What's the Difference between Rock and Metal?

AC/DC used to be the heaviest, darkest, blackest metal band in the world. Then Metallica happened, and now people call it roots rock. AC/DC never considered themselves heavy metal, even when their fans did. I personally think of them as heavy metal, but that's because I refuse to change, and also because I refused to surrender the category to hair metal.

Led Zeppelin never thought of themselves as heavy metal. Their fans never thought of them as heavy metal. Metal fans never thought of them as metal. Critics applied the word to some of what they were doing, but I guess you can't be part-time metal, so it didn't stick.

I also consider Sabbath to be the original, archetypal heavy metal band. BiTD, I never heard anyone describe them otherwise. I think they probably also thought of themselves as such.

 

Mostly the t-shirt art

 

The vocals

 

Not in it's earlier years it wasn't... only in it's evolution.
I'm showing my age, but there was nothing "scooped" about Tipton and Downing's tones... still some of my favorites.

 

I don't think there is a fine line and there was never a boundary. NWOBHM is basically Status Quo on steroids, and there are blues scale based songs even in death metal. Less blues scale in metal, but it's not definitive.

Led Zeppelin was definitely an influence in lyrical subject matter, rhythms, vocals, etc.

 

slag

 

Hint.... if the term heavy metal came before Van Halen, then Van Halen did not create it

There is a difference between the origin, and the popularizing of a genre. Sabbath, Purple & Zep has long been recognized as the origins. Their music may not suit "your mold" today... but it's the beginnings of the influence and can't be dismissed. If you believe metal guitar is more influenced by classical then look no further than Purple. Blackmore and Lord solo's are loaded with classical influence... and they had a 10 year jump on VH.

IMO.... I never considered VH metal in any way, but I don't doubt they had an influence moving forward. Sabbath, Purple, Priest & Scorpions (the 70's with Uli Roth) are 4 earlier groups I think about. They may all seem tame by today's standards, but not when it was happening

 

For the music close to the line, the difference is a person's opinion about what it is.

 

Copyrighted material presented for critique and commentary. As musicians we are well qualified to comment on music.


Rock 'n' Roll is a helluva a lot older than metal.

Rock 'n' Roll goes all the way back to the mid- 1950s. Sun signed Johnny Cash, then they signed Elvis. Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins were also on their roster.

​

There are so many obscure rockabilly 45s out there it is impossible to keep track of them all.

I dropped a needle on an old Buddy Holly "B" side, Buddy with a full orchestra. It sounded more like Lawrence Welk than it did Rock 'n' roll.

Then... by 1960, Rock 'n' Roll was dead.

Except for a few die hards like Link Wray and Dick Dale.

Ah, but like any good virus, kill it in one body part and it survives in another. It will take refuge in the nerve sheath and flare up when the host is stressed.

Thus, The British Invasion. If the British hadn't had such enthusiasm for an essentially American musicical style... Rock 'n' Roll would be just as dead as it was in 1960.

We might all be wearing polyester bellbottoms, Van Heusen shirts with really long pointy collars and we'd all be dancing to... wait for it...

Disco!





Except that came around 15 years later, around the U.S. Bicentennial.

Studio 54 opened in 1977.

There was an undercurrent of hardcore (punk) concurrent with disco. The usual short discography of hardcore doesn't differentiate between Punk and Hardcore but there certainly is a difference. Punk was deliberately imprecise while hardcore was deliberately precise. It was and is a wall of sound carefully designed to exceed any and all wimpy pop that came before.

​

(to be continued)

 

Copyright material presented for critique and commentary. As musicians we are well qualified to comment on music.


(continued)

See, there's a ton of overlap.

Priest goes way back to 1969. Few people heard of 'em on tis side of the pond until metal took off.

Sabbath has been around since 1968.

Maiden has been around since 1975.

Motorhead has been around sitnce 1975.

That's the discussion we used to have. Was it hard rock or "acid" rock? Technically, LSD is a pre- requisite for "acid rock".

There was a lot of hard rock if you knew where to look. Not quite metal yet...

