The heavy metal family tree is not a tree at all. It is a banyan. A banyan starts life as a single trunk and then lets roots down from its own branches, thin grey cords that hang in the air for years until they touch the ground, bite into the soil, prise the paving slabs apart and thicken into trunks of their own, so that the parent can rot hollow at the centre while the grove stands, held up by its children. Nobody walking through it can say which pillar came first.
That is what happened to the music after 1983. Fed at the root by the electric blues of the late sixties, sired in Birmingham and London between 1970 and 1976 and carried abroad on imported vinyl, the family that had been one style dropped thrash, doom and power metal like aerial roots, and within a decade each of them was carrying weight of its own. The oldest trunk in the grove belongs to the Aston quartet that pressed its first album for Vertigo in February 1970, Black Sabbath. It no longer holds the whole grove up.
Where each style broke away along tempo, weight and voice is drawn on the map of the genre. A family tree asks the narrower question, who begat whom, and it keeps two kinds of record. One is the line-up, the players moving from band to band. The other is the cover version, a band standing up on its own record and naming its forebear out loud.
Two ways to draw a heavy metal family tree
The man who taught rock fans to draw the first kind was Pete Frame, founder in 1969 of the British magazine ZigZag, whose hand-lettered charts boxed every line-up with its dates and ran arrows between the boxes each time a player changed bands. Omnibus Press began collecting them as Rock Family Trees in 1979. The BBC filmed them in two series, in 1995 and 1998, with episodes on Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. On his pages a band is a household. People marry in and move out. Drawn his way, the heavy metal family tree is thickest round Deep Purple, Rainbow and Black Sabbath, where the same few players turn up in box after box, and the drummer Cozy Powell alone sits in the boxes of Rainbow, Whitesnake and Sabbath. The arrows there look like a railway junction.
The second kind is written on the records themselves. A cover version is a paternity test taken in public: the band puts its own name on the sleeve, and beside it the name of the band it learned from. Tape trading and hearsay can be argued about. A cover cannot.
The Purple branch and its roots in the air
One household produced more of the tree than any other. The guitarist who walked out of Deep Purple in 1975, took over the American band Elf apart from its guitarist and made a debut under his own name was Ritchie Blackmore, and Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, released that August, put a new voice at the front of a hard rock record built on classical scales and medieval colour. He had told his bandmates in March that he was leaving.
The voice was Ronnie James Dio's, and "Man on the Silver Mountain" is where the family first hears it at full size. From Rainbow it went to Black Sabbath in 1979 and to a band of its own name in 1982, so that one aerial root dropped from Purple ended up holding a corner of the parent trunk itself. No other singer's path draws that loop on a chart.
A second household split the same year. Dismissed from Hawkwind in May 1975 after nearly four years of playing bass like a rhythm guitar in a space rock band, the bassist who took his volume and the title of a song he had written for Hawkwind with him was Lemmy Kilmister, and the band he built on them was Motörhead. The sacking followed a night in a Canadian jail, after border police took his amphetamine for cocaine. Thrash would later call it a parent. Lemmy called it rock and roll.
A cover version is a paternity test taken in public.
Children who named their parents
The oldest test result in the tree reaches straight back to the blues. Added in 1979 to Hell Bent for Leather, the American edition of Killing Machine, a hard, polished reading of a song Peter Green had written for Fleetwood Mac in 1970, "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)", came from the Birmingham five who had already stripped the swing out of their own music, Judas Priest. The grandparent is named on a heavy metal sleeve by the parent. Few branches show where they joined the blues so plainly.
| The child | The song | The forebear | Where it appeared | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Judas Priest | "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)" | Fleetwood Mac | Hell Bent for Leather, the American Killing Machine | 1979 |
| Metallica | "Am I Evil?" | Diamond Head | B-side of "Creeping Death" | 1984 |
| Metallica | "Blitzkrieg" | Blitzkrieg | B-side of "Creeping Death" | 1984 |
| Metallica | "Helpless" | Diamond Head | The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited | 1987 |
| Metallica | "Crash Course in Brain Surgery" | Budgie | The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited | 1987 |
| Slayer | "Dissident Aggressor" | Judas Priest | South of Heaven | 1988 |
The Californian quartet that paid its debts in public, first on the B-side of "Creeping Death" in 1984 and then across a whole cheap record in August 1987, was Metallica, and its creditors were the British bands it had grown up on, Diamond Head and Holocaust from the young wave and Budgie from the decade before it, with Killing Joke and Misfits from outside the family. Thrash was the progeny of those small British singles. The band said so in print, on the sleeve.
They went at Diamond Head's "Helpless" the way ivy goes at an old brick wall, feeding its rootlets into the lime between the courses, working the joints loose grain by grain and dragging the whole face of the wall toward the light, until the song from Lightning to the Nations belonged to the band covering it as much as to the Stourbridge band that wrote it. The bricks were the same. The wall was not.
A year later the chain grew another link. Placed second to last on a record that had deliberately slowed their own attack, released by Def Jam in July 1988 and led by a title track built on dread instead of speed, the version of "Dissident Aggressor" that Priest had first cut for Sin After Sin in 1977 was put down by the Huntington Park four who had made Reign in Blood two years earlier, Slayer. Fleetwood Mac to Priest, Priest to Slayer: three generations on three sleeves.
Four generations from Paranoid
Counted that way, a young band playing extreme metal today often stands four or five generations from Paranoid, learning from a band that learned from Slayer, who learned from Priest, who learned from the blues. The name heavy metal still sits over all of them. The weight has moved to the children.
The family sat for its portrait in 1994. Released by Columbia in October 1994 with the grandchildren queuing to play the grandparent's songs, the record that put Sepultura, Megadeth, White Zombie, Type O Negative and Corrosion of Conformity on one sleeve beneath a single name was Nativity in Black, a tribute to Black Sabbath. Megadeth took "Paranoid", Sepultura "Symptom of the Universe", White Zombie "Children of the Grave", Corrosion of Conformity "Lord of This World" and Type O Negative "Black Sabbath" itself. Thrash, groove, gothic and southern metal all turned up, and every one of them played the riffs as heirs, not as guests. Nobody at that table needed an introduction to the host.
Some descendants skipped the generations between. The Swedish band that went straight back to the records of 1980 to 1984 and played them on its early albums as if thrash had never happened is Enforcer, and In Solitude did the same with the occult side of the family, grandchildren raised by their grandparents. On any honest reading they are the most faithful branch of the lineage. They are also the youngest.
One branch let go of the singer altogether and let the guitar carry the tune, a line that runs from Blackmore's classical runs through the shredders of the eighties, and it has its own chapter as instrumental heavy metal. It too grew from the same trunk.
Drawn on paper, the tree looks tidy. Played in order, the records show every band to be somebody's child. The best of them say so on the sleeve.
