Twenty-one months. The London quartet that almost every list of the first heavy metal bands puts at the top was Led Zeppelin, and it stayed a heavy band pure and simple for about that long, from an American debut on 12 January 1969 to the October 1970 release of a third album whose second side had been written largely at Bron-Yr-Aur, a Welsh hillside cottage with no mains electricity, and was played on acoustic guitars. Zeppelin was not the exception. Zeppelin was the rule.
Most of the groups that put a match to the hayloft between 1968 and 1971 were over the fence and running before the roof caught, off toward progressive rock, jazz fusion, country rock and the pop charts, while the barn they set alight went on burning for more than half a century without them. The muster of men who struck a match is long. The list of those who stayed is short.
The first heavy metal bands, and the test that thins the list
A band is not a single. Across 1968 a number of groups on both sides of the Atlantic cut a heavy track or a heavy side, Steppenwolf with a motorcycle song, Iron Butterfly with seventeen minutes of organ and fuzz, the Jeff Beck Group on Truth, and a heavy track proves only that somebody in the room had turned the amplifier up that afternoon. The test for a heavy metal band asks for more. It asks for whole albums built on the riff, and it asks whether the band was still making them five years later. By that test the heavy class of 1968 shrinks to almost nobody, and the class of 1970 to a handful.
The first half of that test is the definition of the style itself, the shuffle stripped out of the blues and the volume built into the song, and it is set out in full under what is heavy metal. The second half is time. Time is where most of the famous names drop off the list, and the drop is written on the records themselves, in the order they came out.
A heavy track proves only that somebody in the room had turned the amplifier up that afternoon.
The pioneers who walked away
The San Francisco trio that put a captive bolt pistol to the skull of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" in 1968, dropping the song with a single shot of feedback and hauling the carcass into the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100, answered to the name Blue Cheer, and it held that noise for barely a year. Leigh Stephens, whose amplifiers had made Vincebus Eruptum, was out before the end of 1968. By Oh! Pleasant Hope in 1971 the same name sat on a mild folk rock record.
The London quintet that had spent 1970 proving a Hammond organ could be as violent as a guitar went by the name Deep Purple, and four years later it laid a dance floor over its own gun deck. Released in November 1974, Stormbringer let David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes pull the band toward funk and soul so hard that Ritchie Blackmore walked out in 1975 to start Rainbow, and the line-up that made Come Taste the Band with Tommy Bolin that year had broken up by the summer of 1976.
Elsewhere the apostasy ran faster. In Hamburg, Lucifer's Friend took a heavy debut of 1971 into orchestral jazz fusion by Banquet in 1974. Grand Funk Railroad, which had sold out Shea Stadium in 1971 on sheer noise, went to number one on the Hot 100 in 1974 with a Todd Rundgren production of "The Loco-Motion", the Goffin and King song Little Eva had taken to the top in 1962. The volume had turned into a hit parade.
The name at the top of the list came back to the riff, but never whole. Led Zeppelin III opened on "Immigrant Song", a riff hauled like the oars of a raiding longship driven up a shingle beach, and then gave its second side to "Gallows Pole", "Tangerine" and "That's the Way". The untitled fourth album of November 1971 carried "Black Dog" and "When the Levee Breaks" beside "The Battle of Evermore" and "Going to California". A band with that many rooms was a great rock band. A heavy metal band it was not.
Casualties of the first wave
Some of the first heavy metal bands never had the chance to walk away. The Brooklyn trio with a drummer who sang from behind his own kit was Sir Lord Baltimore, and after Kingdom Come in December 1970 and a second album in 1971, Mercury let it go. Its Brooklyn neighbours in Dust got two albums out of Kama Sutra, Dust in 1971 and Hard Attack in 1972, and on the second of them Richie Wise's guitar goes through "Pull Away/So Many Times" like a jackhammer through a frozen kerb, flinging chips of the old blues across the pavement. Then, in 1972, the trio broke up.
The same fate reached further than New York. The Tokyo quartet built around the singer Joe Yamanaka and the guitarist Hideki Ishima was Flower Travellin' Band, and after Satori came out on Atlantic's Japanese arm in April 1971, five long movements under a single title, it lasted barely two more years before breaking up in 1973. The first wave lost more bands to the ledger than to changes of heart.
The few who stayed
The survivors are fewer. The London band whose guitarist Mick Box has played on every album it has released since ...Very 'Eavy ...Very 'Umble came out on Vertigo in June 1970 is Uriah Heep, and through all the organ and the stacked harmonies of "Gypsy" and "Easy Livin'" it has never stopped being a heavy band.
The Hanover quintet that cut Lonesome Crow for the Brain label in 1972, with a sixteen year old Michael Schenker on lead guitar, went by the name Scorpions, and it was still making heavy records half a century later, Rock Believer in 2022 among them. Schenker himself crossed to the London quartet UFO in 1973 and turned a band that had played space rock into a heavy one. Phenomenon, on Chrysalis in 1974, carried "Doctor Doctor" and "Rock Bottom", and the band held that weight through Lights Out in 1977 and the live Strangers in the Night in 1979.
Then there is the one band that made the style its whole subject from the first side of its first album, Black Sabbath, and even there the full catalogue holds a flute solo, a piano ballad and a horn section. Put is Black Sabbath heavy metal to every record the band made and the answer comes back yes. It has to be argued, though.
| Band | First heavy album | Year | Label | What came next |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue Cheer | Vincebus Eruptum | 1968 | Philips | Country rock by 1971 |
| Led Zeppelin | Led Zeppelin | 1969 | Atlantic | An acoustic second side in 1970 |
| Grand Funk Railroad | On Time | 1969 | Capitol | A number one pop single in 1974 |
| Black Sabbath | Black Sabbath | 1970 | Vertigo | Stayed heavy |
| Deep Purple | Deep Purple in Rock | 1970 | Harvest | Funk and soul on Stormbringer, 1974 |
| Uriah Heep | ...Very 'Eavy ...Very 'Umble | 1970 | Vertigo | Stayed heavy |
| Sir Lord Baltimore | Kingdom Come | 1970 | Mercury | Dropped after a second album, 1971 |
| Lucifer's Friend | Lucifer's Friend | 1971 | Philips | Jazz fusion on Banquet, 1974 |
| Dust | Dust | 1971 | Kama Sutra | Split after Hard Attack, 1972 |
| Scorpions | Lonesome Crow | 1972 | Brain | Stayed heavy |
Read top to bottom, the table says what the chroniclers seldom say out loud: most of the first heavy metal bands were passing through. What they left on the shelf was picked up by musicians who had learned it from the records, Judas Priest first among them with a debut in 1974, and carried through the young British wave into its fifty later names, a road followed from the start in a history of heavy metal.
The founders who stayed, among all the bands that put out heavy records in the years around 1970, can be counted on one hand. The ones who left made very good records on the way out, and not one of them was ever asked to give those records back.