Wendy and the boys get metallic towards the end...

If Zeppelin is "metal" then Robert Johnson is The Father of Metal. Not quite correct. He's The Grandfather of Metal.






​

(to be continued)

 

(continued)

Robert Johnson and probably Cream influenced:

Sabbath was a struggling blues band until they played a Halloween show that was like nothing the world had ever seen. Every day was Halloween after that for Sabbath.



These guys:



Circa early 1980s I went to CBGB's Hardcore Matinee on Sunday afternoon. No one at the studio had heard of Carnivore, Ludichrist or The Crumbsuckers. That Monday morning Scotty, Neil and Ron were all raving about their new Master of Puppets CD.


Copyright material presented for critique and commentary. As musicians we are well qualified to comment on music.​

 

It has to do with distortion, duty cycle, and dissonance. Rock doesn't hurt my ears at reasonable levels, metals always hurts my ears, so I don't listen to it.

 

Motorcycles and leather aside, I do not consider Steppenwolf the first 'heavy metal' band. Although their name sounds kinda metally. For that matter, Jethro Tull is kindof a metally sounding name, too.

It's a dumb and pointless argument that will never be settled. But I will always take the position that Led Zeppelin was the first metal-ish band, and Black Sabbath was the first actual puredee heavy metal band. And yeah, like muchxs said, 'acid' rock was part of the evolution in that direction.

I have no expertise in the matter, but I think the term heavy metal first came about to refer the 'hardest' and 'darkest' of the bunch, for which some of Led Zeppelin touched on. That included occult and supernatural themes. Basically topics that AC/DC only referred to with tongue in cheek and testosterone (Hell's Bells, Highway to Hell, etc..). Black Sabbath, OTOH, actually referred to the debil in a more dramatic and narrative way.

And so on and so forth....

 

I don’t hear metal, in any of it’s incarnations.
My ears and brain reject it.
To me, it’s violence in musical form.
Music and violence are mutually exclusive, for me.
I love stuff that rocks, and rolls.
The roll is the swing, the rock is the beat, for me.
I seek and find joy in music.
I know I’m old, and not really in the future.
Cool with me.
I think metal has had it’s day, though it too will always have it’s fans.
I’ll never be among them.

 

Copyright material presented for critique and commentary.

Some of the recurring themes in Punk are "Dumb" and "Pointless".



Way I see it nothing pre- 1980 is "metal" no matter how hard it is. It's hard rock.

Lotta folks used to confuse hard rock with "acid" rock because chemically most acid is corrosive.

Coincidentally (not!) Marshall's distribution deal with Rose-Morris expired in 1980. That gave all of us the tools we needed to play metal, Marshall JCM800s.

Stylistically the lines are blurry. Historically, less so.


One might define Sabbath as "metal" in view of Iommi's tone.

IMO Sabbath was hard rock especially in a historical context.

Ozzy went metal when he went off on his own. Randy Rhoads...



Someone went out of tune towards the end.



The last real rock band:

 

Haha, I was going to say the delineation is based on how pointy the headstock are, but you beat me to it! Lol

 

I just want to make some personal observations, about what I saw at a Steppenwolf concert in the very late 1960s. This concert was at War Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo, New York.

The audience was overwhelmingly male, and there was a lot of unrest in the audience and John just barely was able to get the crowd back under control before the police shut the whole thing down and sent us home.

Years later, seeing a metal concert, I had the same vibe - these guys who paid to see seemed to have so much in common with the angry ones at this Steppenwolf concert.

I thought the concert audience at an early Black Sabbath concert, just a few years after the Steppenwolf show, seemed much more relaxed and playful. Like an Alice Cooper concert; no real angst going on.

So it may be that John Kay and friends didn't actually sound like the metal we know today, but they were reaching out to this kind of need that some ticket buyers had.

 

Unresolved rage is an essential element in heavy metal music.

 

I believe Sabbath was the earliest metal band, but I consider this to be the first metal song:

 

My introduction to "heavy metal" was this album!