The Psychedelic Roots of Heavy Metal
How the secret roots of the world’s evilest music were sown in the summer of love
“The sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.”
- Aleister Crowley
It’s said that the devil in music – the tritone, or the sixth fret (the 666th threat to tonality, as it were, or the interval of the flattened fifth) – was banned by the Church, but this isn’t true. It turns up in 7th and diminished chords and if the cadence is right no-one will notice, but put it against the grain, make it too obviously the point of your change, and yes people will think you’re a bit dark. I remember first noticing it in rock, briefly, when I was sitting alone out of sight in the music class storeroom at Southland Boys High, as I often did in 1974, long story, and my teacher Jean France was playing Pink Floyd‘s Ummagumma out front to a class of older boys. This was part of the long campaign of music teachers at that time to make serious music more relevant by playing progressive rock. This didn’t really work in my case but exposed me and many other boys to Tommy and Thick as a Brick in the name of opera, I think, and on this occasion, possibly in the name of tone poems, I heard the first song from The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (1967), Syd Barrett’s “Astronomy Domine”, as played live by his friends without him.
In one of those unforgettable moments when a new musical world establishes itself in a few notes, I heard David Gilmour’s guitar play a growling riff that slides momentarily up a semitone and back, then goes up to the 5th – then flattens it. This is a perfect riff for exposing the tritone interval’s savagery. It only happens twice, then the pinging high slide guitar triplets come in. The whole song blew me away, as it eerie and powerfully captured the immensity of alien worlds, with what David Downing in Future Rock (1976) unforgettably described as an “undertow of terror”, and led me to explore the whole of Syd Barrett’s short and wonderful creative output, as well as the rest of Pink Floyd’s work. Meddle was everywhere in those days, they even played the whole of “Echoes” on 4ZA a few times, and then Dark Side Of The Moon became impossible to escape, but I never forgot that riff as my touchstone, what a guitar could do in the way of expression.
Only much later did I realize that those first notes of the greatest psychedelic album of all time are a quotation, only slightly embellished, from the section of Gustav Holst’s The Planets titled “Mars, The Bringer Of War”, where they are repeated ostinato by the brass over marching drums, the God of War on the move – music that had been used as the theme for the Sci-Fi TV show Quatermass in 1953 and 1957, but was surely well-enough known on its own. And Pink Floyd weren’t the only group to hear its potential – just ask Geezer Butler. “I was a medium-sized fan of Holst and particularly ‘Mars’. One day we were trying to play ‘Mars’ and that’s how ‘Black Sabbath’ came about.” The music that tells us that magic is afoot in the early Harry Potter films is also derived from The Planets. This popular work aside, Holst was a mystic who studied the Vedas, the Sanskrit holy books and set many of them to music, a romantic who turned his back on Wagnerism to study folk tunes, a dedicated teacher and a wild showman who lived a life of excess on the road, as he tells in a letter from Boston in 1932. "In the Perfect Fool ballet the harpist missed a line and the water music sounded quite modern, while in the St Paul's suite I broke a collar-stud."
Most of the ideas of early, first wave heavy metal derive from or are inspired by the work of one man, Jimi Hendrix. Holst aside, the classic Black Sabbath riff is a reductive, disciplined take on a riff that could have come from one of his heavy blues renditions. Hendrix himself had too much freedom in his make-up to repeat such riffs much verbatim, but talented, but less prodigiously talented, guitarists soon saw the point of trimming and repeating exaggerated blues riffs, with their tritone emphasis, and doubling them up with the same notes on the bass, to create powerful, regimented music. Hendrix, a pantheist and futurist, with seemingly minimal interest in established Christianity, and certainly too little interest in political violence to please his activist peers, also introduced the lyrical themes of classic metal – groupie love, intimations of insanity, existential questions, mind-bending drug experiences, science fiction and fantasy. He’s never entirely in the metal genre himself, but so much of it is in him**
Another case is the slowly arpeggiated electric guitar riff; Metallica would develop complex versions of it in songs like “Master Of Puppets” and “One”, multisegmented monsters which would eventually break into the smaller, blacker spiders that crawl on the face of trap metal songs today. This type of arpeggiated pattern, which differs from the more folkish emphasis of the “When You Walk In The Room” riff Jackie De Shannon taught to George Harrison, which inspired the arrangement of what John Lennon called the Beatles’ first “heavy” song, “Ticket To Ride”, is first heard on Hendrix’s 1967 single “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp”, on a wah-wah guitar accompanied by a harpsichord, an idea which "just came to me…I can't play no piano or harpsichord, I just picked out different little notes and started from there". It’s Jimi’s first use of the wah-wah pedal that will forever be associated with his music - the Jimi Hendrix Experience have already made two albums without it.*** The arpeggios, the heavy feel of the chord change itself, and the downbeat, mystifying lyrics have a hierophant gravitas that was new in rock, and remind me that Hendrix later lived in Handel’s old flat, and indeed the harmonic progression and stately pace of “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” is not dissimilar to what I remember of sections of The Messiah, with their harpsichord obligatos.
Heavy blues and classical influences can take us so far, but whence came the evil riff, the riff that goes a little further out of conventional tonality than mere tritones, like some malevolent raga, to suggest a weird pagan dimension of evil? Unsurprisingly the first glimmerings of this sound arose in the intersection of British biker rock and druidic freak folk, on the Pretty Thing’s 1968 psychedelic concept album S.F. Sorrow (“Old Man Going”) and the 1967 single which inspired it “Defecting Grey” (1967). In each case it’s only a section (of an otherwise hippy-dippy psych song in the case of “Defecting Grey”) and accompanies the expression of existential horror in Phil May’s lyrics.
