Classic Metal Class This Weekend - Metal In America in the 1970s!

 

We have a session of our monthly classic metal class coming up this Saturday at Noon Central Time. I'll be joined again by Scott Tarulli - professor of guitar, studio and gig musician and bandleader, and fellow metalhead - and this time we're discussing more music history (and veering into some philosophy as well).

The topic this session is heavy metal bands, music, and identity in the 1970s, specifically in America.  So in addition to tracing out the influence British metal exercised in catalyzing American metal in the 1970s, we're also going to be tracing out the development of distinctively heavy metal scenes (like that of LA in the late 70s and the early 80s.  And we'll engage in some analysis - maybe even some argument between us - about what American bands really qualify as "heavy metal" and which are better described as "metal-adjacent" or "kinda metal" hard rock.  We might even indulge in some wild counter-factual speculation about how metal might have developed differently if Jimi Hendrix hadn't met his untimely death (we'll see!)

So it'll be a mix of music history, sociology, philosophy, and musicology, all centered around American bands and musicians.  To give a little foretaste, I'm going to claim that bands that are definitely American metal in the 1970s include Sir Lord Baltimore, Bang, Pentagram, Montrose, KISS, Twisted Sister, Riot, Van Halen, Cirith Ungol, Mickey Ratt, Quiet Riot, and the Plasmatics.  There's also a part of the story to be told about Dokken as well.

We're also going to discuss how we ought to classify acts ranging from Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Foghat, Ramjam, Mountain, Y&T, The Runaways.  Does their music in the 1970s qualify as "metal", or should they be just lumped in to the larger genre of "hard rock"?  (I like to call them "metal adjacent")

So, High Noon (my time), this Saturday, February 20!  Here's the Zoom link for the session.  I hope to see you there!

Videorecording of Classic Metal Class Session #5 - British Mid-Late 1970s Metal

We held Session 5 of Classic Metal Class several weeks ago.  This time, we intended to return to a focus primarily on music history, but we ended up going into a lot of discussion about technological and sound development aspects of the period we were discussing.  I won't say "strayed" or "digressed" because all of that discussion - led primarily by my co-host Scott Taruli - was both very well-informed and extraordinarily useful for understanding the development across the sound vectors that we call "heavy metal".

The official topic for this session was mid-late 1970s British heavy metal - so all the major bands,  developments, tours, continuities and changes in sound in England, Scotland, and Wales.  I used whether or not a band managed to bring out at least one more-or-less metal album in those years as a proxy for whether to include them in the discussion.

Those years were a time, of course, in which the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) was coalescing, growing, and getting ready to burst forth.  Saxon did manage to get their first album out by 1979 (as did the somewhat less favored Samson), but some of the other really key players in the scene - like Iron Maiden - hadn't yet got to that stage.  So 1979 winds up being a good cut-off year.

We'll be revisiting some of these bands in later sessions - particularly Motorhead and Judas Priest - and we'll also be devoting some sessions to the NWOBHM movement.  But it was really worthwhile to focus in on those 1970s years in the development of British heavy metal.  Here's the videorecording of the session!

Our next classic metal class session will be coming up later this month, on Saturday, October 10.

Classic Metal Class Session 5 - Mid-Late 1970s British Metal

We have another session of our monthly Classic Metal Class coming up tomorrow at Noon Central Time.  Here's the ZOOM LINK to join us!  Guitarist and Berkelee School of Music professor Scott Tarulli will be joining me as a special guest again for this session. 

In Session #5, we will be looking at the mid-late 1970s (1974-1979) and the ongoing development of heavy metal as a more and more self-conscious genre of music. We'll be discussing this ongoing history, features of metal in that era, and how the sounds were getting heavier and harder, leading into early 80s metal.

While many of the main bands that comprise the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (e.g. Iron Maiden, Raven) were active in the pub scene, and producing demos at the time, we're going to be focusing on the bands that were producing albums in this time period.  So, among the bands we'll be discussing will be Judas Priest, Motörhead, Budgie, UFO, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Whitesnake, Gillan, Saxon, Girlschool, Quartz, Nazareth, and Magnum

I hope you can join us for it! If you can, you get to participate in the discussion.  We will be recording the session as well, just like the four previous class sessions, all of which you can view here.

Classic Metal Class Session 2 Tomorrow Noon Central!

We're doing another of the online Classic Metal Class sessions tomorrow, Saturday May 16 at Noon Central Time, and anyone who wants to attend is invited! 

If you'd like to register for the session - which you'll need in order to get the Zoom link and the cool handout on the topic for this session - just click here and fill out the form.

I'll be joined again by special guest, Scott Tarulli - guitar professor, band leader, studio and gig musician, and a good friend and colleague - and we'll be discussing the "Black Sabbath-Deep Purple Nexus".

By that admittedly strange term, what I have in mind is not just the early metal music they composed, played, and recorded, and not just their massive influence on so many other metal acts that were to follow.  I also mean the musicians they took in from other bands, developed, and then spun off and out into other bands.  There's a lot of connections between these two main poles of the nexus and the other acts that fit into it.  These include three important metal solo bands - Gillan, Ozzy Osborne, and Dio - and two other major bands - Rainbow and Whitesnake.

So join us tomorrow for a conversation that will range over classic metal music history, philosophical ideas and speculations, and most likely a lot more (including a kids' cartoon)!

