Who was the first heavy metal band?
Most people tend to believe that the birth of heavy metal can be traced back to Birmingham, England, with the release of the first Black Sabbath album. Over two sides of vinyl, the sound of Tony Iommi’s guitar set the blueprint for what metal was supposed to be, taking the fundamentals of blues and adding different textures to make it sound ominous and foreboding. Then again, metal may have been around long before Iommi even started dreaming up his doom hymns.
Across the 1960s, the counterculture movement also brought its fair share of darker bands. Compared to the songs about moving to San Francisco and basking in the sunshine of psychedelia, acts like The Doors and The Velvet Underground were already exposing fans to the gritty side of life.
Although each of those bands would qualify as the originator of metal, the sounds of metal can be traced back to the band Blue Cheer from around the same time. Taking the primal sounds of what was coming out of Detroit with The MC5 and The Stooges, Blue Cheer began as a reaction to the folksy slant that rock had taken.
Rather than cater to the flowery prose at the time, the band’s debut album Vincebus Eruptum is overflowing with metal energy. Around the same time that The Who was exploding onto the hard rock scene with their cover of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’, Blue Cheer’s rendition is closer to the metal that could be heard a few years, with its gratuitous use of fuzz guitar and the overflowing distortion popping up left and right.
When asked about his distinctive tone, guitarist Leigh Stephens talked about needing to hear something heavier than what he was used to on the radio, telling Metal Evolution, “I was always drawn to a minor key and heavy chords. I was tuning my guitar to D as far back as the time that I was playing surf music, and I did it because I just loved the sound of that thunder.”
Since the ‘Summer of Love’ already had an “anything goes” mentality to half of its material, Blue Cheer’s arrival predated Sabbath’s debut by two years, marking the first time that something that heavy would be featured on the radio. More than just their music, Stephens’ approach to the guitar had the same aesthetic as what metal bands were supposed to go for, continuing, “I would always thinking ‘What would it sound like if a nuclear bomb went off?’. I felt that if you get enough amplifiers, you could come close to that maybe.”
Even though Blue Cheer remained obscure for most of their career, the biggest names in heavy rock at the time were listening. When asked about his influences, Rush’s Geddy Lee thought that Blue Cheer were the real groundbreakers of heavy music, recalling, “In some ways, they were the first heavy metal band, only they didn’t think in terms of metal. It was volume that they were after and fury.”
Although Blue Cheer may not have thought about metal, the need to make their sound more distorted and furious than what came before eventually spawned metal and punk rock, with everyone trying to play harder and faster than those around them. Heavy metal may not have one true godparent, but Blue Cheer may have a good case for being one of the originators of heavy music.
