Metal Origins: Black Sabbath? Yes! — But Who Else Was Involved?
getting past the Sabbath-first-and-only narrative
There’s been a tendency in recent years — one I see particularly among fans into more recent “genre” metal (all the stuff ranging from “black” to “sludge” to “viking” . . .) — to accord the origins of heavy metal primarily to one band, Black Sabbath. This claim has been given considerable weight by a key practitioner and early innovator, Rob Halford, for whom it’s become somewhat of a party-line that first there was Sabbath, and really nobody else doing it, and then there was Judas Priest. My aim, in this and some follow-up posts yet to come, is to argue that this is far from the case — that the story is much more complicated and interesting than that.
Don’t get me wrong — in the narrative as I reconstruct it, Black Sabbath certainly gets given their rightful pride of place. They possess a rightly accorded status of “first among equals.” I’d even go so far as to say that without Sabbath, metal might have coalesced rather differently — and perhaps less powerfully, less coherently — as a genre. But it’s a mistake to portray them as the sole seminal band.
Halford’s claims — which I was surprised to hear him making on stage during their Epitaph tour years back — get magnified in books like Garry Sharpe-Young’s rather lopsided and misleadingly-named compendium Metal: The Definitive Guide (for my critical review of that work, see here), which unfortunately gets taken as a major source for the Wikipedia Traditional Heavy Metal entry. (Some go Halford one better, for instance Roy Wilkinson, in this 2010 Guardian piece, claiming that Judas Priest invented heavy metal!)
Earlier on in thinking about these matters, it was common to point towards a triumvirate of late 60s-early 70s heavy metal originators — Black Sabbath, to be sure, but also Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple — and to tilt the hat towards a few other heavy bands as predecessors, for instance, Blue Cheer, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and even Steppenwolf (since they coin that “heavy metal thunder” line in Born to Be Wild). There’s certainly more truth there in that expanded genealogy, I think, but it doesn’t go quite far enough.
I tend to think that Heavy Metal as a musical genre, in its classic 70s-early 80s forms, has a history analogous to Existentialism as a philosophical movement. The time-frame is much shorter for the former, to be sure, since it took close to eight decades for the earlier figures who would prove so central as influences on the later movement (Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Shestov, Rilke, Kafka to be brought together under that rubric, and recognized retrospectively as having inaugurated a new kind of philosophy. In the case of Heavy Metal, we’re really looking at a space of a decade, whose limits let’s set (admittedly arbitrarily) from 1967 to 1977.
Again, let’s emphasize the absolutely central role of Black Sabbath in the development of metal — that string of early albums, Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), Masters of Reality (1971), IV (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), and Sabotage (1975). There’s a massively influential body of work there — and keep in mind that by that time Toni Iommi is already working with a protege band, Quartz, who are touring with Sabbath and AC/DC in 1976.
But who else deserves their place in the limelight, or at least a mention (and, like I said earlier, some follow-up posts) as key players in the emergence of heavy metal? Led Zeppelin is already on the scene, coming out out their first album in 1969 — but although their influence is well-attested, I’m not going to say much about them. I’m much more interested in several of the other bands that are present at the origins.
Deep Purple, to be sure, gets started in 1967 — but can we call Shades of Deep Purple or even The Book of Taliesyn metal? Not in any full sense — although in their live shows by this time, they’re certainly pushing into that uncharted territory. By the Mark II lineup, however, adding Ian Gillan on vocals and Roger Glover on bass, at least on a number of songs, Purple is identifiably early metal. Machine Head is already there as a reference point for new metallions in 1971. We should point out that when you look at who younger metal musicians emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s say were their major influences and examples, Ian Gillan and Richie Blackmore get mentioned a lot.
Uriah Heep, who started out in 1969 and put out their first album in 1970, also certainly deserves a place in the early history of metal as well. Structured similarly to Deep Purple — vocal, guitar, bass, drums, and organs — but with a clearly distinctive sound of their own, they likewise contribute some songs in the early 70s that not only are identifiable as metal, but which will become standards, and even get covered by later metal bands (e.g. Easy Living, by WASP). These include “Gypsy,” “Bird of Prey”. Even the softer “Lady in Black” is kinda metal in a way, lyrically speaking.
