* *
Sam Dunn: In the previous episode I explored the
emergence of heavy music in America and what I learned
is that the American bands have a much bigger part
in the story of metal than I initially realized.
But when I think of the great bands that truly gave birth to
heavy metal I think of British bands like Black Sabbath and
Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin and so I've come to England because
I want to find out why did this music come out of England and
what was its impact back in the 1960's and 70's?
* Intro *
>> During the 60's England gave rise to a number
of bands that were heavier than anything that had come
before but before the emergence of heavy metal this country
was the home for another musical style that
transformed rock music, the British Blues boom,
so I'm meeting with blues legend John Mayall to
find out how this movement paved the way for heavy metal.
Sam Dunn: I want to spend some time talking with you about
what's famously known as the British Blues boom.
John Mayall: Well fondly enough it wasn't known as that when it
happened for the first few years, it was just called R&B
which in America is totally different kind of music.
There were just these venues that supported the music and
it was just an opportunity for us to get out there and play
what we wanted to play and we're kind of surprised
and delighted that there was an audience for it.
Sam Dunn: Why do you think young musicians in England
at that time were attracted to this music?
John Mayall: Well I think generation to generation you get
something that connects with an audience, prior to the blues
boom was ten years of jazz bands so people flopped to those and I
think the blues is something that addresses itself to
situations in people's lives that they can identify with.
Dave Lewis: Lots of these guys were listening to records that
were coming over from the States, John Lee Hooker, Muddy
Waters, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, they were picked
up on so they're massive influences you know and I think
that's where they began to wanna play like those guys.
* Music *
Chris Welch: When the British R&B bands first appeared
like the Yardbirds for example, really they were all playing on
a kinda really nervy sort of form of playing, R&B in a way,
it was really fast almost hysterical, it was very
excitable and kind of lacked power and depth, so gradually
it's when bands learned to slow down a bit and to use more bass.
All these little ways of playing the music changed the whole
sound of it, so it's when they learned to relax really, I think
that's when bands began to become heavier.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: If we think of guitarists like Clapton
and Page and a guy like Jeff Beck, what was
unifying do you think, all of these players?
John Mayall: It was all based on blues initially and
then it kinda got individualized by different people,
Eric was always into the blues whereas Beck and Page
although they started off with the blues and then it very
quickly mushroomed into there on, all individual styles.
* Music *
>> Besides Cream, the Jeff Beck Group, and The Yardbirds,
the one band that unquestionably transformed the blues into
something much heavier was Led Zeppelin.
They're one of the most celebrated bands in the
history of rock and Rolling Stone magazine even
described them as the heaviest band of all time.
But what exactly was Led Zeppelin's connection to the
British Blues boom and what was unique about their sound?
Dave Lewis: Well Led Zeppelin occurred at the time of the
British Blues boom and they came right smack in middle of it, you
only got to look at the first album "I Can't Quit You Babe" ,
"You Shook Me", Within two or three years they were taking the
influences of Willie Dixon and taking it much further.
Billy Gibbons: Led Zeppelin I think it's fair to say
that people would like to place them as
probably the launch pad of what exemplifies
the early days of heavy, and it is.
Sam: How did Zeppelin achieve their heaviness?
What did Jimmy's guitar tone contribute?
Eddie Kramer: He was the guy you would call if you wanted that
really gritty distorted guitar tone and he was master of that,
I mean when you hear the tone of his solo coming in,
it's instantaneously identifiable.
Sam Dunn: Talk about Robert Plant as a front man.
Why do you think he was important in terms of his
presentation that was doing something new?
Frankie Banali: Robert Plant was that golden god lead singer,
he had the attitude, he had the look, he had the mannerisms.
Robert Plant was probably more than any other
singer that iconic role model for singers.
Sam Dunn: We're in Trinifold Management, who manages
Judas Priest, let us use this room which is the office of
Bill Curbishley who manages Robert Plant, to be so
close but so far because we've been really trying
to get Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to be
part of the series but they've declined.
