Anybody know about 60's Heavy Metal?

Hello there,

What was it like in the 60s? Up to the mid 60s rock was very formatted. You had to conform your music to fit what the industry thought rock should sound like in order to get air time. If you did not conform, the major radio stations did not play your music.For instance, Link Wray did a song called Rumble that was heavy of guitar distortion (pre 1960). It was banned from the air waves and it is an instrumental.

All of that changed when the Beatles released Revolver. That album broke the mold the industry had set for rock. The Beatles were big enough by then that their work could not be squelched. After Revolver, rock musicians were free to play whatever they wanted. The roots of various genre sprang up. By the time the Beatles released Sgt Pepper, whatever remained control the music industry had on rock was totally smashed. The imagination was now the only limitation on rock musicians.

Jimi Hendrix rose to fame primarily through his appearance at the Monterrey Pop Festival. Acid rock sprang up. Later folks more politically correct call it psychedelic music, back then we called it acid rock. Other forms of heavier rock emerged. Bands like Deep Purple with their classic Smoke on the Water laid the foundation for what later became metal. They were followed by Black Sabbath with their classic Iron Man. Bands like Steppenwolf with their songs Magic Carpet Ride and Born to be Wild laid the foundation for hard rock.They were followed by bands like Led Zeppelin.

There was the hard core acid rock sounds from bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin), the Cream (Eric Clapton) and the Jefferson Airplane (Gracie Slick).

Back in the late 60s as all these different sounds were beginning, we never thought about genres. Bands played a mix of stuff, experimenting with this and that. That is part of why it is hard to pigeon hole bands of the late 60s into precise genres. It was an era of experimentation, musically and culturally. Later other bands would take a particular song or sound of a band from that era and develop it as that sound emerged into a genre. Kids of today see genres as black and white, clear cut divisions. A band is one or the other, but must fit into some genre pigeon hole. In a sense we were freer in the late 60s and early 70s. Free to experiment and blend sounds and styles. Since the notion of genres came along later, we were not bound to fit into some pigeon hole definition of what we should sound like. After all, that was the very notion that the Beatles had smashed for us with Revolver.

Later,

60s Heavy Metal

Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Who, Iron Butterfly, The Kinks, etc all formed in the 60's and made what would be later called Heavy Metal. Just because it wasn't named until the 70's doesn't mean it wasn't part of the genre. I would have to add that The Stooges, Question Mark & the Mysterians, and MC5 also had a part in making what would be known as Heavy Metal. But they influenced punk as well.

Well- "metal" wasn't really used as a term until around '70- although Steppenwolf said 'heavy metal thunder' in reference to motorbikes in 'Born to be Wild'.

The first heavy rock artists were Blue Cheer, MC5, Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Budgie, UFO, Cream, Deep Purple, etc. Here's a link to some AMAZING stuff from 60's '70's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exYgyajkjsI&feature...

Heavy metal did not exist in the '60s. You mean heavyweight blues and rock bands like Blue Cheer, Cream, and Vanilla Fudge? Or heavy psych bands like High Tide and The Open Mind? Because there was no metal.

Rock existed, metal did not.

The '60s had acid rock and hard rock, but metal wasn't coined yet. Bands like the Yardbirds, Steppenwolf and Pink Floyd were just getting started.

The foundation for metal began in the 60s, but metal didn't exist then.

I would think a pair of headphones that go around the back of the head. They have Nike ones at the apple store and I think they around $50. Nike tends to make quality merchandise, and I'm sure they work and sound good.

One of the first few recorded metal songs (Early Stages)

Was The beatle's "Helter Skelter"

Again, VERY early and a lot of people seem to argue about this.

Silly boy. Everyone knows there was no metal before Peter Frampton!