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.