The problem I guess for Plant and Page is they
don't like to be associated with the term "Heavy Metal"
even though they were hugely influential.
Eddie Kramer: I never really thought of them as a heavy quote
"metal band" basically because of the complete diversity of
material heavily acoustically orientated with a strong beat.
I guess you could say without Zeppelin there wouldn't
be quote unquote "heavy metal" but I don't think that
I would ever consider them a heavy metal band.
I think Sabbath probably more than any band would be the
definition of a heavy metal band you know, the essence of one.
* Music *
>> Although Led Zeppelin didn't self identify as a heavy metal
band, Black Sabbath is the one band that many argue marked
the beginning of the heavy metal sound, so I need to find
out why Sabbath is considered the pioneer of the genre.
* Music *
(Crowd Cheering)
>> In the early 70"s Black Sabbath created a
sound that was darker and more sinister than ever before
so I've come to Birmingham, Sabbath's home town
in England's industrial heart land to find out where
they got the inspiration to create this sound.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: When you started out with Sabbath,
describe for me what Birmingham was like?
Bill Ward: Birmingham's profile is dismal,
you know, rain swept and factories and belching smoke,
it's a very industrial place. You could go into the factories,
you could go to prison or you could be a gangster.
Geezer Butler: Birmingham had a massive hammering
during World War 2, there's still a lot of bombed out
buildings around, the place on the corner where I grew up
is completely demolished by bombs in the war.
Where we lived was very very working class,
there's a lot of immigration there, very mixed racially
and culturally and a lot of street fighting.
Sam Dunn: So how did this sort of horrible reality
influence what Black Sabbath sounded like?
Bill Ward: We all let some feelings about the counter
culture or a lot of the peace movements but I think all of
us had an attitude to well, that's all well and good,
but that's not what's going on right now, I'm sitting here
looking at a guy getting his guts beaten up and music
began to take a really good look at what was really on
the ground or really what we were seeing.
I think it had a huge impact on Sabbath.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Describe for me the sound of Black Sabbath's music.
How was it different than what else was going on?
Jim Simpson: The country was inundated with blues bands and
they all sounded the same or looked the same or smelt the
same and wore the same denim jackets and all the guitar
players played sixty mile long solos and we were all anxious to
get out of that because all five of us believed the band was
going somewhere so we had to do something different.
Geezer Butler: We'd jam around and see what we came out
with and we came out with the song "Wicked World".
That put us on you know, thought this is good, we can do it,
we'll have a go at another one and the second song was
"Black Sabbath" and then we just thought, god this is
really weird, different, let's just give it a try on the next
gig and we did the gig, we played it right at the end
"Black Sabbath" and the crowd just went absolutely mental.
They were saying play that again, play that again, so we
played it again, played it three times (laughs), and we just
realized you know that we had something that nobody else had.
* Music *
Bill Ward: When we would sit down and make a piece of
music together one of the things that I would try to create with
drums, a lot of atmosphere I definitely used a lot of toms to
bring about certain words, Ozzy sang "what is this that stands
before me" I knew where I had to go with the toms. I could
have gone (imitates drums) it would never have worked.
Thomas Allom: In some ways they were almost a jazz band,
if you listened to what Bill and Geezer are playing,
Geezer's not playing rock really, he's playing like sort
of almost modern jazz, very intricate stuff, but with it
were these absolutely staggering heavy lyrics and
heavy vocal melodies and Tony's fantastic guitar riffs.
* Music *
>> By combining the heaviness of Tony Iommi's
guitar with the eerie sounds of Ozzy's vocals and Bill and
Geezer's jazz influenced rhythms Black Sabbath was creating
a sound that have never been heard before so given
that this sound was so unusual for it's time, how is the
record industry reacting to Black Sabbath's music?
Jim Simpson: We did a demo in Birmingham which is
not very different to the first album.
I took this recording to fourteen straight record
companies and they all turned me down.
Sam: Why didn't they want to take this record on?
Jim: Because there wasn't a current hit on the charts that
sounded like that. If you sit there in your
posh purple office with your white suit on,
you want to hear something safe, you want to go to the boss
and say listen I've got a single that sounds just like Rolling
what are they called, Stones was it, yes something like
that but something new they were scared of it.
