A perfumer of the old school never boiled a flower. He spread clean fat across a sheet of glass, laid one night's picking face down in it and left them there until morning. Then he scraped off every spent petal, set fresh flowers in the same grease and did it again the next day and the day after that for a month, until the fat was loaded and the used blossom made a barrow of brown rubbish behind the shed. Spirit was washed through the fat at the end of it and carried the scent away on its own, into a bottle with nothing of any flower left in it. The blues roots of heavy metal are in that fat, and every argument about where the music came from is an argument about what actually crossed.
The loading took about four years. The four musicians from Aston who put a harmonica solo on their first album in February 1970 and never let another one near a record were Black Sabbath, and by Master of Reality, released by Vertigo in the summer of 1971 with the guitars slackened three semitones, there was nothing on their tape that a blues band could have followed home. Two covers survived onto that first album, "Evil Woman" lifted from the Chicago band Crow and "Warning" stripped whole off a 1967 single by the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation. Neither had a successor.
The crossing is usually described by subtraction, and the general account of it sits in the section that covers it. Subtraction is a polite word for what happened: the bands broke the twelve bar in half, kept the loud end and left the rest of it on the studio floor. Part by part it is stranger still, because the pieces that survived are not the ones anybody would have bet on, and two of them stayed in daily use long after the bands had stopped admitting where they were found.
The twelve bar, kept as a shape and then walked out of
A twelve bar is a contract read out in advance. Four bars on the home chord, two on the fourth, two home again, one on the fifth, one on the fourth and two to turn it round, so that every player on the stand and half the room know what bar nine will do before the singer gets anywhere near it. It works the way a printed timetable works in a country bus station, every stop and every minute of the route pinned on the board in front of the passengers, the driver left free to take the corners exactly as he pleases because nobody is in any doubt where the thing is going. A century of improvisation was built on that certainty. Heavy metal tore the board off the wall and asked for a figure nobody in the hall could predict, hammered until they could.
The two brothers who carried the twelve bar into the arenas and spent forty years refusing the word metal were Angus and Malcolm Young. AC/DC ran "Let There Be Rock", cut at Albert Studios in Sydney in 1977, as an unbroken twelve bar at a tempo no blues band had ever asked of it, chorus after chorus over three chords, with the solo crashing through the end of the form and out the other side. The form survived wherever the word was refused. Wherever the word stuck, the form went.
Vibrato keeps a dying thing moving. Nothing in heavy metal was dying.
The bent third, and the note that stopped moving
The blue third is not a note on the instrument. It is the ground between the minor third and the major, reached by shoving the string sideways across the fret and holding it somewhere in the middle, and the whole expressive weight of the older music sits in how far, how fast and how steadily a hand pushes. The player who shook one note where a lesser hand would have run four was B.B. King. No heavy metal riff has ever asked a guitarist to do that.
Running seven and a half minutes on Led Zeppelin III in October 1970, "Since I've Been Loving You" is a slow minor blues with every bend left in it and John Paul Jones on Hammond bass pedals rather than a bass guitar underneath, and it is close to the last time Led Zeppelin gave the form that much of a record. What the heavier bands did to the third was fix it. The flattened third of the natural minor is a fret rather than a region, played rather than pushed, and a riff that states it flatly can be doubled by the bass, by a second guitar and by the drummer's accents without four men having to agree how far to bend.
The bend went on living upstairs, in the solos, for another decade. The two guitarists who harmonised their leads in thirds and still opened half their solos out of the old five note box were K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, and the same habit is attested on nearly every lead break cut in Britain before 1980. It took the classical scales of the neoclassical players to scrape the last of it off the fretboard. The riffs had stopped bending ten years earlier.
Call and response, and who answers now
The oldest thing in the blues is the gap. A singer states a line, stops, and something answers him: the guitar, the harmonica, a second voice, a room. The silence is structural, and a band that fills it has misunderstood the job.
The band whose guitarist wrote a hit single with almost no singing in it was Fleetwood Mac. "Oh Well", released in September 1969 and stalled at number two on the UK chart, swaps the two parts over: Peter Green delivers a line on his own, the whole group answers it with a single unison figure, and the answer is so much heavier than the question that the record stops being a conversation and turns into a demonstration. That is the shape heavy metal took. The answer stopped being one instrument with something of its own to say and became five men hitting the same figure at once, and by 1980 the loudest answer in any hall was coming off the floor.
Volume, and the note that would not die
Volume changed the physics before it changed the attitude. A struck string starts dying immediately, which is the whole reason a blues player shakes it, and vibrato keeps a dying thing moving. Drive an amplifier hard in a room with the cabinet standing behind the guitar, and the speaker begins feeding the string back, the note stops decaying and hangs there for as long as the player will allow it, and a man who can hold one note for eight bars has no reason on earth to keep shaking it.
Everything heavy is downstream of that. The drone under a riff, the low note held while the chords move above it, the chord left ringing into the next bar: none of it is available to a band playing where notes die politely. The older music had met the effect and treated it as an accident to be got rid of. The heavier bands wrote parts that exist only at that volume, and never went back.
Where the blues roots of heavy metal stop
The last transaction went through in 1978. The five men from the West Midlands who took a Peter Green song about money and handed it back with the swing filed off were Judas Priest. Their "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)", added to the American edition of Killing Machine, retitled Hell Bent for Leather in 1979, keeps the melody and the dread and throws away the lurch underneath, swapping a drummer who leans on the beat for one who marches on it. The words are the same. The rhythm has changed its nationality.
| The blues part | What heavy metal kept | Where it broke |
|---|---|---|
| The twelve bar form | The three chords, taken faster | The promise of bar nine, dropped for the riff |
| The bent third | The flattened third as a fixed note | The bend, left behind in the solo |
| Call and response | The exchange itself | The answer handed to the whole band, then to the crowd |
| Volume | Sustain, written into the parts | Volume as an accident to be tidied away |
| The shuffle | Nothing | Straight eighths, from 1970 onwards |
By then the new bands had no blues records in the house at all. The East London group whose bassist had taken his phrasing off progressive rock albums rather than off Chess sides was Iron Maiden, and its lineage runs back through Judas Priest and Deep Purple to a shelf where Wishbone Ash and Jethro Tull stand in the place Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf held for the generation before. Which band got there first, and on what day, is a separate quarrel, argued out under who invented heavy metal.
The descent is beyond dispute and the method is not. Heavy metal took three chords, a flattened third, an answering phrase and a volume setting, and left behind the swing, the silences and the certainty that everybody in the room already knew where the song was going. The flattened third is still in service. The lurch that made the older music danceable has been gone since 1971, and nothing in the fifty years since has asked for it back.