Recording of Classic Metal Class #1

Our first session of the new online Classic Metal Class went very well.  Feedback from the participants was that they had a great time, and are looking forward to the next session, and I'll say that I - and my special guest, Scott Tarulli (who will be joining me for additional sessions coming up) really enjoyed the conversation as well!

We discussed the beginnings of Heavy Metal, looking particularly at 1970, and then continuing the narrative up to 1974.  1970 was a massively important year, with a number of early metal bands bringing out albums, and going on tour (sometimes with each other). Black Sabbath, of course, is the most influential and central band, but there are some others that play a major role in forming and fomenting this developing genre - Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, sir Lord Baltimore, and Led Zepplin each bring out important albums in 1970.  And in 1971, that expands to Budgie and Flower Travellin' Band.  1972 adds the Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, Alice Cooper, and Bang to the mix.

There's a lot more to be said, but it was in the session!  So here's the videorecording:

Watch for an announcement about the next class session coming up soon!

A Classic Metal Workout Playlist

For the last four months, I have been doing something different with my life.  Something that consumes quite a bit of time and energy.  It's working out regularly - mostly doing cardio and weight circuit training (I've written a bit about that on my main blog, Orexis Dianoētikē).  When my workload gets especially crazy, or if I get seriously sick, I might only get in 1 or 2 workouts in a week.  But most weeks I'm at the gym 5, and sometimes 6 days a week.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you've likely seen me post occasionally about the music I listen to when I exercise - all classic metal.  Occasionally, I'll listen to just one band or even one album.  But usually, what I'm listening to is my classic metal workout playlist, set to play randomly.  

Two days ago, I posted a screen shot of a bit of that playlist from my phone.  One of my fans said that he'd really like to see what else is in that playlist.  It's really a work in progress at this point, but I'm happy to share the song listing as I've set it up so far.  So, with no further ado, that's what I'm doing below - arranged by band.

The Ship Of Theseus and Bands With No Original Members

A number of the responses to my last post here - RATT - immediately referenced the "Ship of Theseus".  That's not surprising, since what I was writing about focused on the identity of a band in terms of its membership, and the "Ship of Theseus" is a classic puzzle about a whole and its constituent parts.  But as I pointed out to those commenters, that puzzle really has to do with a different kind of case.

It's not as if there aren't some bands, though, to which the "Ship of Theseus" issue would apply.  I thought it might be useful for others - and interesting for me - to write a follow-up piece specifically discussing how and why.  Simply put, the Ship of Theseus bears upon cases where none of the constituent parts of a whole are original to it.  In terms of bands, this means we would be focused on bands that contain none of their original members.

The fundamental question then is whether they do remain the same band or not, despite all of the replacements of members.  It is always useful to consider examples, and in classic metal, we do have a number of illustrative cases we can examine - and discuss (in comments or social media).  I think it might also be helpful to consider some cases close to but not quite like the Ship of Theseus as well, where one original member of the band is left (but reserve that issue for a later post)

Generations of Metalheads: Passing On My Bass

This year, I am passing on an object that, by virtue of giving it to my teenaged daughter, effectively becomes a family heirloom -- my bass guitar.  On her own initiative, she asked this summer if she could get it out of storage -- I hadn't played it for years, since now I putter around with a banjo that previously belonged to my dad -- and start learning how to play.  I was surprised, and very happy, that she wanted to learn an instrument -- she is already a strong singer -- and to learn this instrument particularly in order to play metal songs, specifically KISS songs!

So, for the last four weeks, she's been plunking away here, downloading tabulature, practicing, and taking lessons from a bassist at a local music store.  I've recently had it overhauled -- the buddy-of-a-former-brother-in-law who "rewired" it a decade back did what I hesitate even to call a "job," even with the qualifier of "bad" -- and she got to play it today for the first time actually plugged in.  Not into a bass amp, and not turned up all that high, but still enough for her to get a sense of the raw sonic power that the instrument she held, fretted, and plucked!  So, I'm experiencing the kind of excitement and pride that parents feel when one of their children decides to follow along, not necessarily in their footsteps, but along a similar and shared path.  And added to that is the simple fact that I've discovered that my teenage daughter is a genuine metalhead!

The Scene of the Past: Metal Albums 40 Years Back

Among the seemingly endless listicles and galleries the VH1 website regularly churns out, one caught my eye a week or so ago -- finding its way into my Facebook stream, if I remember rightly -- a gallery that takes us back into the years before metal becomes a self-conscious movement, and has yet to extricate itself from the closely aligned and still more vague genre of "hard rock":  20 Classic Metal Albums Turning 40 in 2015.

Perhaps it's because I'm myself near to the midpoint of my own 40s that this retrospective -- among so many others -- got me ruminating as I clicked through the albums picked out by the VH1 writers.  I can say that my friends and I quite literally grew up as teens with classic metal in the 1980s, and became excited in  our childhoods by bands in the 1970s we didn't even realize might form part of a broader and deeper musical movement -- formative years for sensibilities and imaginations.  Of course, our generation could have that experience precisely because an earlier generation had been over the previous decade gradually feeling their way -- some more deliberately and consistently, others almost by happenstance or experimentation towards sounds that embodied and incorporated elements that would turn out to be central in later metal music.