My better half and I had a game for a while where we would replace the peak dramatic line of seventies story songs with “Peace on Earth… Was all it said!”
“So we crashed the gate, doin’ ninety-eight. Peace on Earth… Was all it said!”
“As I hung up the phone it occurred to me, Peace on Earth… Was all it said!”
“And his cheap wife had never left town. And that’s one body that’ll never be found, see, Peace on Earth… Was all it said!”
My dad kept around a few old issues of Stereo Review magazine, and I always loved reading contemporary reviews of records from back in the day, what they got right, what they got wrong looking back. I suppose teenage me was a little offended at the casual dismissal of an album I had recently bought and liked, yet I can totally see that this is how an adult would have seen it at the time, not knowing they practically founded a genre.
I think that what I love about heavy metal and its subcultural cousins in punk, drill, and DnB, is how it mutates and sprawls through so much weird territory. All it takes is the germ of an musical motif to land in a new niche and something amazing will sprout. For metal it’s usually a Boss Overdrive pedal, for punk it’s an atonal vocalist willing to bleed on stage, for drill it’s a trap hat pattern, for DnB it’s a sacred sample.
Boris perfected what Black Sabbath started:
Also worthy is Sleep’s tribute to Geezer Butler:
I always really liked FNM’s cover:
reaction videos are my new compulsive time-suck. they may be acting or embellishing, but the reactions are always so fun.
I think there’s a good case to be made for King Crimson’s ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, which was released in 1969.
I was still in school when a classmate brought the album to school, and the cover made an instant impression, so I asked if I could borrow it. The opening track stunned me, I’d never heard anything like it, I only had the radio, no money for anything other than the occasional single, and it blew wide open what I knew about music, I knew the Stones, Beatles, regular chart stuff, even Jethro Tull, but the guitar, saxophone, distorted vocals, nothing like it.
I finally got to see KC last year on their 50th Anniversary tour, at the Royal Albert Hall, London; they’ve still got the power!
I like that Boris track… cacophonous.
It doesn’t seem that much like Black Sabbath though.
After both bands fell apart — Mythology got busted for smoking weed, which was enough of a setback to crumple a band at the time
They were also based in Carlisle, which always was socially behind the rest of the UK. When I left there in 2004 the population were just about starting to get the idea that lesbian and gay people were human, but forget about B, T or any of the other letters. Getting caught with cannabis in 60s Carlisle would have been like getting caught with it in the 1940s everywhere else.
They called themselves the Polka Tulk Blues Band (“Polka Tulk” alluded to the brand of talcum powder Osbourne’s mom preferred), and they were originally a six-piece group with a bottleneck-slide-guitar player named Jimmy Phillips and a saxophone player named Alan Clark. Butler switched to bass since the group already had two guitarists. But after playing jammy blues at a couple of gigs in August 1968, Iommi decided it just wasn’t working out.
“It was awful,” Iommi says of the band in the Polka Tulk days. “It was a mishmash, like a jam. I don’t know if it was taken that seriously, with a sax player and a slide-guitar player.”
“I really liked that band,” Ward says. “I was having a good time. But we went up to Carlisle as a six-piece and came back as a four-piece.”
It should be mentioned that they went back up to Carlisle for about 6 months to a year. Even with the drugs offence they had built up useful contacts there. I used to know Keith Jefferson, who was their roadie and soundman at the time. I wish I had asked him about his time with the band, instead I spent most of my lunchtimes sneaking out of school to listen to the new happy hardcore and gabber releases at his record shop.
I think Black Sabbath wanted him to continue working with them when they left Carlisle, but he had family there and didn’t feel like he could balance the two over long distances.
You know which group won the first Grammy in the category of heavy metal?
Jethro Tull.
Yup.
Oh oh oh. . . I know this one. . . it was the Osmonds, right?
(Yeah I knew the real answer, I recall Ian Anderson kind of scratching his head at that one, since the album in question wasn’t very ‘metal’ at all.)
Wow, I didn’t realize that was 1969. But as @GoatCheezInfrno alludes to, I’ve always considered Helter Skelter to be the earliest thing resembling what we know of as heavy metal (per @generic_name’s definition). However, a lot of early Floyd has a great argument for that crown, especially Nile Song, though that came a bit later IIRC.
While I don’t entirely disagree with you to a certain extent; the stuff earlier bands were putting out is more regularly classified as Hard Rock. Even Black Sabbath was under that header until it became clear there was something more going on there. Heavy Metal at the time could have just as easily been called Harder Rock.
FWIW: In addition to the Velvet Underground (though see above), Lester Bangs included The Stooges (hard for me to argue with that, though especially by the time of Raw Power), Alice Cooper, Kiss (“testing the limits of gullibility” or some such), ZZ Top, and Grand Funk (among others – I’m mainly remembering the pictures accompanying his text). This was from an old Rolling Stone book.
Well, this is like arguing where hip-hop begins-- Rudy Ray Moore? Pigmeat Markham’s “Here Comes The Judge”? The original dirty dozens that itinerant blues musicians did? One could make a case for Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” except Bambaataa and Kool Herc probably never even heard that tune. What we know of as hip hop really begins in the Bronx in the mid-70’s, and it drew from a lot of influences. By the same token, what we know of as heavy metal now begins with Sabbath and Zeppelin. Steppenwolf coined the phrase “heavy metal thunder” (from a William Burroughs line), but nobody really thinks of Steppenwolf as metal now, same with Cream and Blue Cheer and Crimson.
The term “Heavy Metal” was used to describe a music genre for the first time for Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. Anything before was just Hard Rock.
There’s a very recommendable BBC documentation about “Paranoid”, something like “Classic Albums - Paranoid” that has the most detailed background about it, like who said it, when and where. The same fact is mentioned in a lot of documentaries but this is the one I remember for the clearest point on one of mankinds’ most important questions: Who invited Heavy Metal.
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