Geezer: I'll always remember this one record company,
we were in the northern most part of England and we had
to do a gig and then drive all through the night to play
this audition at this pub for eleven o'clock in the morning
in London so none of us had slept we were all
absolutely exhausted, the guy came from the record company,
we started playing and he just literally walked out (laughs),
after about halfway through the second song, he just went,
what's this crap and just walked out, that's the way they
treated us you know, they just really didn't get it.
And then we got this A&R guy and he really liked
us and he finally got Vertigo to sign us.
Sam: When you first saw Black Sabbath play
what were your impressions of their music?
Olav Wyper: My first thoughts were it's a heavy metal band, as
they went on I realized they were much more than that because
a lot of the lyrics were not only intelligent but they dealt
with some difficult subjects and musically they were terrific, so
after the gig I talked them in to coming with us on Vertigo.
Geezer: It happened so incredibly fast, the first album
charted and I think it came in number thirteen, we didn't know
anything about it we were in a car going to a gig and we were
listening to the album charts and a bloke said
new at thirteen this week Black Sabbath, we went, what?
Is there another band called Black Sabbath?
And then he played the track off it and it was us.
Jim: The week it went on the charts it sold with 5200 records
the first week, from that moment on we were on a crusade,
we knew that we got something very very special
and from that moment on it became really serious.
* Music *
Sam: For you are they that band that sets in motion
this music that came to be called heavy Metal?
Bruce Dickinson: If there's one band that did it
and if there's one album that did it,
it is the first Black Sabbath album
because that influenced a whole generation of kids that
five years, six years later appeared as heavy metal bands.
Slash: Black Sabbath was the band that first defined
heavy metal for me and seriously had
that sort of heavy approach that really seemed
like these guys are for real.
Sam: To what extent did you consider yourselves
a heavy metal band?
Geezer: We just thought we were a hard rock band at the time,
that's what we liked and the first I'd heard being called
heavy metal was somebody being derogatory about us,
I read this review when we were on tour and criticizing us
as usual and it says it sounded like a lot of
heavy metal being dropped, not musically whatsoever.
Jim Simpson: The words heavy metal were never banging
around in those days, we're just a heavy rock band.
That's how Sabbath saw themselves and not realizing
they invented a whole genre under their name.
* Music *
>> Black Sabbath clearly didn't self identify as a
heavy metal band, but future generations of musicians and
fans would credit Sabbath for creating a distinctly
darker sound and esthetic. So now that Birmingham's
Black Sabbath had laid this foundation, how would this
genre evolve as the focus shifted to London, the capital
of the seventies English hard rock scene.
* Music *
>>BlackSabbathand LedZeppelin
weren't the only English bands carving new directions
in heavy music in the 70's, the one band that pushed the sound
of hard rock into something much more complex and
sophisticated was London's Deep Purple.
However the bands original line-up nicknamed Mark 1 was a
far cry from the heavy sound that Purple is known for today.
So I've traveled to the country home of drummer Ian Paice to ask
him about the bands Mark 1 origins and how they became the
Deep Purple that has influenced legions of heavy metal bands.
Sam Dunn: How was Mark 2 different than Mark 1?
Ian Paice: In Mark 1 we tried to be like somebody else,
we actually tried to be like a British version of
Vanilla Fudge by taking other peoples songs
and putting big arrangements around them.
* Music *
Ian: What Mark 2 progressed to was realizing
there was no point being number two Vanilla Fudge,
very important to actually become number one yourselves.
Jon Lord: We had something really rather good and
quite interesting but it wasn't gelling quite right,
it wasn't making the right noise somehow and
unfortunately for Nick Simper and Rod Evans we came
to the conclusion that it was their fault.
* Music *
Jon: They were not the two right guys to help Paice, Blackmore
and myself, quite realized where we wanted to go.
Sam: When you and Ian came into the band what do you
think changed in terms of the sound of the band?
