Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
all fans. But genres are defined not only through internal features of the artists or the texts but also through commercial strategies and the conflicting valorizations of audiences. These debates over heavy metal are grounded in historical formations of meaning and prestige. To understand the priorities and values of heavy metal musicians and fans, we will need to examine their history.
Casting Heavy Metal
The term “heavy metal” has been applied to popular music since the late 1960s, when it began to appear in the rock press as an adjective; in the early 1970s it became a noun and thus a genre. The spectacular increase in the popularity of heavy metal during the 1980s prompted many critics and scholars of popular music to begin to write metal’s history. In histories of rock and of American music, in encyclopedias of popular music, in books and periodicals aimed at the dedicated metal fan or the quizzical outsider, writers began to construct a history of the genre. These historians have all understood their task similarly: they have attempted to define the boundaries of a musical genre and to produce a narrative of the formation and development of that genre, usually in the context of the history of rock music. The best of these histories, such as Philip Bashe’s Heavy Metal Thunder or Wolf Marshall’s articles in Guitar for the Practicing Musician, are insightful and lucid, written by journalists with intimate knowledge of the bands and their fans.22
Histories typically begin with a problem most writers regard as essential: the question of the origin of the term “heavy metal.” The first appearance of “heavy metal” in a song lyric is generally agreed to be in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” a hit motorcycle anthem of 1968, celebrating the “heavy metal thunder” of life in the fast lane. But the term “heavy metal,” we are usually told, had burst into popular consciousness in 1962, with the U.S. publication of William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, a beat junkie’s fantasies and confessions of drugs, sleaze, and violent sex. Burroughs is often credited with inventing the term and sometimes even with inspiring the genre. Some sources claim that Steppenwolf lifted the phrase directly from Burroughs’s book, although no one has provided any evidence for that link.
This story of the origin of “heavy metal” appears in nearly every recounting of metal’s history.23 It is, however, not only simplistic but wrong, since the phrase “heavy metal” does not actually appear anywhere in Naked Lunch (although a later novel by Burroughs, Nova Express (1964), introduces as characters “The Heavy Metal Kid” and the “Heavy Metal People of Uranus”). At some point this notion of origin got planted in rock journalism, and the appeal of a clear point of origin led others to perpetuate the error.24 But as we are reminded by The Oxford English Dictionary, “heavy metal” enjoyed centuries of relevant usage as a term for ordnance and poisonous compounds. The long-standing use of the phrase as a technical term in chemistry, metallurgy, and discussions of pollution suggests that the term did not spring full-blown into public awareness from an avant-garde source. “Heavy metal poisoning” is a diagnosis that has long had greater cultural currency than Burroughs’s book has had, and the scientific and medical uses of the term “heavy metal” are even cognate, since they infuse the music with values of danger and weight, desirable characteristics in the eyes of late 1960s rock musicians. The evidence suggests that the term circulated long before Steppenwolf or even Burroughs and that its meaning is rich and associative rather than an arbitrary label invented at some moment. Eventually, “heavy metal” began to be used to refer specifically to popular music in the early 1970s, in the writings of Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh at Creem.
A heavy metal genealogy ought to trace the music back to African-American blues, but this is seldom done. Just as histories of North America begin with the European invasion, the histories of musical genres such as rock and heavy metal commonly begin at the point of white dominance. But to emphasize Black Sabbath’s contribution of occult concerns to rock is to forget Robert Johnson’s struggles with the Devil and Howlin’ Wolf’s meditations on the problem of evil. To trace heavy metal vocal style to Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant is to forget James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” To deify white rock guitarists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page is to forget the black American musicians they were trying to copy; to dwell on the prowess of these guitarists is to relegate Jimi Hendrix, the most virtuosic rock guitarist of the 1960s, to the fringes of music history. The debt of heavy metal to African-American music making has vanished from most accounts of the genre, just as black history as been suppressed in every other field.
Rock historians usually begin the history of heavy metal with the white (usually British) musicians who were copying urban blues styles. Mid-1960s groups like the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Jeff Beck Group combined the rock and roll style of Chuck Berry with the earthy blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Along with Jimi Hendrix, these British blues bands developed the sounds that would define metal: heavy drums and bass, virtuosic distorted guitar, and a powerful vocal style, that used screams and growls as signs of transgression and transcendence. The Kinks released the first hit song built around power chords in 1964, “You Really Got Me.” Some credit Jimi Hendrix with the first real heavy metal hit, the heavily distorted, virtuosic “Purple Haze” of 1967. Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic band, extended the frontiers of loudness, distortion, and feedback (but not virtuosity) with their defiantly crude cover version of “Summertime Blues,” a hit single in 1968, the same year Steppenwolf released “Born to Be Wild.”
We had a place in forming that heavy-metal sound. Although I’m not saying we knew what we were doing, ’cause we didn’t. All we knew was we wanted more power. And if that’s not a heavy-metal attitude, I don’t know what is.
—Dick Peterson, singer/bass player with Blue Cheer25
These groups of the late 1960s, now identified as early heavy metal bands, favored lyrics that evoked excess and transgression. Some, such as MC5 and Steppenwolf, linked their noisiness to explicit political critique in their lyrics; others, like Blue Cheer, identified with the San Francisco—based psychedelic bands, for whom volume and heaviness aided an often drug-assisted search for alternative formations of identity and community. Inspired by the guitar virtuosity and volume of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, late 1960s rock bands developed a musical language that used distortion, heavy beats, and sheer loudness to create music that sounded more powerful than any other.26 Groups like Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge added organ to the musical mix; like the electric guitar, the organ is capable of sustained, powerful sounds as well as virtuosic soloing, and the combination of both resulted in an aural wall of heavy sound. Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1969), featuring the seventeen-minute title tune with its interminable drum solo, became the biggest-selling album Atlantic Records had ever had. Drummers of the late 1960s hit their drums very hard, resulting in a sound that was not only louder but heavier, more emphatic. Their drum sets grew ever larger and more complicated, along with the expansion of concert amplification and guitar distortion devices.
The sound that would become known as heavy metal was definitively codified in 1970 with the release of Led Zeppelin II, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, and Deep Purple in Rock. Joe Elliot, now lead vocalist for Def Leppard, recalls this moment, which he lived as a young fan: “In 1971, there were only three bands that mattered. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple.”27 Led Zeppelin’s sound was marked by speed and power, unusual rhythmic patterns, contrasting terraced dynamics, singer Robert Plant’s wailing vocals, and guitarist Jimmy Page’s heavily distorted crunch. Their songs were often built around thematic hooks called rifts, a practice derived from urban blues music and extended by British imitators such as Eric Clapton (e.g., “Sunshine of Your Love”).28 In their lyrics and music, Led Zeppelin added mysticism to hard rock through evocations of the occult, the supernatural, Celtic legend, and Eastern modality. Deep Purple’s sound was similar but with organ added and with greater stress on classical influences; Baroque figuration abounds in the solos of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and keyboardist Jon Lord.29 Black Sabbath took the emphasis on the occult even further, using dissonance, heavy riffs, and the mysterious whine of vocalist Ozzy Osbourne to evoke overtones of gothic horror.
A “second generation of heavy metal,” the first to claim the name unambiguously, was also active