First heavy metal album would be Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden or maybe The Colour of Spring
You have one of the strangest notions of what comprises Heavy Metal that I have ever run across. Your ideas intrigue me, however, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Maybe he was on the Grammy committee that gave Jethro Tull the heavy metal award one year. (I’m a huge Tull fan, but even their heaviest stuff, like Cat’s Squirrel or Hymn 43 or the heavy part of Minstrel in the Gallery, was never metal.)
No, but it was nice to see Ian and Martin get a Grammy.
I’d love to see Mark Hollis get a Grammy as well, but since he’s pretty much pulled a salinger I doubt it will ever happen in any category.
Since “You Really Got Me” has been mentioned over and over again, I thought it might bear mentioning that Pete Townshend cited that specific song as the inspiration for the Who’s first single, I Can’t Explain.
Which surely isn’t metal by any definition, but which contains elements that would come to define the Who’s sound and their contributions to proto-metal.
I just remembered that Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi (sp?) was a member of Jethro Tull, for about a month (December 1968)…so maybe hanging out with Ian, Glenn, and Clive really did plant a seed in Tony’s skull that would bear fruit as the first undisputed heavy metal riffing just about a year later…so, just maybe, that Grammy wasn’t so silly after all ;).
As for Mark Hollis… I remember being 12 years old, turning on MTV, and being impressed that someone had figured out how to make a video label* consist of the same word repeated six times.
*You know, those three lines of text – artist, song (in quotes), album – which would appear on the screen for about eight seconds, twice – about five seconds after a video started, and about thirteen seconds before a video ended.
Bach - Toccata and Fugue in D Minor \m/
Hard Rock is like Rock’n’Roll. The scope, boundaries and the factors that make it are too nebulous and ill-defined to really hash out what it is. If you look up Hard Rock on Wiki, you will see that everything and the kitchen sink falls under its title.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, I just ignored that comment. I’m not a big heavy metal guy (though I do like it, especially 80s thrash stuff, and the very early stuff like Sabbath), but “simple-minded” the music ain’t. A lot of it (I’d say most) is quite complicated musically and requires a level of technique that you don’t need in many other popular music forms. And the lyrical content, although often heavy-handed and overwrought (IMHO), is certainly not “simple-minded,” either.
No love for John Henry was a Steel-Drivin’ Man?
This is one of the things I both love and hate about subjects like this; they’re all so . . . subjective. To wit: I love early Rock and Roll, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and hell, even the Everly Brothers (who I would say are closer to Pop than Rock if you’re making a fine distinction). But there’s no way I would classify any of that music as Hard Rock. Hell, personally I make a distinction between Rock and Roll (that early '50’s and '60’s music) and Rock (the late '60’s forward).
I’d be much more comfortable positing The Kinks (and The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, and The Who, and The Jeff Beck Group, and The Faces, and The Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin, and Cream, and Jimi Hendrix et al.) as the progenitors of the “hard” sound that later came to be defined in the '70’s by some of those same bands on Album Oriented Rock Radio with albums from Led Zeppelin, The Who, and The Rolling Stones supplemented later by bands like Aerosmith, AC/DC, Van Halen, et al.
And then there are the fine distinctions one can make between Rock and Roll, Rock, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Pop, and endless subcategories. This is the kind of stuff we used to argue about in high school. 
Just to throw this out for discussion:
From *The New Book of Rock Lists *by Dave Marsh and James Bernard
Heavy Metal Ore: The Records That Dug the Pit from Which Metal Was Mined
(All records predate the first chart appearance of Black Sabbath in August 1970)
- “How Many More Years,” Howlin Wolf (1951)
- “I’m a Man,” Bo Diddley (1955)
- “Rumble,” Link Wray and His Ray Men (1958)
- “Boom Boom,” John Lee Hooker (1962)
- “I Want Candy,” The Strangeloves (1965)
- “Psychotic Reaction,” The Count Five (1966)
- “Mystic Eyes,” Them (1966)
- Are You Experienced? The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)
- Journey to the Center of Your Mind, The Amboy Dukes featuring Ted Nugent (1968)
- “Yer Blues,” The Beatles (1968)
- Vincebus Eruptum, Blue Cheer (1968)
- Wheels of Fire, Cream (1968)
- In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Iron Butterfly (1968)
- *Led Zeppelin *(1969)
- *Deep Purple *(1969)
- On Time, Grand Funk Railroad (1969)
- *Frijid Pink *(January, 1970)
- “Mississippi Queen,” Mountain (March, 1970)
- Live at Leeds, The Who (May, 1970)
- Cactus (July, 1970)
“I Want Candy”? As a forerunner to heavy metal? Really? I’m not hearing it…
Yeah, there’s a couple of “out-of-left-field” picks on that list. But the early blues stuff is right on, in my opinion - especially as we’re talking about the early progenitors. That’s the kind of stuff I was thinking of when I said “dark and brooding atmosphere of the most desolate of the blues” earlier - that and Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.
But there’s also stuff there that I would say are legitimately Heavy Metal, and not just “ore” - like songs from Led Zeppelin (I’d mentioned their “How Many More Times”, which is a reworking of the Howlin’ Wolf “How Many More Years”).
At 1:12 of that clip we see the first example of crip-walking, also. Not a distinctly heavy metal dance movement, to be sure.
Zounds!
It’s also missing Vanilla Fudge, whom I usually see on these proto-metal lists.
Whether or not they might qualify retrospectively now, to my recollection in the late 60s and early 70s Led Zepplin was regarded as being among the heavy metal groups (not the least because of the heavy metal pun in their name), although they played more than just metal.
Didn’t catch that, but you’re right; the Vanilla Fudge sound was very much metal.
Oh, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be (or weren’t) classified as Heavy Metal, just that they weren’t specifically and only Heavy Metal (though many songs in their catalogue can be classified that way). The band members (well, specifically Page and Plant, to my knowledge) would resist a categorical classification into anything more specific than Rock, from what I’ve read.