Hard Rock

Hard rock is a genre that came to light in the mid-sixties, hard rock is made up of several rock & roll influenced sub-genres.

First, there is “garage rock” which cropped up from the instrumental rock & roll of the late fifties with songs like the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie” and the surf rock of the early sixties such as the Trashmen’s “Bird Is A Word”.

Then add to that the mix of blues-influenced British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Stones and you get hard rock. Many scholars argue as to the first song of whatever yet with the song “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks it seems to be a good start with the first distortion later to be enhanced and duplicated spawning several sub-genres.

Hard rock developed in the middle years of the 60’s with the influence of the Briitish Invasion becoming more and more important in the development of rock.

The distortion on the guitars continued from the Kinks late 1964 to the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction” in the summer of 1965 then there was an outcropping of the sound amongst the Beatles (I Feel Fine, Ticket To Ride), The Kinks (I Need You), The Stones (19th Nervous Breakdown), The Yardbirds (Shape Of Things )and the Who (My Generation) and their albums.

This led to new psychedelic bands that experimented in folk rock as well as blues induced hard rock in 1967. In the UK there was the rise of Cream, Jimi Hendrix Experience and Pink Floyds mix of eclectic music.

On the west coast particularly San Francisco where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and (Janice Joplin) Big Brother and the Holding Company. In LA was the mighty Jim Morrison and the Doors along with Frank Zappa and the Mothers, not to forget the Village NY with Velvet Underground and the Fugs.

Hard rock had been growing since the early days of rhythm and blues and yet the year it became main-stream and would be listened to on public radio stations for decades has to be 1968 for several reasons. First, The Beatles and the Stones put out hard rock singles with “Revolution” and “Street Fighting Man”, Steppenwolf releases “Born To Be Wild” hitting number 2 on the Billboard charts at the end of the summer.

Key Hard Rock songs that influenced: The Beatles “Revolution”, “Helter Skelter”;Blue Cheer – “Summertime Blues”; Arthur Brown – “Fire”; Iron Butterfly -“In A Gadda Da Vida”, Steppenwolf – “Born To Be Wild”, King Crimson

The Decibel Technology

Led Zeppelin

Personally, I see Deep Purple as well as Vanilla Fudge as early hard rock bands that were sometimes called heavy metal bands like Led Zeppelin was. However, I think Led Zeppelin was too diverse in their music styles to be labeled purely a “heavy metal” band. To my ears, Led Zeppelin fits better in the categories of classic rock including blues rock, funk rock, folk rock and hard rock and not only heavy metal, what do you think?

Hard Rock vs. Heavy Metal

Hard rock became mainstream with groups like James Gang (Walk Away), Queen (Keep Yourself Alive), Neil Young (Cinnamon Girl) radio favorites Boston , Thin Lizzy, Bachman Turner Overdrive and Heart early 70’s, Rush, Bon Scot era AC/DC, original line-up of Kiss,all have elements and songs that had that aggressive sound but are still considered hard rock bands.

The Year of Hard Rock: 1968

Blues rock, psychedelic rock and folk rock mixed around in late 1967 and gave way to a string of distortion hits in 1968 starting the genre “Hard Rock”. In early 1968, the music was still tripping with psychedelic albums as divergent as the Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” and Zappa’s #30 “We’re Only In It, For The Money”. But things were about to change after a very troubling spring (April 4th) and early summer with the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy (June 5th) the music started to change.

The summer started with Blue Cheer’s # 14 “Summertime Blues” in early May becoming what many agree is the first classic heavy metal song. The Stones were back in July with the energetic #3 “Jumping Jack Flash”, August, 3rd broke out with the Doors #1 buzz guitar “Hello, I Love You” followed by Steppenwolf’s #2 “Born to Be Wild” on August 24th using the phrase “heavy metal” in a song. Then, Vanilla Fudge’s #6 “You Keep Me Hanging On” and super-group Cream’s ‘#5 “Sunshine of Your Love”  both peaked August 31st and where very influential on the future genre heavy metal.

Then starting off the fall Deep Purple turned out a bluesy, trippy anthem  the #4 “Hush” with the two veteran rockers the Beatles pulling out the distorted blues rocker #12 “Revolution”, continuing with the Stones weighty #48 “Street Fighting Man” all in late September. Then a new band, the genre defining Iron Butterfly gave us a classic heavy metal song with the #30 “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s gave us the Satanists delight, # 2 “Fire” peaking in October. Ending the year was Janice Joplin and the Holding Company’s #12 “Piece of My Heart” early November.

The albums, starting with Iron Butterfly’s #78, January release “Heavy” and the #4 June release “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” gave us the first two proto true heavy metal albums. Jeff Beck’s “Truth” album explored heavy sounds as was the Who in the heavy classic “I Can See for Miles”. Jimi brought out the hard rock and psychedelic masterpiece album “Electric Lady Land”. The Beatles explored hard rock and heavy metal with the iconic “Helter Skelter” off the master discs of “The White Album” further extending my argument that the Beatles had a hand in all music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Many of the songs in 1968 were exploring the heavy distortion sound  but with the exception of Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly most of the bands were hard rock bands and not what you could call a flat out ‘Heavy Metal Band”.

Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath

Even in the next year of 1969 when much of hard rock would be released in the LP album format with the domination of Led Zeppelin’s first two albums “Led Zeppelin” in January and then the brown bomber “Led Zeppelin II” in October showing a wide complexity of genres. The first album, laden with blues was showing blues rocks influence on the new hard rock sound.

I see Led Zeppelin as a hard rock band that explored many different genres in rock, blues, gospel, folk as well as heavy metal and other styles mixed with the love of old time rock & roll of the 50s; therefore Led Zeppelin cannot be labeled as only a “heavy Metal” band.

Deep Purple started out as a “Hard Rock” band that later ended up in the “Heavy Metal” category. Now, along with Black Sabbath, these three bands make up the so called “Unholy Trinity” or a Heavy Metal Triumvirate that had extraordinary influence on the genre called Heavy Metal..

The difference between the two genres of “Hard Rock” (Led Zeppelin) and Heavy Metals (Black Sabbath) is in Heavy Metal’s usage of dissonance, down tuning half or whole steps, the usage of the tri-tone also known as the augmented fourth/diminished fifth and Satan’s Interval (diabolus in musica), the use of chromatic chord progressions and bass pedal point and sustained passing dissonance. Black Sabbath, although rooted in “blues rock” began to move away from the blues progressions and to incorporate Aeolian chord progressions (ex: I, VI, VII) and the Phrygian modes (chromatic, ex:  I, ii, III) or scales.

Black Sabbath’s entire image as well as sounding the most extreme for the time seals the argument that Black Sabbath is the quintessential heavy metal band. The dark usage of images in horror, the macabre, Satan, pagan mythology, dysfunction, depression, fear, abuse, addiction and topics that up till 1970 had not been fully explored in the way that Sabbath uncovered.

Tony Iommi was influenced by “Blues” but in many of the songs that he created for Sabbath have a “Classic Music” feel to them like Baroque or classical guitar like Segovia or Paganini. In fact many of the Brits contributed a distinct classical music influence to rock music (Beatles, Stones, Procul Harum, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd and on to Led Zeppelin, Yes and Sabbath) quite different then America’s Americana (folk, blues, gospel, country, etc.) influence to Rock music. With the exception of Frank Zappa and a couple of others the music of “Classic Rock” was created by the mix of British Bands with the United States Americana bands.

It wasn’t until retrospect, many years after that the term “rock” would become an umbrella term used to describe many mixes of rock & roll music with other genres.