Heavy metal owes a heck of a lot to Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and perhaps most notably, Black Sabbath. The so-called unholy trinity were arguably the first generation of true heavy metal, but the narrative we’re used to hearing – that they singlehandedly forged the genre on a diet of blues and rock – is not the whole truth. It’s the sort of watered-down simplification of events that makes it easier to skim over everything pre-1969 when writing a feature or introducing a documentary on the genre, but whilst it’s not exactly untrue, it conveniently sidesteps a host of bands whose influence on all things heavy has been lost to the ages.
Metal has no ground zero, it was not born out of nothingness in 1970. Nor is it quite as simple as Jimi Hendrix > Cream > Vanilla Fudge > Blue Cheer > Steppenwolf > Grand Funk Railroad > Sabbath. Like all genres, it has its influencers (f**k I hate that word today), and it took time to fully take shape. One could even argue that metal wasn’t a true entity until NWOBHM came into being. Indeed, the question of who gave life to the first fuzzed-out heavy riff has no discernible answer, and in truth, what qualifies as metal here is somewhat subjective. Regardless, though, it’s indisputable that towards the tail-end of the ’60s, the initial blueprints for metal and its seemingly endless list of subgenres were forged. Amongst this time, a host of bands played around with the heavy rock that would become metal, helping to push it ever so slightly closer to its hellish final stop.
Many of these bands have been lost in the mists of time, so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to scour some forgotten pages of rock literature to uncover some of metal’s forgotten pioneers.
/ Text by Astral Noize (with my edits)
SOME OF THE PIONEERS
This is an ongoing project, I have dedicated a separate page that is continuously updated with new pioneers and albums to discover.
So if you’re interested in where it all started?