Roger Glover: Ian and I were, well we were songwriters, we
were a partnership and I think the musicianship of Paice and
Ritchie and Jon was just unbelievable, I don't I had ever
played with people that good before and there was a kind of
marriage between the sophistication of the other
three and the naive simplistic songwriting of us two,
and I think that was the key.
* Music *
Roger: I wrote quite a few of the riffs in the early
days but Ritchie was really the riff master, he's a complex
player who really learned how to be simple, but writing something
simple that is unlike anything else, that's really difficult.
Sam: You grew up as a big fan of Purple,
why were they so important?
Phil Collen: Ritchie Blackmore was the reason I played guitar,
my cousin took me to see Deep Purple, I was
front row in front of Ritchie Blackmore, I'm like
oh my god he's like smashing his guitar up and playing,
again he's playing was just off the chart.
Bruce Dickinson: I never heard anyone play you know make
sounds like that on guitar, it was just so cool
because up to then it was all just you know Clapton is God
and all that kind of stuff, you know Clapton was tame
compared to what Ritchie was doing, it was the sound of Pan,
like prancing all over your brain.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: With the Mark 2 line-up of Gillan, Glover,
Paice, Blackmore and Lord firmly in place in 1970 Deep Purple
released one of heavy metal's all time classic records
"In Rock" and one of the elements that made "In Rock"
unique was the thunderous sound of Jon Lord's Hammond organ.
* Music *
Jon: The first time I really became aware of what I could do
with the Hammond on record was on the organ seller in "Hard
Lovin' Man" which is the first time I just let myself loose in
the studio to see exactly what I can make that beast do.
I think one of the things I really like about the Hammond
organ is adaptability, I mean I managed to adapt what was
initially a church instrument and then adapted by
jazz musicians and blues musicians and I managed to kind
of shoe horn it into a hard rock band.
I wanted to emancipate the organ from being something that just
sat in the background and colored the sound, I wanted it
to create that hard sound and here now finally I had something
that could compete with Ritchie you see.
* Music *
Sam: You had some pretty heavy peers at that time
speaking of Sabbath and Zeppelin but I think one thing
that set you guys apart was that real complexity
and that expansiveness of the music.
Jon: We had the genuine belief that improvisation was
part of the music and indeed it was very often
was how we came up with the music.
Dave Lewis: When you went to a Purple show you were
getting something very special because it was never gonna
sound the same, I think the improvisation was definitely
a key thing to putting them apart from other bands,
I don't think Sabbath had that and there wasn't many
bands that carried that and Purple certainly did.
Jon: We had that wonderful freedom which is to go out on
stage in front of paying customers and saying hang onto
your hats you're gonna like what we're gonna do here, we don't
know what we're gonna do, but we know you're gonna like it.
* Music *
>> Deep Purple weren't just great improvisers,
their song "Smoke On The Water" contains heavy metals most
famousriffwhichtook Purple tonumber1ontheUK charts.
So what's the story behind the riff and how do the band members
feel about being considered a leader of heavy metal music?
Roger: Ritchie started playing a riff, I don't know if he
had it beforehand or whether it just came to him instantly,
we all just sort of joined in and threw together an
arrangement, it took all of about maybe four minutes.
Ian: You had this amazingly simple catchy riff, you had
quite a clever little chord sequence and you had a story,
most great songs are stories and it really was the genius of Ian
and Roger, they said look, we've had a major occurrence here,
we came to record, the place we were gonna record, a beautiful
big place has just burned down, we've got all this story,
let's tell the story of the whole thing.
* Music *
Sam: It had a bit of a crossover appeal, kind of moves
you guys up the ladder in terms of exposure and popularity.
Roger: It amazes me to this day that a song about such a
specific incident has such a general appeal.
Most people come up to me and say hey
it's the first thing I played on the guitar.
I hear that everywhere we go and you go in music stores
and stuff like that you know no "Smoke On The Water" or
"Stairway To Heaven", they're the two you get and
that's a back handed compliment but a great one.
Sam: At the time in that early seventies period did
you see yourselves as a heavy metal band?