Who else deserves a place in the pantheon of metal originators? In my book — and I’m confining myself to bands that we can make a case for as being “metal”, not just predecessors (like Blue Cheer) — we’d have to include
- U.F.O. (already making metal with songs like Boogie in 1970, taking on Michael Schenker in 1973)
- Sir Lord Baltimore (Kingdom Come in 1970, open for Black Sabbath in 1971)
- Lucifer’s Friend (self-titled album in 1970), Germany’s first band making what we can identify as heavy metal
- Budgie (debuting in 1971 with a self-titled album, tour in 1974 with Judas Priest)
- Flower Travellin Band (Satori in 1971)
- Blue Oyster Cult (Cities on Fire with Rock and Roll in 1972)
- Bang (self-titled album in 1972)
- The Scorpions (Lonesome Crow appearing in 1972 — when they lose Michael Schenkner to UFO on tour)
- Pentagram (doing what are clearly metal singles in the early 70s)
- Buffalo (an early 70s Australian, identifiably metal band)
- Montrose (self-titled album in 1973, and Paper Money in 1974)
- KISS (their debut self-titled album in 1974, followed by four additional albums in two years, tour with UFO in 1974)
We can of course add Judas Priest, formed in their original lineup back in 1969 (which then breaks up), then stabilized in their new lineup and bringing out Rocka Rolla in 1974. Some quibble about whether that album should really be considered heavy metal (I think it is), but certainly with Sad Wings of Destiny and Sin After Sin there can be zero doubt
I’d even go so far as to include, but more on the penumbra, rather than right in the center, right at the start of the 70s (and yes, I know some of these groups start in the late 60s). I’m fine if people want to call these bands “metal-adjacent” rather than actual heavy metal.
- Thin Lizzy
- Hawkwind
- Alice Cooper
- Aerosmith
- Foghat
- Nazareth
- AC/DC
I’m sure I’ve left out someone — but that’s for others to bring to light, if they’d like, in the comments.
Having hopefully made a case that the heavy metal’s basis of origin-base extends considerably wider than the “Black Sabbath-only” story — though of course, there much more to say — I’d like to close by speculating about why someone would endorse or believe that overly-reductive narrative, and how that goes wrong
One reason a person might assume that Black Sabbath is the sole or main origin of an entire musical movement is rather trivial. That’s the standard line that a person has heard or read, and one just buys into it without thinking any further about the matter. You could say that this reflects a certainly laziness, gullibility, or inattentiveness, and that might be true in some or many cases, but we can’t assert as a blanket statement that this is always the case. In my experience, when a person who buys the “Black Sabbath-only” story is introduced to the larger matrix of early heavy metal, they typically move away from that story
Another line of thinking, one that does acknowledge the diversity of early claimants to “heavy metal”, but which does assert the absolute primacy of Black Sabbath, focuses on the dates of album releases. Black Sabbath brought out their debut album in February 1970, and their followup Paranoid in September. Uriah Heep and Deep Purple don’t bring out their arguably heavy metal albums Very ‘eavy, Very ‘umble and Deep Purple in Rock until June. So, Black Sabbath produce and provide the first essentially heavy metal album. Therefore, this line of reasoning goes, the band Black Sabbath are the origin-point for heavy metal.
There are a number of problems with taking this rather myopic stance, but I’ll just point out one. By the time that heavy metal could be more or less identified and endorsed as a broad musical genre by the mid-1970s, there was an entire complex scene of bands, tours, media, and even emerging identity and lifestyle centered by Black Sabbath and by the other bands discussed here. Insisting on the earliest date as the only important factor
A third line of reasoning has a bit more plausibility to it. Instead of focusing on who got an album out first, one might focus on the content of early albums for the bands we’ve been discussing. Depending on what you’re willing to classify as “heavy metal”, you could say that Black Sabbath’s albums are all or mostly heavy metal, whereas with all of these other bands, they are a mix of some heavy metal songs and other songs that are not heavy metal.
I think we can acknowledge that, on the whole and by comparison, there is a greater proportion of heavy metal songs on those early Black Sabbath albums to those of most of these bands. But does that make Black Sabbath the sole or even main originator of a genre as it develops? I think that would still be the wrong inference to draw. There is too much going on in and with those other early bands that isn’t derivative from Sabbath.
There is of course much more to explore when it comes to this topic of heavy metal’s origins and the bands central to them. But we’ll put those excursions off to another day, and other posts.
I’m Greg Sadler, the Heavy Metal Philosopher. You can join me and my co-host Scott Tarulli each month for a new session of Classic Metal Class).
I’m also the president of ReasonIO, the editor of Stoicism Today, a speaker, writer, and a producer of highly popular YouTube videos on classic and contemporary philosophy. I teach at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and offer classes to the wider public in my Study With Sadler online academy. I also produce the Sadler’s Lectures podcast and co-host the Wisdom for Life radio show
