How do we get from Buddy Holly to death metal? Could someone outline this branch of the musical tree for me.
Sorry… would a mod please move this to the cafe?
I believe it all started with Black Sabbath…
Well, two of the first heavy metal classics were Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (1968), and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (1969).
Yeah… but did these works spring foward fully formed from these groups or were there proto-metal bands or other influences?
If I had to name the biggest influence, it would be Jimi Hendrix’s style of guitar playing. There’s was virtually nothing like it before. For the heavy metal sound, it was essential.
Thanks! This link on that page is especially good!
Well, I looked at those lists and Black Sabbath wasn’t given enough credit. Hendrix expanded the range of guitar. Zepplin wrote heavy songs that got really popular. Yet Zepplins songs tended to end on a happy side.
I believe that you have to describe HEAVY METAL vs Hard Rock. Hendrix and Zepplin had a huge influence in the world of hard rock. A lot of people took their styles and expanded on it create what I call “Hard Rock”. Van Halen is a wonderful example. VH used a bunch of Jimi’s tricks and turned that into the “VH” sound. Other people have used the Zepplin sound to make hard rock.
At the same time the Heavy Metal scene has one basic influence: Black Sabbath. Bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax and Sanctuary (Heavy Metal bands) all put Black Sabbath on the top of their lists for their major influence. (BW, I wish I could spell).
Anyway, comparing Zepplin to Sabbath to Hendrix doesn’t work as they all played different types of music. They all rocked but did so in different ways.
Slee
PBS did a great documentary about Rock & Roll a few years back. In a segment on surf music they claimed that the influence of Dick Dale can be heard in today’s heavy metal.
That doesn’t exactly mean it originated there, but people like Dick Dale and Link Wray certainly did a lot to expand on what kind of sounds we can get out of a guitar. Link Wray in particular explored the fine line between music and “noise”.
The same show also made the curious link between The Ramones and The Beach Boys. At first I scoffed, but when you listen to them side by side, you can see the influence. The Ramones used a lot of harmonies that sounded like Brian Wilson on a lazy day.
Well, the roots of heavy metal lie in the English blues scene of the early 60s. The Yardbirds weren’t a great band, nor were they really a heavy metal band, but they had three guitarists (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) who were pioneers of heavy metal, and they were among the first bands to:
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Take old blues songs and break them down into a few hard guitar chords
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Experiment with guitar fuzztone and feedback.
“Heart Full of Soul” certainly wasn’t a heavy metal song, nor was “Shapes of Things,” but they both illustrate the way Jeff Beck was experimenting with distorted guitar sounds. Beck wasn’t really playing “heavy metal,” but he certainly helped create the guitar sound that heavy metal bands relied on.
Meanwhile, there was another blues musician in America, playing the “chitling circuit,” before small crowds. He’d heard what people like Beck and Clapton were doing, and started taking guitar distortion waaay beyond that. Obviously, I’m talking about Jimi Hendrix. He was “discovered,” oddly enough, by another English blues-oriented band, the Animals. Their bass player, Chas Chandler, convinced Hendrix he’d be a star in England, brought him to London, helped him put together a band, and produced their debut album: “Are You Experienced.”
If you listen to albums like “Are You Experienced,” Beck’s “Truth” and “Beck-ola,” Cream’s “Disraeli Gears,” and the first Led Zeppelin Album, you’ll see that the basic sound of heavy metal was established by 1967-69. Of course, at the time, all of those musicians would have been baffled by the concept of “heavy metal.” They thought of themselves as blues-rock musicians.
“Heavy metal” (already a scientific term, it had been popularized by both William Burroughs and Steppenwolf) was first used by Lester Bangs to describe Black Sabbath. Sabbath was among the first bands to use the guitar sounds created by Hendrix/Beck/Clapton/Page WITHOUT the blues context.
Two words: Live at Leeds
-Coffeeguy
“Heavy metal” didn’t really become separate from rock overall until Metallica came out. Not coincidentally (IMO), the 70’s were the last decade in which there was a single type of music that could be called “rock”. After that, it splintered into many different types, no one quite like the original.
Are you kidding? There were already heavy metal fanzines and compilations when Metallica came out - they stole their name from one and got wide exposure on another. Metallica popularized the metal sub-genre of thrash, but there were already lots of similar bands out there.
