Protometal : Before There Was Metal...
Metal was invented by accident in August 1968 when Tony Iommi met John Michael Osbourne.
That much is clear. But the planets had aligned long before that, so they could write the devil’s music into existence together. Iommi and Osbourne invented metal because the pre-existing creative conditions to do so were met. A lot has been said about what was the first metal song, but little is understood about how the idea of metal was invented. The dots are there, but they haven’t been explicitly connected yet.
Here are the five innovations metal owes its existence to : blues, the commodification of music, electric guitar, distortion pedals and The Velvet Underground. In that order, more or less. Here’s how the alchemy worked for over a hundred years prior to the meeting of the metal Gods:
The Blue Devils of Blues
The overlap between people who give a shit about blues and people who give a shit about metal is extremely small in 2023. But that doesn’t mean both styles aren’t connected.
It isn’t clear how and when blues was exactly invented because it originated in the American South in the nineteenth century and no one really kept precise tabs on African-American culture then. Gee, I wonder why? Blues was originally a way of expressing anger and sorrow at the challenges African-American people faced in segregated America. It exorcized emotions people called then “blue devils”. Melancholy and sadness. I’m not going to turn this into a detailed sociology of blues, but this detail here is important.
What the hell does it have to do with metal? Well, blues artists formed the first important outsider culture in contemporary music. After the American Civil War, the African-American community became free from slavery, but remained segregated. So, it was a music style born in “otherness” and that thrived in unofficial otherness once that Black people were allowed to have a culture. Blues artists kept singing about sadness and hurt, but the sources of the aforementioned sadness and hurt changed.
In the first half of the twentieth century, blues became a popular art where difficult feelings often unbecoming of upstanding citizens were celebrated. Howlin’ Wolf sang about domestic violence on Killing Floor and rioting with dangerous people in Wang Dang Doodle. John Lee Hooker sang about (presumably) his penis on Crawlin’ King Snake and getting hammered as a way to temporarily solve your problems on One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.
You see where I’m getting at? These were unacceptable topics to sing about from a commercial standpoint. It could only have happened (and thrived) in a culture of otherness, where people identified to a protagonist who doesn’t fit the social norms of the era. This idea resonated way outside the confines of African-American communities because a lot of people have a lot of repressed feelings about a shitload of stuff. Not only is blues still a rather important musical genre today, but its lyrical themes and musical precepts are at the root of most modern music: jazz, rock, r&b, even hip-hop. This otherness, this proud outsider mentality is at the root of metal. So is the music.
It is a common mistake to think that blues gave way to rock which gave way to metal. Truth to be told, blues gave way to both. The first metal musician was not trying to play downtuned rock, he was trying to play blues. Rock isn’t rock’s dad. It’s his older, straighter stepbrother. Definitely an inspiration in terms of attitude and composition, but they quickly evolved into their own thing.
The Devil Inside Your Home
Blues wasn’t the first outside culture in music, but it became popular at the right time. Oppressed people have turned to music to express their frustration and anger since music exists. The Irish did it. The Celts did it beforehand. Blues wasn’t necessarily better or worse (I think that blues is musically light years ahead, but it’s a personal taste), but it happened right at the time where music became a popular commodity.
In his book How Music Works, David Byrne chronicled how the commercialization of gramophones, turntables and vinyl records turned music from what was once a communal experience into a personal one for an affordable fee. It is mostly responsible for making music what it is today. Instead of going somewhere to hear music, you could hear it inside your own home and form a personal relationship to it. That is important in metal history not only because metalheads are huge record collectors, but it’s how blues traveled from black to white communities. The commodification of music of how white boys started wanting to play blues.
Same thing goes for rock n’ roll. The saying that black people invented every style of music and that white people swiped it away from them is true, sort of.
One of the reasons why blues is so foundational in the history of metal is that it’s a guitar-driven genre and guitar is the self-expression tool of rebellious, outsider kids. Well, it became that BECAUSE of blues and subsequently rock n’ roll. The genre allowed guitar music to burrow its way into unsuspecting homes. It would singlehandedly turn music into the dominant expression of youth culture in Occidental society. It would only grow in importance from its invention in the early twentieth century to the turn of the millennia. Parents bought records to dance, but the kids built their entire identities around it. Keep that in mind, it’s important.
Electric Gods
Metal is a guitar-driven genre. That means guitar is the single most important instrument in composition. It’s even more important than vocals. In more extreme forms of metal, vocals are used like another instrument that adds layers of grittiness to the sonic texture of the music rather than a storytelling tool. In metal, guitar takes care of that. It operated on a more intuitive and emotional level than just about any other genre that I’m aware of. This sort of visceral relationship exists because of another technical innovation: the invention of electric guitar.
The beautiful thing in a journey like this is that electric guitar was invented innocently. The idea behind the technology was to make music accessible to larger crowds. Oddly enough, the first amplified string instruments were violins and banjos. The first commercial electric “guitar” was something called “the frying pan”, which was a whole new spin on an familiar instrument. It looked like a banjo, but it didn’t sound like one. The first modern electric guitar (which means the body wasn’t hollow like classic guitars) was the Les Paul, which was invented in 1941 by a guy named O.W Appleton.
The first major artist to commission and use an electric guitar as we know it wasn’t actually a blues singer. It was country singer Merle Travis in 1946, but its rich new sound became instantly popular. It was picked up by T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and soon after that, by Chuck Berry and the rest was history. There was a coolness associated with electric guitar that seized the collective imagination and never really faded away. It was the instruments of rebels and misunderstood geniuses. Electric guitar could speak for you. The greater range of possibilities it offered opened up a new creative lexicon for a generation of kids who aspired to be different and different they were.
