Summertime Blues, as performed by Blue Cheer on their first album, was a remake of a rockabilly classic recorded by Eddie Cochran 10 years earlier. Whatever their long-term contribution to the evolution of the metal genre, Blue Cheer sucked. In the interests of even fuller disclosure, I saw Blue Cheer live, and if heavy metal started with Blue Cheer, heavy metal had pretty humble beginnings. In the interests of full disclosure, Sam Dunn is the son of a woman my wife went to school with in Stroud and is a very nice fellow indeed. If Blue Cheer are the fathers of heavy metal, this would fix the birth of the genre two years before the release of Black Sabbath's first album, and suggest that the genre first saw the light of day not in gritty Birmingham but in spacey, trendy, prissy San Francisco, which no one has ever thought of as a heavy-metal town. And while there is no smoking gun linking Blue Cheer with LBJ's action, his abdication paved the way for Richard Nixon's election, a disaster leading directly to the US defeat in Vietnam and James Taylor's first two albums. The song attained its highest position on the Billboard charts (No 11) the day before President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. Yet in their fascinating, authoritative, and oddly affectionate documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scott McFadyen suggest that the genre may have begun in 1968, when the San Francisco band Blue Cheer released the single Summertime Blues. Led Zeppelin did not exist in 1968.Ī more popular theory is that heavy metal begins with Black Sabbath, because the band was loud, murky, cultivated a cheerfully satanic aura, and used the tritone, the sound widely associated with Satan. Burroughs) was earlier used to describe Humble Pie and appears in the 1968 Steppenwolf song Born to be Wild. However, this theory will not hold water, as the term (coined by the writer William S. One theory holds that the term "heavy metal" was first applied to Led Zeppelin, even though Zeppelin is rarely thought of as a metal band despite all that hammer-of-the-gods stuff. Metal-heads, who are much more numerous and buy many more records than the public realises, do care about this question. (He was blind, after all, and Braille didn't exist in 1200 BC Mycenaean society.) These are all worthy questions, but most people don't particularly care one way or the other, as most people are not metal-heads and have not thought about the topless towers of Ilium since high school. It is like the debate over whether the same person wrote both The Iliad and The Odyssey, and whether the enigmatic poet we refer to as Homer even knew how to write. ![]() Who invented heavy metal? This is a question that has been the subject of intense debate for more than three decades, though admittedly the answer to the question is only of interest to fans of the heavy metal genre.
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