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”.