Ian: We just called ourselves a hard rock band, metal is one
facet of what us and a couple other bands created,
it's the nastier side of what we do but there's also other stuff
we do which is not any way connected to that.
Jon: I always felt that Purple despite all the bomb blasts
and the loudness on stage I always felt it had one foot
just dragging back into the blues somehow and you know
some people say that Purple had a hand in heavy metal
and I would accept that we could be one of the godfathers
but I defy the parenthood, I thought that wasn't us,
we weren't the parents.
* Music *
>> Despite Deep Purple's pivotal role in expanding
thesound of heavy musicmuch likeSabbathandZeppelin
theydidn'tdefinetheir soundasheavymetal
but now that these bands had undeniably forged a new
direction in heavy music, what would happen next in the
evolution of seventies hard rock in England?
*
>> After the ground breaking records of Black Sabbath,
Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple in the early seventies
the sound of British hard rock started to shift and
so I've always wanted to know why these bands drifted away
from their iconic aggressive sound.
Geezer Butler: After "Master of Reality" we wanted to branch out
and get a bit of a different sound and we were buying
keyboards and stuff like that, Tony was getting good at playing
piano and we just wanted to experiment a bit more.
By the time 'Vol.4' and 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' we thought let's
spend a bit more time in the studio and we had
enough money by then to be able to not be on the road,
to be able to go into the studio and spend more time.
Bill Ward: All of us were growing, all of us were
still being influenced so I think there was a departure
from those first three records, everything was always about
the song so if we needed a choir we'd add in a choir,
if I needed to play tubular bells, which I did,
I would play tubular bells, so we had very little resistance
to going to other instruments and to new ideas.
Sam Dunn: Why do you think these bands start to
explore new sounds and take new directions?
John Ingham: There comes a point of course when it probably
gets very tiring to play the same kind of riff
and the same feeling, you want to start
exploring and widening the palette out.
Sabbath putting keyboards on an album, you know that's a level
that we should just, you just don't really care what anybody
says you know because you know you can do it.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Here's a now legendary prog rock producer
Rick Wakeman working with Black Sabbath.
What was it like having him work with you guys?
Geezer Butler: The way it came about is we were trying to work
a keyboard part out for ages, we just couldn't get it right,
I was trying to play it, Tony was trying to play it
and it just didn't sound right. We were in the bar and
Rick Wakeman came in and we got talking to Rick and we're
asking him his advice and he went, what you trying to do?
and he came into the studio, you mean like this...
...and we went, yes! And that was it,
you know we got him in and did the keyboard parts.
Bill Ward: So Rick definitely enhanced the music and
I'm glad that we went through it, I'm glad that we played
with other artists on our records instead of being inside
some very scared place about, we're changing it too
much you know, I think we had to smash through a
lot of what we might have originally been.
Sam: Taking risks.
Bill: Very much taking risks.
* Music *
>> Besides Black Sabbath, the other British hard rock band
that changed their sound in the early seventies
was Deep Purple. Tensions within the band had led to
a brand new Mark 3 line-up featuring the R&B inspired
duo of Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: How was what you were doing in Deep Purple
do you think different than what the sound
of the band before that?
David Coverdale: I think I brought a soul element, my three
most played albums when I joined Deep Purple was "There's a Riot
Goin' On" - Sly And The Family Stone, Donny Hathaway - "Live"
and "Music Of My Mind" - Stevie Wonder.
I was a huge hard rock fan but I try to bring that the songs I
mistreated you know that kind of blues element.
Glenn Hughes: I had seen them at the peak of "Machine Head",
I thought they were interesting and I thought they were
unique and I thought they were a one off band.
So when the call came in for me to join them, I wasn't
completely sold on the music that I was about to play.
But knowing that with David coming in with me
there would be a whole, possibly a new structure
in the form of writing and singing.
I wasn't trying to derail the angst or metal vibe that was
Purple but Purple were changing radically.
