Quote:
Originally Posted by Certif1ed
As a quick summary in bullet points, from the very beginning;
1. We've charted a little of the metal attitudes back to the beginning of Rock and Roll, and seen how metal music grew from this energetic interpretation of the Blues, thanks to the sudden growth of the underground music scene in the mid 1960s.
2. We've tracked the accidental "discovery" of fuzz back to 1960, and noted that the overdriven sound came originally from the Bluesmen that predate Rock and Roll, although the fuzzed sound notably did not become widely used until 1965, when The Rolling Stones used it in "Satisfaction".
3. We've seen that Marshall Amplifiers and the almost simultaneous introduction of Gibson's Fuzz box, together with Gibson's legendary humbucker-driven guitars are pretty much what made the metal sound in 1965 - and that The Who were first with this combination.
4. We've seen the music grow from seeds planted as early as 1963 (the insistend rhythms and dark tones of Delia Derbyshire's "Dr Who" theme) - or possibly earlier in Horror films (we haven't really explored those yet), but the earliest song I could find that sounds distinctly like heavy metal is probably Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" (1968), or arguably some of the material put out by Cream and Hendrix. I think that The Bluesbreakers, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things and The Who were absolutely instrumental in bringing this music about, but I don't think that any of their stuff was "it", so we can't pin this date any earlier than 1967.
5. We've seen the name and the style grow from Spooky Tooth to Black Sabbath to Judas Priest, via Blues Rock, Space Rock and Glam Rock, but also seen that the style was only loosely related to Black Sabbath for well over a decade. In fact, Black Sabbath's revolutionary tritone-based riffs which are now a commonplace feature of metal were almost non-existent in all but the wildest of Prog Rock bands. We need to move into the late 1970s-early 1980s to see the rise of the tritone in metal and the emergence of the Modern Metal sound.
6. We can already see that metal is made up of a whole variety of sounds and surface styles, not to mention lyrical themes and technical playing ability, ranging from completely unable to play right across the board to uber-virtuoso. This rules out most generalisations you will ever read about Heavy Metal - despite the familiarity of its sound, it cannot easily be generalised. This diversity deserves an exploration which will probably hit several posts.
7. We can also see how musicians from other fields of music (I'll avoid the word "genres" simply because I hate the word!) have come into metal and brought aspects of those fields into metal - but metal doesn't flow the other way. Once you bring classical or jazz music into metal, it becomes part of metal, not the other way around. This is peculiar, because composers brought jazz into Classical, and it remained Classical (Debussy), and Classical into jazz (Gershwin) without altering the jazz nature. This would be a very interesting aspect to explore further.
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So we are more or less upto the emergence of Black Sabbath as a group that has taken on a large amount of some of the previous influences either knowingly or unknowingly.
I`ve still yet to listen to Spooky Tooth but will do this weekend.
As of yet, nobody has challenged your notion of Spooky Tooth as the first heavy metal outfit (I assume this is the notion that you are trying to put forward) So unless nobody challenges it, time to move forward.
I`m surprised Budgie hasn`t been mentioned as they are often regarded as a prime influence on the NWOBHM.
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