Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum from 1967, is - in my half-assed opinion - the first heavy metal record. Their version of “Summertime Blues” would certainly strike most metalheads as their sort of music.
Nonsense. Sabbath had plenty of fast songs. “Paranoid” and “Symptom of the Universe” are consistently fast, and big chunks of other songs (including “War Pigs” and the last part of “Black Sabbath”) are plenty fast too. For every “Smoke on the Water” you care to name, I can point to a “Highway Star.”
Here’s a bit of trivia for everyone: who’s generally credited with coining the term “heavy metal”?
Those who get the reference of my username are cheating, btw… 
It was originally coined by William S. Burroghs in his novel Naked Lunch. It was first associated with hard rock music when Steppenwolf treferenced the term in “Born To Be Wild” ("…heavy metal thunder")
If I might ask a possibly naive question…
aside from issues of music history, what I’d like to know is, at what point did the entire occult thing start in music? (I realize that heavy metal isn’t necessarily occult themed.)
Specifically, when Joe Whitebread talks about “Heavy Metal,” he’s not talking about Led Zeppelin or Van Halen. He’s talking about some dude biting the head off a bat. (Regardless, I might add, of whether any bats were really harmed in the making of the music.)
So what’s the development of batbiting in modern music? Did it start out relatively low-key, maybe with some bat-nibbling? Did it spring fully formed from Ozzy’s brow? Were there any occult references in popular music before, say, “Sympathy for the Devil”?
For that matter, one really needs to take into account the entire thing with Jim Morrison’s penis, if you want to talk about the history of rumored-naughty-onstage-behavior-by-occult-influenced-musician. I can’t see there really being any rumors of Chubby Checker doing anything naughty onstage.
In all seriousness, for most people I think that part of what they think of when they think of “Heavy Metal” is “dissonant music with an antisocial attitude.” With that in mind, how did the “antisocial attitude” part of it develop?
The whole occult thing may have started with Zeppelin. Jimmy Page had a fixation on Alistair Crowley and black magic. Black Sabbath took their name and persona from a horror movie of that same name. I think with them it was really just theatrical, a musical version of a horror movie., The same could be said of Alice Cooper. Not that many bands were seriously into Satan, it was really just a stage thing. Ozzy has actually always identified himself as a Christian.
The biting of the bat was done by accident-- well it was done on purpose, but Ozzy didn’t know it was real bat. He thought it was one of the many rubber toys (bats, snakes, rats) which get thrown onstage at his concerts. He didn’t know it was real until he bit it.
He did, however, intentionally bite the head off a live dove at a record release party. You may find this hard to believe but Ozzy was abusing substances at the time.
Ozzy Ozbourne used to work as a butcher, so he was perhaps more used to gruesome beheadings than the rest of us.
BTW, thanks to all who posted to this thread. You’re giving a mini-lesson in music history here; very educational.
No, actually, I believe it was Tony Iommi who spent time working in a meat plant. That’s how he cut off the tips of two of the fingers on his right (fretboard) hand.
Don’t forget the award-winning Heavy Metal band, Jethro Tull!
:rolleyes:
sorry - too much like shooting fish in a barrel, that was.
Actually, it was a chemist in the mid-1800’s. That’s not any more incorrect answer than saying William Burroughs. Burroughs created a sci-fi character in his trilogy(Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded). He probably wrote most of this in the mid-late '50’s. None of the references can be taken musically, that I can see.
Steppenwolf(1967) used the term, but it’s probably a reference to motorcycles rather than the music. No doubt the song(Born to be Wild) helped popularize the term later.
Love to know when and where Lester’s column appeared.
So, anyone have any definitive usage of “heavy metal” in the immediate years after 1967-8? In a review?
“Born to Be Wild” does not sound at all heavy metal to me. I would classify it as plain old Hard Rock. The difference? Hard Rock preceded heavy metal and died out earlier. Hard rock shared the same solid beat, but did not have all the sonic space filled up with crunching chords, which is the characteristic of heavy metal. Just because it used the words “heavy metal” did not make it of that genre. In fact, when “Born to Be Wild” was recorded, said genre had not yet begun to exist.
The All Music Guide attributed the birth of heavy metal to British blues bands, who were not able to give blues the same rhythmic swing as American blues bands, so they squared off the rhythm, making for a heavier chord-crunching sound.
Ozzy Osbourne also worked as a butcher.
Move aside, Lester Bangs. Rock critic Mike Saunders first used the term “heavy metal” to describe a music genre in Creem magazine a year before Bangs did.
Specifically, Mike Saunders wrote in the May 1971 issue of Creem that Sir Lord Baltimore’s album Kingdom Come “seems to have down pat all the best heavy metal tricks in the book.”
I had a music teacher that stressed heavily that Heavy Metal was born the exact second that Led Zepplin recorded Black Dog.
I heard Tony lost his fingertips to frostbite…
The occult thing comes, at least in part, out of the blues roots of hard rock/heavy metal. Remember Robert Johnson standing at the crossroads waiting to meet the Devil? There are Voudoun refences all through the old blues works (especially the mojo hand and the High John the Conqueror).
It doesn’t seem too strange for the British guitarists mining that vein to replace the bayou hoodoo with the equivalent in their back gardens . . .
Guitarists amongst us will doubtless be aware that Jimmy Page was one of Englands foremost session guitarists before forming Led Zeppelin. His reputation was so immense that Peter Grant was able to get a $400,000 US advance from Atlantic Records just by advertising that Jimmy Page was putting a band together. Even before a track had been cut!
Remember Joe Cocker’s cover of “With a Little Help from my Friends”? That mighty axe in that song was none other than Jimmy Page.
But it gets better… if you see Jimmy Page get interviewed nowadays, he’s deliberately VERY vague about which records he played on prior to Led Zeppelin - and the reason is because he’s loathe to hurt any egos or reputations. Quite the gentleman in that respect.
As a previous poster pointed out, it really was the experimentation with “overdriven valve amps” which some notable English guitarists at the time were doing. And Jimmy Page was at the forefront obviously. Anyways, there has always been lots, and LOTS of speculation about just who TRULY did the classic riff and lead solo to “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks in 1965. And the reason for this was for the following reason - the solo and riff was atrributed to Dave Davies for decades - and yet Dave was only 18 at the time of the song, and oddly, could never play the solo in a live setting. He later created his own “slower bendier” style and became quite a highly regarded guitarist, but in 1965 there was no WAY he could play the riff and solo well in a “live setting”.
After many years of speculation, Ray Davies (Dave’s brother) finally admitted that it was Jimmy Page all along who had cut the track. The drummer was the drummer from the Yardbirds at the time.
Most rock historians agree that, in terms of “the epic guitar tone” which forms the basis of all “hard rock/metal” genres and sub genres, Jimmy Page invented “heavy metal” then, and there, with that song.
Oh, I forgot, when you consider that Buddy Holly was making tunes, when was it, as late as 1958? Well the timeline wasn’t all that long at all, really, was it?