HEAVY METAL?

We all know who's the best Heavy Metal Band.

The ones that make the adrenaline starts to flow

The ones that thrash'em all arround

The ones that always acted like maniacs.

Metallica.

Petrucci_2099 wrote: We all know who's the best Heavy Metal Band. The ones that make the adrenaline starts to flow The ones that thrash'em all arround The ones that always acted like maniacs. Metallica.

But they didn't "invent" metal.

And Slayer BLOWS THEM AWAY

TheProgtologist wrote: jitu wrote: WHO INVENTED HEAVY METAL?   YOU TELL ME. PLEASE Neither I think the first heavy metal band was Blue Cheer Their first album Vincebus Eruptum was released in Jan. 1968,one year before Zeppelin's debut was released and 2 years before Sabbath released their self titled debut album.

Blue Cheer it was - "Louder than God!"

...and Spooky Tooth were writing riffs like that two years before Black Sabbath, and Jeff Beck and Cream earlier still - so don't go thinking that Sabbath invented Metal - it grew from these bands and the likes of The Who, Ten Years After and Hendrix until that whole "Cult" thing spread around it.

Sabbath had that in spades, of course, so if you're ignoring the music and settling for attitude, then the Sabs aren't a bad place to start. 

The late 1960s/early 1970s was a great time for the Heavy Blues bands that immediately preceeded metal, and Sabbath's music is very closely related, but as far as the riff goes (the root building block of metal), the earliest known "Metal-style" riff is rightly or wrongly attributed to the Kinks - but I reckon that's because Van Halen covered them. Some people even say that the Troggs were the first metal band... (I don't think those people have  heard "Ride Your Pony", "Hi, Hi, Hazel" or "Love Is All Around")

The term "Heavy Metal" is not only erroneously attributed to Steppenwolf, but also to William S Burroughs' "Heavy Metal Kid" (Uranium Willy). Neither are the first usage of the term in relation to the music. I don't really know what is, but Lester Bangs thinks he said it first, and so far no-one seems to dispute him.

The first I knew of it was in the mid-late 1970s, when the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal started. THEN there was a genre of Heavy Metal, which suddenly had this amazing pedigree, with roots in all these great bands like Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath (rarely), and so on. See, Sabbath's music had little to do with the NWOBHM - it was stylistically very different.

Motorhead are really the first of the NWOBHM, but their 1975 album "On Parole" was shelved by an over-cautious United Artists, and only released after punk had caught on and Lemmy had re-recorded the album with a new Motorhead and released it on Chiswick.

However, I'll always associate the "true" beginning of the NWOBHM with Raven, simply because Raven Crash, Bang, Walloped all over everything that hard rock used to be and forged this tight, diamond-hard, technically profecient and yet wild style that was "proper" (progressive?) metal. And then there was Saxon, with their simplistic but LOUD style - Blue Cheer would have been proud of Saxon 

You could say that Judas Priest were first - or even Uriah Heep, but the NWOBHM began with a brace of bands too many to mention, including, mysteriously, AC/DC. You'd have to look up the release dates of the singles or demos to find out who was the first.

Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" is probably the nearest to metal  as we know it now - after all, Def Leppard were part of the NWOBHM - so was that Metal, or was it just people at the time not knowing what metal was?

But, as has been mentioned, it was Metallica that re-invented Metal properly (thanks to the influences of Diamond Head, Budgie, Metal Church and Bleak House, who wrote the original of "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" mp3 here... Metallica were such tea-leaves, but you only have to listen to what they did with the raw material to appreciate what they did for metal.

So if anyone's still awake after that lot (mere food for thought and speculation), I'm not voting...