RushKing wrote:
MrXxx wrote:
Metal from the eighties on did nothing but become commercialized, over-structured, formulated, and "dumbed down."
MrXxx, what do you think of the following bands?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HjCpFLkxshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcAk0oyU8Pkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7vD4OIDRfAI don't know exactly what you count as "over-structured", but isn't all music that's not improv planed and structured?
Nice challenge! Okay, so I guess I had too specific an idea of what we were discussing as "Heavy Metal." For one, I wouldn't even call the first one Heavy Metal, but more "Symphonic Rock," along the lines of some of Uriah Heep's work. The second I actually thought at first was Celtic, but my wife was closer with German.
What do I think of them over all? Over structured. Not that I don't like it. It's not that so much, but more the fact that they're all very far away from the real roots of Metal.
You hit the nail on the head when you asked about Improv. That was my whole point. Very early Metal, especially the very hard to find Metal from the late Sixties and early Seventies, involved a lot more pure improvisation than just about any Metal does these days. The thing is, you would never hear that anywhere but a live performance, other than some rare instances of LP recordings that were improvised, and never sounded exactly like the LP's when played live. Unfortunately, that tended to piss off most rock audiences because they wanted to hear what they heard on the LP and radio exactly as they heard it. The Seventies were famous for "crappy" live albums, in part because of lousy live recording techniques, but also because the live performance was rarely the same either.
I wish like hell I could find some good examples of live metal improvs on YouTube for you, but if there are any there, they are very hard to find (I mean the rare stuff I'm looking for). Here are some close examples of what I mean, all from the list of bands I mentioned:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_z_Irh5AFU[/youtube]
THIS NEXT ONE'S A LONG ONE!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_MZ3__o2Ko&feature=fvst[/youtube]
This one's a cool video adaptation by the uploader:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCJSSL9iGHM[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI0iX2q4pw8[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpmHbyXzVxE[/youtube]
Later paid homage to by (you figure it out):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLGeueFt-oA[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blvnoao1WO0&feature=related[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qP_OqOJ8ug[/youtube]
AND, just for crap and giggles: Were these guys inspiration for future punk or future metal bands, or both? Probably more punk, but neither genre had been yet defined at the time of their existence, so who's really to say? If you google "MC5 metal" or "MC5 punk" you'll find them credited with BOTH.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM6nasmkg7A[/youtube]
Now these are all straightforward songs, structured, with not a lot of improv in these videos. Obscure early metal videos are hard enough to find due to the lack of video cameras back then. Obscure metal improvisation is, of course, even harder to find. I haven't nailed any down yet that wouldn't qualify as "dinosaur," big time "corporate" crapola (Deep Purple, The Who, Zeppelin, etc.). I will try to find something that better represents what I'm talking about. The kind of stuff basically nobody really does anymore.
Probably one of the biggest reasons I feel the early days were the best is because a lot of what was coming out back then wasn't known until AFTER it came out as Metal, and later was even redefined as Psychedelic. Some of what I'm referring to, when I play it for noobs, they tell me it's hard core jazz of some kind. And they're not far off from the truth. A lot of early metal did have roots in jazz and blues. Sabbath, by their own accord, called themselves a jazz band before the song Black Sabbath came to them. I would say they were more of a blues band, but whatever. KISS's original drummer, Peter Criss, was a jazz drummer. Sabbath's Bill Ward's self-proclaimed heavies influences were Gene Krupa, Buddie Rich, and Louie Bellson (ALL jazz drummers).
Jazz influence among very early metal musicians was very prominent. As a result (I think), during live shows there was a lot of improvisational playing. While not many of the bigger acts were famous for playing long jams, MANY of the smaller lesser known acts, were known for it. Scorpions featured a song called Lone Wolf that is a very obvious excuse for extended jams played live, though I've never heard it played live. Anyway, I will see over the next week or so if I can find some examples of what I'm talking about.
The main thing is that at the time these early acts were coming out, none of them were called metal. Most, when we first heard them inspired a WTF response. We didn't know what the hell to call it. It was rock, because it had all the right instruments, but nobody really knew what KIND of rock it was. Somewhere around the late Seventies, most of it became known as metal, but that was just about the time that "Metal" as it's more popularly know today, was just about to got through a major redefining. By the end of the Eighties, a lot of this stuff I'm talking about was being denied as Metal by younger Metal fans, who's first exposure to it was around the time of Judas Priest's rise to monsterdom. JP redifned the look of metal, and along with several other bands, redefined the sound too.
By the time the Eighties hit, what metal was had become more narrowly defined, and everyone pretty much knew what most people meant by "Metal." For most, the term brought the same sounds and images to mind, which were by then quite different from what I had first called "Heavy Metal."
EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is what it does to grow up listening to the evolvement of a new genre. I wasn't really paying attention to early metal until around 1976, so I had to kind if go backward to "discover" music that preceded the stuff I first fell in love with. The most influential album I bought was Scorpion's "Taken by Force." That LP changed EVERYTHING. I HAD to get more of it, and I HAD to know where the hell it had come from. Within the next few years I had collected a crap load of very heavy and a lot of unknown stuff, all of which was developing into this relatively new thing called metal. It was all new, all fresh, and all mind blowing. After charging up with over ten years worth of it, what followed in the Eighties, that was classified as metal, well most of it had already been done. The first truly WTF moment I remember having after 1980 was when Nirvana and Pearl Jam hit the scene. I know, I know, most of you wouldn't qualify that as metal, and I'm not saying it is. It's just that they both did that to me when I heard them (WTF is THIS? ~ in a good way). The early Nineties gave me quite a few moments like that. After 1995, it hasn't happened since.
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I'm not likely to be around much longer. As before when I first signed up here years ago, I'm finding that after a long hiatus, and after only a few days back on here, I'm spending way too much time here again already. So I'm requesting my account be locked, banned or whatever. It's just time. Until then, well, I dunno...
23 Dec 2011, 11:49 am
When grunge killed off hair metal and did serious damage to others, death and black metal remained strong in the underground.
