born to be Wild pre dates Helter Skelter as the first heavy metal song
Jimi Hendrix revolutionized soloing on the electric guitar in a direction that made Heavy Metal possible. The road to Iron Maiden and Metallica, via bands like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep, actually came from Hendrix.
Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden are definitely heavy metal, Uriah Heep and Deep Purple are borderline on hard rock and heavy metal, Led Zeppelin had some songs which could be categorized as heavy metal, but that doesn't make them heavy metal band as they did a lot of other stuff too. Scorpions, AC/DC etc are IMO just hard rock.
Yes and definitions evolve as well. The classic heavy metal bands are what I think of as heavy metal, even if they might be less heavy than some later bands. These have their own terminology, death, thrash, speed, symphonic, hair, Viking, etc.. If it doesn't fit into a neat category, I just call it metal.
Jimi didn't ask about money when Chas Chandler offered to take Jimi to the U.K. as an unknown; Jimi asked if he could meet Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and was obviously influenced by both. Jimi acknowledged lifting the riff from The Yardbirds' Happenings Ten Years Time Ago when Chandler made him write a song of his own as the B-side to Hey Joe . . . a little ditty called Stone Free.
You don't get to Heavy Metal without psychedelia. It's that blend of heavy blues and psychedelia that produced the first metal stuffs.
There are so many branches on the heavy metal tree. Cream, Hendrix, Blue Cheer, MC5, Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple---these guys were the pioneers of what blossomed into full-blown heavy metal.
Don't forget Sir Lord Baltimore's Kingdom Come, probably the first American album which could be called heavy metal.
Heavy metal is still heavy metal. We just have new, heavier forms of metal these days. They have their own genres though such as death metal, thrash, doom metal, Black metal, grindcore etc etc.
Creem 1979, it says so on the cover, not to mention half the bands on the cover where not known or had a record out in 1977.
Fast foward 2-3 yeard later and Van Halen would the only one on that cover to be listed as Heavy Metal.
The term was everywhere in the press by ‘72. Even standard local newspapers would use the term when Sabbath or Purple would come to town. I don’t remember fans using it much back then, but by ‘72 writers like Mike Saunders had been using the term regularly. Anybody who thinks Heavy Metal as a term started with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal just wasn’t reading any of the music rags back then. And maybe they are better for it, but we could crash the server with its use about Sabbath. By the mid ‘70s they were fed up with the term and hated it. Here’s another of countless examples… 'Everybody has sung about all the good things' – a classic Black Sabbath interview from the vaults Following our latest visit to the archives of Rock's Backpages – the world's leading collection of vintage music journalism – we bring you a classic interview with Black Sabbath. Originally titled A Dorito and 7-Up Picnic with Black Sabbath, the piece first appeared in Circular in September 1972 'Want a cheeseburger?' ... Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath. Photograph: Fin Costello/Redferns Some people might want to meet Bob Dylan. Others, if asked which rock idols they'd most like to rub elbows with, might spout off names like John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Keith Richard, Ray Davies. Feh. Me, I was whizzing over to Griffith Park in my 1966 Chevy II to say hi to the greatest rock group in the world, the true keepers of the faith, the absolute Number One group of the '70s so far. You know who I'm talking about as well as I do: Black Sabbath. A Flashback: Jan. 12, 1972 How it all came about was, I won the recent What Black Sabbath Means to Me Contest. This, as I later found out, was a special offer included in but 500 lucky copies of Master Of Reality pressed during December, 1971. Fate as it were, upon acquiring my fifth new copy of Master Of Reality, the aforementioned contest blank popped out. The instructions were a model of conciseness: "In 10 words or less, explain why you love Black Sabbath's music." So, as the strains of Into The Void rumbled on, I strained my faculties for some glimmer of imagination. I scratched my chin, looked up at my poster of lggy Stooge, hummed a few Kinks' tunes, even tried conjuring up the beloved Ferocious Flintlings (better known to the world as Grand Funk) for inspiration. Then my brother Kevin, age 16, looked up from his copy of Teenage Wasteland Gazette and said: "Black Sabbath have discovered the secret of sound." That was it. The Myth of Downer Rock Exploded The reason for the short studio time allotted Sabbath's first album was that no one gives an unknown group much money to make an album with. And they were pretty unknown, as far as the media were concerned. With naïve innocence, Black Sabbath all rushed out to buy the English trade papers the week their debut was released, only to find that it had been savagely attacked by all the critics. "It really threw us," remembers Tony. "What had gone wrong? Were we really as bad as they said? One review of our first album must have been the worst rating ever, and we thought, 'Oh, Christ. This is it.' We were worried if everyone else would think the same." Then, the group's spirits at their lowest, the album made its surprise appearance on the charts. The rest of the Sabbath story is history, and the group hasn't paid much attention to reviews since. 