Distorted Djinns
The invention of electric guitar was one thing, but what brought it to outsider culture and made it a staple in metal was the invention of distortion pedals. Metal wouldn’t have been invented if it weren’t for distortion, for it is an essential part of its vocabulary. Have you ever listened to black metal without distortion? It’s glorified surf rock. What is distortion exactly? It’s the increase of gain to alter the sound of an electric instrument. It gives electric guitar its fuzzy, gritty texture that really is the entire personality of metal. If distortion never existed, we could never have metal.
Once again, this bad boy was invented by accident. Before it even was a concept, distortion was the result of a broken amplifier. Gain became all messed up and altered the sound. A guy named Junior Barnard thought it sounded cool as shit and started trying to find a way to harness this effect. Other guitarists like Buddy Guy and Muddy Waters also thought it was cool and that it added a rawness to their sound that matched the emotional intensity of their music. Distortion was invented by dudes trying to deliberately mess up their amplifiers so that it would sound grittier. That’s fucking metal as fuck.
Although it was invented by mischievous country and blues singers, distortion-driven guitar was definitely enhanced and popularized by rock. It took the sound elsewhere, especially in the sixties. Guitarists like Link Wray, Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix really went overboard with it and tested the boundaries of what you could do with it. At least at the time. We’re still a far cry from Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, but the sixties is where rock started playing an important part in the formation of what would be the sonic signature of metal. I mean listen to this scorcher from 1968. You can tell metal was on the tip of everybody’s tongue. There was somewhere more extreme left to go.
La Monte Young, John Cale and Lou Reed
From its inception in (arguably) 1951 to 1964, rock n’ roll was a forget-your-problems-and-dance kind of music. It was meant to be a great fucking time. Although some artists experimented with slightly darker and provocative lyrical and musical themes, no one shifted rock to a more emotional and introspective paradigm like The Velvet Underground. They were never personally my cup of tea, but these cats were different.
They were different in two ways: 1) Lou Reed’s nihilistic junkie outlook reflected a reality that was both harder to relate to and mystifying. He was not the first troubled rock star, but he was definitely the first who marketed himself as such. 2) The musical experimentations of John Cale broke free from what was until then a pretty rigid form. Both were important in creating metal’s dark and complex identity. They were never quoted by Black Sabbath as an influence, but I do believe they were influential by osmosis. They were influential to bands who were influential to Sabbath.
John Cale’s contribution was both important and misunderstood. Cale studied with contemporary composer La Monte Young. They played together in something called The Theater of Eternal Music, which pioneered a little something called drone.
The ideas of La Monte Young bled into rock music by osmosis, through John Cale and The Velvet Underground. What were these ideas exactly? I’m going to paraphrase critic J.R Moores from his book Electric Wizards here: a preoccupation with the texture and density of music over technicality and composition. In metal, there’s generally a great preoccupation with both. But no one really cared about the texture and density of sound in popular music before Cale did. The Velvet Underground was not heavy per se, but the band subtly explored space and temporality in music in ways rock bands never did before.
Remember, this happened before The Beatles were introduced to LSD. They hadn’t met with Ravi Shankar yet. These changes expressed themselves subtly, through the use of downbeat, fragmented song structures and lengthy instrumentals. These songs breathed. They didn’t need to deliver in a conventional format. Sound existed for its own sake. I mean listen to The Theater of Eternal Music above and then listen to this:
There were a lot of musical revolutions happening at the same time in the sixties, but none of them affected what would become metal more than the compositional ideas of John Cale and La Monte Young. They were the primordial rock metal Gods carved upon.
…and then, there was (proto)metal
Metal was invented by accident in August 1968 when Tony Iommi met John Michael Osbourne, but there were songs that blazed the path of their unholy creation. The year is definitely still 1968, but it is still highly debated today as to what exactly is the first metal song.
The conventional answer to this question is Helter Skelter by The Beatles. A loud, distorted and out of control psychedelic rock song with a shitload of distortion and a Paul McCartney in a diabolical trance. It could definitely be construed as metal, but perhaps the most metal thing about it is that Charles Manson was obsessed with it and claimed it had a secret meaning. It did not, but it’s still a killer song today. I have no problem considering it the first occurrence of metal.
Hipsters will tell you the first metal song was the cover of Summertime Blues by a little known California band called Blue Cheer. It had pretty metal qualities like killer drumming and a pounding rhythm section. The gruff singing is pretty cool too, although it is clearly accidental. I consider it to be just a very aggressive and inspired psychedelic rock song that foreshadowed the existence of metal, but if you compare this sound to early Black Sabbath, there’s very little overlap.
An absolutely wild seventeen minutes-long psychedelic number that redefined what you thought a song could be. I believe In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly really nailed the weight and the ominousness that was proper to Black Sabbath. The vocal performance. The use of the organ. The monstrous length. It was probably a coincidence, but it’s what I mean when I say metal was on the tip of everybody’s tongue in the late sixties. Slayer also made a killer cover, by the way. Metal as fuck.
There are many other usual suspects: The Who, The Kinks, The Stooges, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf. They can all be labeled protometal. Aggressive forms of rock that had certain qualities of metal, but not all of them. If Black Sabbath is so fundamental to the style, it’s because they created a paradigm of their own, notably through the use of horror imagery in their lyrics. They are going to have their own chapter in this journey next month (well, it’ll be mostly their’s), but this chapter here was about making clear that although they were game-changing, Black Sabbath did not appear from a vacuum.
Metal was born in August 1968, but it was a century in the making.