* Music *
John Ingham: Bands like Purple, Zeppelin and Sabbath and
Spooky Truth, I mean all these kind of bands had been around
since say '68, '69, by 72', '73 that's almost a generation in
rock and roll, it felt like they were getting very removed.
Everyone is very famous, very rich, they live in limousines,
they live in penthouses, rock was started to be treated like
some kind of, you know like classical music.
* Music *
>> By the mid seventies bands like Deep Purple
and Black Sabbath were no longer on the vanguard of
heavy music in England, creating a void for something new
and then a whole new sound emerged for the next generation
of rock fans, that sound was glam rock.
* Music *
Andy Scott: The music that was coming out of the late
sixties which we were all very into had no identifiable look
because when you think back not many of these bands
had big visual image, there was a lot of bands,
haircuts, curtains, nose, that's all you saw.
So I think kind of dressing up the late sixties
commercial rock was where bands like Sweet came in.
* Music *
Chris Welch: Glam rock was very big in Britain at that
time so you would find bands like The Sweet,
they had a quite a heavy rock style you know,
it was all revolving around guitars, bass and drums
but at the same time they were adopting a kind
of a gay camp rock appearance of Marc Bolan and
David Bowie, they were getting hit records much to the
annoyance of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.
Sam: Why do you think fans were moving away from that
serious, 'We're gonna change the world' mentality towards more
just, we just want to go to a show and have a good time.
Andy Scott: England was having harder times during the
glam rock period, protest marches, people were striking
a lot but usually when all that kind of stuff starts happening,
the pubs fill up and people generally want to have a
good time that gets you away from all the things that are
going on in your life, you know we were probably lucky
to be the outlet for their frustration.
Chris Welch: The glam rock thing was a big fashion thing and
the younger generation of kids who weren't so concerned
about Vietnam war or death doom and destruction,
you know what they were really concerned about was buying
the next great hit record by David Bowie or T. Rex,
it's a party time really, it's party music.
* Music *
>> Even though glam rock was exploding in England
and heavy metal appeared to be on the ropes
there was one British hard rocker who helped reignite heavy music
in the mid seventies, Ritchie Blackmore.
* Music *
>> Ritchie's new band Rainbow was a far cry from the
funk inspired sounds of Deep Purple.
So why did he form Rainbow and return to this heavier sound?
Sam Dunn: Why do you think Ritchie left Purple and
wanted to do something heavier with Rainbow?
Glenn Hughes: I believe that Ritchie didn't like the super
groove thing that Dave and myself and Ian Paice
was doing and Jon Lord is now playing a
Fender Rhodes keyboard, so by the time we were making
"Stormbringer" Ritchie had already got in his head that he
was gonna start making the bark influence medieval music.
Jimmy Bain: I made the bad move of putting on a
"Stormbringer" CD in the limo one time and
he took it out and chucked it out the window.
He didn't care for that period of Purple at all, he didn't like it.
From the first rehearsals we had, he was definitely into
getting a more raw sound than he had before.
Sam Dunn: Can you tell me about the classical influence that Ritchie brought in?
Tony Carey: He was born like 500 years too late and his passion
was always this 16th century thing but at 130 decibels.
He did a solo on "Stargazer" and live sometimes,
absolutely amazing, this Arabic scale with slide guitar
on a Stratocaster, I never heard anything like it.
* Music *
>> Besides Ritchie Blackmore's midevil inspired guitar sound,
Rainbow also featured one of the most powerful vocalists
in the history of heavy metal, Ronnie James Dio.
And luckily I was ableto meet RonnieathisL.A.home
a few years before his death in 2010,
and ask him about his approach to metal vocals.
Ronnie James Dio: I view the music that I've made as being
so much about the little man because metal music has
always been looked down upon than obviously it's going to be
something that affects people who have been looked down upon.
That's always been the thing that I have written about,
more than anything.
* Music *
Tony Carey: He had his own voice, let me put it that way,
he was really the first to combine this tarot card,
sorcery, Lord of the Rings type thing, wizard flying over you
know and a fist coming out of the ocean grabbing a rainbow,
this whole fantasy thing with hard rock.
