rock guitarists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page is to forget the black American musicians they were trying to copy; to dwell on the prowess of these guitarists is to relegate Jimi Hendrix, the most virtuosic rock guitarist of the 1960s, to the fringes of music history. The debt of heavy metal to African-American music making has vanished from most accounts of the genre, just as black history as been suppressed in every other field.
Rock historians usually begin the history of heavy metal with the white (usually British) musicians who were copying urban blues styles. Mid-1960s groups like the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Jeff Beck Group combined the rock and roll style of Chuck Berry with the earthy blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Along with Jimi Hendrix, these British blues bands developed the sounds that would define metal: heavy drums and bass, virtuosic distorted guitar, and a powerful vocal style, that used screams and growls as signs of transgression and transcendence. The Kinks released the first hit song built around power chords in 1964, “You Really Got Me.” Some credit Jimi Hendrix with the first real heavy metal hit, the heavily distorted, virtuosic “Purple Haze” of 1967. Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic band, extended the frontiers of loudness, distortion, and feedback (but not virtuosity) with their defiantly crude cover version of “Summertime Blues,” a hit single in 1968, the same year Steppenwolf released “Born to Be Wild.”
We had a place in forming that heavy-metal sound. Although I’m not saying we knew what we were doing, ’cause we didn’t. All we knew was we wanted more power. And if that’s not a heavy-metal attitude, I don’t know what is.
—Dick Peterson, singer/bass player with Blue Cheer25
These groups of the late 1960s, now identified as early heavy metal bands, favored lyrics that evoked excess and transgression. Some, such as MC5 and Steppenwolf, linked their noisiness to explicit political critique in their lyrics; others, like Blue Cheer, identified with the San Francisco—based psychedelic bands, for whom volume and heaviness aided an often drug-assisted search for alternative formations of identity and community. Inspired by the guitar virtuosity and volume of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, late 1960s rock bands developed a musical language that used distortion, heavy beats, and sheer loudness to create music that sounded more powerful than any other.26 Groups like Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge added organ to the musical mix; like the electric guitar, the organ is capable of sustained, powerful sounds as well as virtuosic soloing, and the combination of both resulted in an aural wall of heavy sound. Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1969), featuring the seventeen-minute title tune with its interminable drum solo, became the biggest-selling album Atlantic Records had ever had. Drummers of the late 1960s hit their drums very hard, resulting in a sound that was not only louder but heavier, more emphatic. Their drum sets grew ever larger and more complicated, along with the expansion of concert amplification and guitar distortion devices.
The sound that would become known as heavy metal was definitively codified in 1970 with the release of Led Zeppelin II, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, and Deep Purple in Rock. Joe Elliot, now lead vocalist for Def Leppard, recalls this moment, which he lived as a young fan: “In 1971, there were only three bands that mattered. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple.”27 Led Zeppelin’s sound was marked by speed and power, unusual rhythmic patterns, contrasting terraced dynamics, singer Robert Plant’s wailing vocals, and guitarist Jimmy Page’s heavily distorted crunch. Their songs were often built around thematic hooks called rifts, a practice derived from urban blues music and extended by British imitators such as Eric Clapton (e.g., “Sunshine of Your Love”).28 In their lyrics and music, Led Zeppelin added mysticism to hard rock through evocations of the occult, the supernatural, Celtic legend, and Eastern modality. Deep Purple’s sound was similar but with organ added and with greater stress on classical influences; Baroque figuration abounds in the solos of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and keyboardist Jon Lord.29 Black Sabbath took the emphasis on the occult even further, using dissonance, heavy riffs, and the mysterious whine of vocalist Ozzy Osbourne to evoke overtones of gothic horror.
A “second generation of heavy metal,” the first to claim the name unambiguously, was also active throughout the 1970s: Kiss, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Judas Priest, Ted Nugent, Rush, Motörhead, Rainbow, Blue Öyster Cult. Scorpions, from Germany, became the first heavy metal band from a non-English-speaking country to achieve international success. Heavy metal shows became increasingly spectacular as musicians performed in front of elaborate stage sets to the accompaniment of light shows, pyrotechnics, and other special effects. Incessant touring of these impressive shows built the metal audience in the 1970s. Kiss, between 1974 and 1984, made nineteen albums, seventeen of which went gold (thirteen went platinum) with virtually no radio airplay.30 Many of the most successful performers of heavy metal, like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, have never had a Top 40 single.
The rise of heavy metal was simultaneous with the rise of professional rock criticism, but their relationship was not cordial. Flushed with enthusiasm for the artistic importance of rock music, critics were deeply suspicious of commercially successful music, which smacked of “sellout” because it appealed to too many people. Many critics were also hostile toward visual spectacle, which they saw as commercial artifice, compromising rock music’s “authenticity.” With the exception of some writers at Creem, they abhorred the face paint and fantastic costumes of Kiss, the macabre theatricality of Alice Cooper, and the fireworks, smoke, and unearthly props of everyone else in heavy metal. The pronouncements of the critics had little effect on the loyalties of heavy metal fans, for whom the concert experience remained primary: Led Zeppelin’s 1973 tour of the United States set new concert attendance records, breaking the previous records held by the Beatles. However, critics contributed to the establishment of heavy metal as a genre, since such labels were useful to them, as they were to the music industry, then in a phase of commercial growth and diversification (including increasingly specialized radio formats).
Heavy metal record sales slumped severely during the second half of the 1970s, as attention shifted to disco, punk, and mainstream rock bands like Fleetwood Mac. Writing for posterity in 1977, Lester Bangs summarized: “As the Seventies drew to a close, it appeared that heavy metal had had it.” Bangs described metal’s obsolescence: “What little flair and freshness remained in heavy metal has been stolen by punk rockers like the Ramones and Sex Pistols, who stripped it down, sped it up and provided some lyric content beyond the customary macho breast-beatings, by now not only offensive but old-fashioned.”31 Bangs’s description of that moment was a fair one, but the 1980s saw the growth of heavy metal on a scale none had imagined.
Heavy Metal in the 1980s
During the 1980s, heavy metal was transformed from the moribund music of a fading subculture into the dominant genre of American music. Eddie Van Halen had revolutionized metal guitar technique with the release of Van Halen’s debut album in 1978, fueling a renaissance in electric guitar study and experimentation unmatched since thousands of fans were inspired to learn to play by Eric Clapton’s apotheosis in the late 1960s and Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970. But the real boom occurred with what became known as the “new wave of British heavy metal,” around the turn of the decade. The United States was overrun by another “British invasion,” as important for metal as the Beatles and Rolling Stones had been fifteen years earlier for pop music. Singer Joe Elliot recalls: “As years went on, hard rock did feel a certain loss of popularity with record audiences. But around 1979 or ’80, it came back again. Suddenly, there was us [Def Leppard], Iron Maiden and Saxon doing really well.”32 Bands like Iron Maiden and Motörhead exported very different styles of music, but they all were experienced as a wave of renewal for the genre of heavy metal. For the most part, the new wave of metal featured shorter, catchier songs, more sophisticated production techniques, and higher technical standards. All of these characteristics helped pave the way toward greater popular success.
The next wave of metal came out of Los Angeles around 1983–84. Motley Crüe and Ratt spearheaded a revival of “glam” metal androgyny, and other L.A. bands, like Quiet
