Thanks for the additional info. You're right, there is the issue that many bands are in a grey are, in that they played heavy metal, although not as a general rule, and also that there are many different styles of metal, including the hybrids you point out.
Image is certainly something I left out - and this is a crucial part of the genre (as opposed to the music), although I did mention the album covers.
The sole point of going back before Sabbath is to trace the roots more accurately than other studies have done. I think the roots lie before the Kinks - indeed, the Kinks are not even related to Sabbath except via the riff, and the fact that Van Halen covered them. Does this mean that Metal is rooted in Holst, since "Am I Evil" by Diamond Head is rooted in "Mars, Bringer of War" from The Planets suite?
Possibly - and I have already noted a potential Classical root in Sabbath's formal approaches - but I really want to limit the exploration into Rock music.
Sabbath themselves use something similar in "Children of the Grave" - hence my link to the vid, which shows a faster, less doomy side of Sabbath that was left largely untapped until "Heaven and Hell".
Before Sabbath, there was a band called "Spooky Tooth", who played riffs very similar to those Sabbath played, and were undoubtedly the bands' main influence. Spooky Tooth also wrote "Better By You, Better Than Me", (in)famously included on "Stained Class", which brought Priest a huge amount of publicity, even though it was, on the whole, very unwelcome and unpleasant. Spooky Tooth can't have been alone in playing that style - hence I really want to dig into the harder rock music of the late 1960s - but I also want to find out where that came from.
Your point about Priest is also noted - but note also that the self-titled Sabbath song has this quiet/loud structure, and that the Sabs were also prone to even quieter and far heavier moments (as in "Children of the Grave", "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and many more).
As I've noted in another thread, Priest's heavy sound and style has definite precedents in the music of groups like The Scorpions, UFO, The Sweet and Queen - showing the close links between Metal, Glam and Prog.
I want to trace the coming together - as well as the growing apart - of the roots, so we can show how groups as diverse as Bon Jovi and Slayer are essentially playing the same music. If, indeed, they are.
First I want to get at the defining characteristics that link all metal bands, by the simple process of examining the music of the bands that defined the genre, and getting a series of traits - or failing that, a combination of traits that uniquely identify the music and get away from silly, flowery descriptions such as the ones on Wikipedia which are mostly untrue, and almost entirely linked heresay rather than thoroughly researched (since Original Research is banned from Wikipedia articles!).
I've crippled myself for time again... back later! Thanks again for the useful points. It's contributions like this which are going to make this thread a success!
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