Ronnie: Dragons and Medieval times and the things that you
see surrounding my home are part and parcel of my life.
I read at such an early age and read all about dragons and
knights and damsels in distress and great science fiction works,
Edgar Rice Burroughs and I was just, wow I better create what
these images are on myself, that's so cool and so that's why
eventually, writing and writing and writing, I decided to put
all the things that I wrote in this kind of fantasy area which
made you have to think, what is he talking about?
Oh he said that, I wonder what that looks like?
I wanted people to have to use their imagination the way I did
and create their own dragons.
* Music *
>> Ronnie James Dio pioneered the fantasy-based imagery
that's become part of the fabric of many
contemporary metal bands but the first band to create
the modern metal sound and to actually identify as a
true heavy metal band was Judas Priest.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Can we go back to "Rocka Rolla" and
"Sad Wings Of Destiny". How do you think
"Sad Wings" was a different record than "Rocka Rolla"
Rob Halford: I think the difference between
"Rocka Rolla" and "Sad Wings Of Destiny", the band grew up
very very quickly. Some of those "Rocka Rolla" songs
were already established in the bands repertoire.
So by the time we got to "Sad Wings" there was, there was a
growth, there was a definite growth going on.
Sam Dunn: It has a very metallic sound compared
to say the early Sabbath records.
Chris Tsangarides: Yes.
Sam Dunn: How did you do it?
Chris Tsangarides: The first Sabbath albums were done in
no time, basically they set up live, recorded it,
maybe threw the vocal on at the end, that was it.
"Sad Wings" took quite a few months of intensive overdubs,
it's orchestrated except we don't have violins and
you know orchestral instruments, we've got drums, guitars,
and bass but if you arrange them like you would a
classical piece of music, that's heavy metal.
Christopher Knowles: Judas Priest represent a distinct
shift away from the blues roots of metal,
their chord changes and their progressions are not based
on that old 145 blues twelve bar kind of thing.
They become a distinct metal that has no real prior
antecedence, it's now a style.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Where did you get the inspiration to create what
is now hallmark of what you guys do, the two-guitar approach?
K.K. Downing: One band in particular is called
Wishbone Ash, they had a couple of guitar players
that are kind of not heavy in any particular way but it just
seemed to be a really good idea at the time because the sound
was just fuller, you know it was almost like a stereo effect
on the stage, we were very excited about it.
Martin Popoff: There were bands before Judas Priest
that had two guitars in them but
they almost seemed like disassociated with each other
it was just two guitarists in the band,
you know Brad Whitford and Joe Perry or Keith Richards
and whoever was the guitarist at the time, the twin
guitarists chugging away on a really good solid meat and
potatoes riff is something that comes from Judas Priest.
Scott Ian: You know this is (beep) as a kid that I had never
heard before, Tipton would just tear your head off,
his leads, they were blistering and then
K.K. on the other hand was the madman,
you know the guy holding the Flying-V
and you know playing the whammy bar like this.
* Music *
>> Judas Priest's influence on modern metal went beyond
their dual guitar approach; they also established a look
that would become the uniform of the heavy metal culture.
Rob Halford: It's one thing to have the music but it's another
thing to have the visual so that everyone around the planet can
connect and go, yah that's it, the way that looks is totally
representative of the sound of the music, all I wear is black,
I just don't feel, you'll never find never wearing black.
K.K. Downing: So many of the other bands they were still
kind of wearing obviously leather, denims and
different things but you did have a sense of excitement that
it was kind of fresh you know and you had a sense that the
audience recognized the fact that well this is new, this is metal.
Sam Dunn: The big three never really self identified
or adopted the concept of heavy metal,
with you guys, you claimed it.
K.K.: There was a period, wasn't that really people were really
sort of not admitting they were metal but I think Priest, we
always maintained that we were proud to fly the flag of metal.
Rob Halford: We are who we are, we believe in ourselves,
we're strong about what we feel we want to do so yah right
from the very beginning that's all we ever wanted to be
known as in Judas Priest was we're heavy metal.
*