Night sky hangs in blackness
Night threads, patterns weaving
Somebody going tells you where I need me
Casting gardens of shadow
(Defecting Grey)
Traffic thins as you drive slowly by
A friend wipes a flower from an eye
Streets filled with bouquets from a cloudy sky
They'll soon forget the field in which you lie
(Old Man Going)
Which you can’t deny are proper metal lyrics. But the psychedelic acts that laid down the groundwork for the genre rarely exploited it themselves – Pink Floyd’s “The Nile Song” on the More soundtrack, maybe their best post-Syd album, is heavy, as are “Corporal Clegg” and “Point Me At The Sky” arguably proto-metal; the Pretty Things album after S.F. Sorrow, Parachute, their masterpiece, would be made with a different band from SF Sorrow and a more Doors-like approach to the portrayal of darkness.
Most of this doesn’t concern America yet; metal was a British invention (and Hendrix as an innovator was de facto a British musician), but the Americans can claim one first – the heavy metal boogie riff, the galloping triplet surge beloved of Deep Purple and Uriah Heep, was, as far as I’m aware, a US affair. “(We Ain’t Got) Nothing Yet” by the Blues Magoos (1966) predates Deep Purple’s “Black Night”, and, an especially fine riff, “You Better Run” by the Young Rascals (1967) predates Uriah Heep’s “Easy Living”, The Gun’s “Race With The Devil” and a whole lot else.*
The musical germ cells of heavy metal riffs were thus first invented by some very psychedelic musicians who needed to depict their bad LSD trips; the later reduction and regimentation of these ideas, and their ring-fencing by a consistently dark aesthetic, mainly by Black Sabbath, the Beatles of Metal, are what created the Heavy Metal genre per se.
footnotoriety
*US and British acts could be keenly aware of the latest trends on the opposite side of the Atlantic, often relayed to them ahead of schedule by managers and producers. The Electric Prunes version of “Are You Loving Me More (But Enjoying It Less)”, a psychedelic pop song written by Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz, released in April 1967, inspired the arrangement of “Astronomy Domine” according to Julian Palacios’ Syd Barrett biography Dark Globe, but it reminds me even more of “Arnold Layne”. When I first listened to “Are You Loving Me More (But Enjoying It Less)” I felt sure that the Electric Prunes were being inspired by Pink Floyd’s first single; we think of Syd Barrett today as the kind of original genius who lived in the woods in his head inventing new sounds that inspired others, but the reality was that young Syd was as obsessed as anyone else by the latest psychedelic sounds, wearing out his copy of The Rolling Stones’ Between The Buttons, basing “Interstellar Overdrive” on Burt Bacharach’s melody for My Little Red Book as recorded by Love on their debut LP, and learning a lot from the sound of an Electric Prunes B-side. (The silly eclecticism of some Tucker-Mantz song choices on Electric Prunes may also have enabled the inclusion of “The Gnome” on Piper).
** A young roadie named Lemmy Kilminster worked for Hendrix in 1968, learning from him “how to function on five hits of acid”; he later played with Hawkwind and founded the speed metal band Motörhead (when Mayhem, the band who founded the Norwegian dark metal scene, formed in Norway in 1990 they learned to play metal by practicing songs by Venom and Motörhead). Lemmy describes picking up the scattered remains of Jimi’s “stompboxes” after gigs and repairing them; early effects pedals must have lacked the tough shells we have today. The fuzz timbre is an indispensable aspect of metal guitaring, just as its addition to chiming keyboard tones is essential to witch house – it’s the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, the horripilation of sound.
*** Ten days after finishing Burning Of The Midnight Lamp with the Experience, a job which required over 30 takes, Hendrix would bring his wah-wah pedal to record a somewhat similar track, “Hush Now” with Curtis Knight and the Squires, in an unsuccessful attempt to settle the “contractual obligation” deal that would eventually cost him Band Of Gypsies.
Algorithm professes
The problem of evil in music was, once upon a time, solely the problem of how to represent this value in sound. The most convincing metal effects I know of in classical music are those parts of Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel opera, and the Third Symphony derived from it, that deal with demonic possession, witchcraft, and the Inquisition, and those parts of his Alexander Nevsky suite that represent the Teutonic Knights as the most intimidating biker gang of medieval Europe (third movement) and their charge across the ice lake to meet the Russians (fifth movement). It helps that the Teutonic Knights were being used as stand-ins for the Nazis in 1938, when the music was written (originally as part of the soundtrack to the Sergei Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky, a propaganda commission which had its release delayed till 1941 by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact). After naïvely returning to the USSR in 1936 and becoming trapped there Prokofiev eventually came to realize that he was living in a charnel house as the pet of monsters, a feeling he represented alongside the tragedy of the Great Patriotic War in his 6th Symphony (1947), the greatest of 20th century symphonies, which ends abruptly, with an effect like the bullet to the back of the neck that had ended many Russian lives in his lifetime. It took Stalin a little while to understand what the work was saying, after which the composer’s life was never the same. The two men would die on the same day.
you ever heard this? they take the coolest part of "defecting grey" & make that bit the whole song, great idea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKMs3_az3EU