7-Up and Doritos with the Dark Princes of Heavy Metal Back to the business at hand, the beer was ok, Doritos a bit stale. Ozzy delighted in mugging with a 7-Up can for photographs, all in the line of maintaining his image as the face of the group. One thing people have rarely picked up on is just where Black Sabbath's music comes from; the group is often seen as a faceless four-piece entity. Such is hardly the case. Tony Iommi is a former school bully, these days reformed, with the result that the aggro, as the English would call it, comes out in his guitar work (power chords at their ultimate) and songwriting. The words, on the other hand, come from bassist Geezer Butler, as Tony emphasizes: "Geezer writes most of the lyrics. Some of them are very doomy, but they vary from that to drugs and the bad things that happen sometimes with the band." I asked Geezer for comment on this… "People feel evil things, but nobody ever sings about what's frightening and evil. I mean the world is a right ****ing shambles. Anyway, everybody has sung about all the good things." So there's an element of catharsis in your music? "Yes. We try to relieve all the tension in the people who listen to us. To get everything out of their bodies – all the evil and everything." Trivia Time One fact I wanted to check on was Tony Iommi's short-lived alliance with Jethro Tull in early 1969. What happened? "I only stayed with Jethro Tull for three weeks. It was just like doing a 9 to 5 job. The group would meet, play a gig and then split. Whereas with our group we are all good friends; we not only work as a group, but we all lived together for a long time." Of Demons, Wizards, Iron Men and War Pigs As my talk with reigning kings of Heavy Metal rock continued, the whole moral here became quite clear; Black Sabbath are just a bunch of rock 'n' roll kids who happen to make music that, along with Grand Funk, is louder than anything ever created, and which, not incidentally, sends our older brothers off into shrieks of anguish and condescension concerning that viperous noise we've got on the record player. Ironic, too, that people could glorify the Stones' pretence at being "street fighting men," only to cringe when the real article came along in Black Sabbath – a group from the factory job rat-race world of fists and street fights known as Birmingham, England. But it's all about raw, musical energy, and if Sabbath's music happens also to be a shade more vengeful and violent than any previous rock, it's because they mean what they say about releasing the tension in their audiences. With few of the trappings and affectations common to all too many groups, Black Sabbath deliver. "Want a cheeseburger?" asked Geezer, in an unconscious mimic of the Beach Boys' Bull Session With The Big Daddy classic. That about summed it all up. Epilogue/Aftermath My mind began to dizzy from all this. Visions dancing in my head as I drove home, Surfin' Bird came on the radio to heighten the hallucinatory state even further. Around the corner of Pass and Verdugo in Burbank, I think I saw God… When I got home I frenziedly began to play all the records I'd ever liked because they had the Beat – Beatles VI, The Kink Kontroversy, Out of Our Head, E Pluribus Funk, The Who Sings My Generation, Funhouse, All Summer Long, Chuck Berry's Golden Decade, The Crystals' Greatest Hits, Paranoid, Kick out the Jams, Beatles for Sale, Dion's More Greatest Hits, Back in the USA, Back Door Men, Here Are the Sonics, Master Of Reality, Beach Boys Party, The Beatles' Second Album, The Live Kinks, Demons and Wizards, Teenage Head… * After dancing the Locomotion for 36 consecutive hours, Mr Saunders collapsed from a case of what the doctors termed "second-degree prostate delirium" and is currently recuperating at his bedside in the Burbank Municipal Hospital. He will be released at the end of September, in time to finish his senior year at the University of Texas in a wheelchair.
I was going to bring up the fact of people saying some bands are not Heavy Metal that where back in the day, are now using the term "Classic Rock" that was never used back in the day. We had Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Acid Rock, Blues Rock, Heavy Metal, Stadium/ Arena Rock, Pop Rock all through the 70s, never heard of Classic Rock until someone wanted to roll all the others up into one pile. I distinctly remember Rock music making big changes over the years, generally around decade changes or close to it and for the most part we embraced it. Many of these changes were because of technology, back in the 70s I would wonder what the Beatles would have sounded like with better/ bigger equipment. It was bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane that came up with using home HiFi equipment so they can get huge power amps and speakers to make Stadium/ Arena Rock possible. Normal electrical musical instruments and the amps were low power at the time, so they found a way to up the game until Marshal and others filled the gap. Then as well as having all that power artist could also incorporate feedback and sutain to the writing of music, this ushered in the big guitar solos, like the way Ted Nugent would blow you away. Without this evolution of equipment we would never have had Hard Rock, Acid Rock, Heavy Metal, Stadium/ Arena Rock. The term Heavy Metal used back in the day was basically the hardest of Hard Rock, Acid Rock, Stadium/ Arena Rock. By 1979 music started to change again due to equipment technology and the advent of digital, computerized equipment. We started to see New Wave (Not New Wave of Metal) and Power Pop, Punk and we entered the 80s with this new modern sounds. Some bands hung onto the the main focus of a Guitar Band like Metallica putting a harder twist on it to be new, critics stated to say this music was so "Metal"!!! Heavy Metal was already out there and known so this new music was spond off the past, it was the new wave of heavy metal. The name Metal actually just became to signify a hard hitting Guitar Band. Also at the time and the decadence of the 80s ushered in Hair Metal/Hair Bands to differentiate the two one being more glam oriented and the other more leather greaser in their personal appearance. We had Heavy Metal in the 70s, the new wave of "Metal" started around the start of the 80s and then I can't even keep up with all the Metal names they want to call a Guitar Band today. But that's all a metal band is, a hard hitting Guitar Band, and what one calls hard has changed over the years.
Agree... the terms Metal, Hard rock and classic rock are vague because there are so many sub genres within those terms
Why do people get so on the weeks with labeling music genres. Who cares? Do you enjoy it? That’s all the matters.
Toad 1971 Hard Rock not Metal ?ymmv) Gets a nod as Hard Rock /proto-nwobhm.....the latter tag for their energy in places on this record. The opening track “Cotton Wood Hill” demonstrates this effectively in the faster portion of the extended instrumental on this song. Thankfully the needldroppers soaked up in a passel of ones and zeros as best one can the music in these amazing, once nearly forgotten, vinyl grooves.
Toad were great but those fast sections were straight out of the Cream school with a side of Cactus energy. They put their own spin on it but that was post-hard blues rock more than proto-anything, IMO. Cream, Sabs, Zep, Cactus, a bit of Beatles. Fun stuff!