I gotta stick with Black Sabbath being the first metal band. Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix are definitely not metal, though they are both influences on it. If you count music that’s influential in metal you will go back centuries…old classical guitarists may have played fifth chords over a E pedal tone, but they weren’t metal.
Hell, aside from the production values the first Black Sabbath album would not sound particularly dated today if you hadn’t heard it before. They were hugely influential on lots of modern music, not just metal.
For sure: heavy metal was definitely alive and well before Metallica. What I meant (and maybe didn’t express clearly) was that before Metallica, there was a general spectrum of rock, with Sabbath, Zeppelin, Priest, Motorhead, and others at one end. Metallica really made the break, and created a separate category for metal. The blues influences on the first set of bands are much clearer than those on (early) Metallica. Less roll, more rock.
The original heavy metal can be traced back to two songs:
The first heavy metal group was Steppenwolf; the term even comes from “Born to Be Wild” (“Heavy metal thunder”). It was pretty much all there in that song – clashing guitars, loud vocals, heavy beat.
Later, Led Zeppelin added one more essential element – a high pitched male screaming lead. This was unveiled in “Communications Breakdown,” which was a much different from the rest of the songs in Led Zep’s first album, and became the hallmark of their sound.
Later groups took what Led Zep pioneered and went further with it.
What you historians have been overlooking is the difference between early heavy metal pioneers (Sabbath, Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge) of the late 60s/early 70s and the later metal bands of the 80s. Originally, metal was heavy because it was slow and massive like a steamroller. The feeling of heavy weight was generated by slamming down the power chords slowly and letting them sink in. Speed metal was invented years later, and has a very different effect, even though it grew out of the original (slow) metal. Remember “Smoke on the Water”?
Hell, metal influences appear on many early 70s LPs that people wouldn’t think of normally. The first Queen album has a song “Son and Daughter” that people mistake for Iron Maiden. And the first Rush LP was pretty much a Zeppelin ripoff.
I think ultrafilter is speaking of the codification that occured during the late 70s/early 80s Metal scene in LA (I was there! Whee!) when Van Halen and others were popping up and developing a distinctive sound with power chords and Eddie Van Halen’s flying fingers. But to say it was Metallica ignores a lot of prior happenings.
I don’t think it was Metallica, specifically. Just that it was about that time.
There are loads of interesting early ‘heavy metal’ songs before the term meant anything - listen to ‘The Nile Song’ by Pink Floyd or ‘Sister Ray’ by The Velvet Underground for examples.
By the time of Metallica, though, there had already been ‘Black Metal’ (in the shape of Venom) and New Wave of British Heavy Metal (eg Iron Maiden, Saxon). Metallica and Slayer were two bands who expanded on these two styles - at first, Slayer were called a Black Metal band, and then the term thrash became used for fast, usually evil bands.
Death metal was in some ways a spin off from thrash metal, and in some ways a spin off from black metal, and in some ways from progressive music. I’d say important steps in the development of real death metal were the unreleased (at the time) Morbid Angel album Abominations of Desolation, the first Death album Scream Bloody Gore, and the first Napalm Death record Scum. Also throw in the first couple of records by Germany’s Kreator for growling vocals over more ambitious music.
Lots of people nowadays also refer to a Morbid Angel/Napalm Death side project Terrorizer as a totally seminal death metal band. Of course, I can’t not mention Bathory, but they were more in the Black metal (ie simplistic) style, before going symphonic and viking in the late 1980’s.
Most of the ‘action’ and developments in death metal was happening, unsurprisingly, in the underground demo community, so it’s hard to trace exactly what was going on - Europe especially exploded in the eighties when it came to death metal, and bands that later either went Black Metal (eg Mayhem, Darkthrone, Immortal) or more rock (eg Entombed) put out some of their most wild and interesting music on tape in the mid 80’s.
I believe that a lot of the development from Buddy Holly -> death metal came about from self-consciously trying to be heavier than what came before, and in some cases wanting to be more musically complex than ever before (cf Morbid Angel), or on the other hand, being more primitive and brutal than ever before (cf black and white record cover era Darkthrone).