There’s a lot of debate about the origins of heavy metal, and most people assume that it all began with a certain Birmingham-born force called Black Sabbath, and for good reason, but Eric Clapton, on the other hand, feels a little differently.
The point of contention between how metal started and when makes sense for all the same reasons why people debate the inception of any genre – it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact starting point when innovations usually occur gradually, morphing sets of styles and sensibilities into fuller, more established movements over a slower period of time.
With metal, especially, its official roots are nearly impossible to pinpoint because it emerged from a handful of communities across the 1960s and 1970s rock ‘n’ roll scenes. In certain spaces, many were already testing the limits of hard rock “aggression”, implementing various expressive techniques that would go on to infiltrate much of modern metal.
Specifically, bands like Cream, with Clapton’s input, provided a foundation for metal to flourish, with a heavier sound and style that blended both blues and psychedelic rock. For this reason, many credit Cream with inventing the entire genre, but really, they were merely the catalyst, and a truer, more established version of the genre appeared with the arrival of Black Sabbath’s debut album in 1970.
The reasons are obvious. Sabbath married every factor of modern metal and hard rock as we know it today, from its quintessential distortions to its more accessible melodic charm. At its crux, they also embodied everything the genre stands for: notoriety, chaos, and a break from mainstream convention, all without seeming overly pretentious or inauthentic.
However, according to Clapton, the genre originated a few years earlier, somewhere far more rooted in the core principle of metal itself: volume and abrasiveness. Many associate Sabbath with the same elements, but for Clapton and a handful of others, it was San Francisco pioneers Blue Cheer that truly kicked off the entire moment.
Blue Cheer predominantly attached to the psychedelic and acid rock spaces, but many, including Clapton, see them as the earliest seeds of the metal movement due to how loud and commanding their music was, with a live aura that hypnotised anyone in the room. Guitarist Leigh Stephens even once said that they aimed to create a sound heavier than anything they’d heard on the radio, reflecting much of the same thought process of many metal pioneers who came after.
Explaining why he felt they were the true originators to Uncut, Clapton compared their contributions to Cream’s and claimed that Blue Cheer ruled the entire genre because “they didn’t have a mission” other than to be “loud”. He added, “Cream were very loud, too, and we got caught up in having huge banks of Marshall amps just for the hell of it. But we had a really strong foundation in blues and jazz.”
For many, Blue Cheer laid the foundation for many other pioneers to emerge, Sabbath included. Mainly, it was the way people felt during their live sets, and how the music seemed to explode beyond the simple confines of the speakers and venue walls. Some even had to leave midway through their sets because it was too much, but that’s also the ethos of metal itself: you either get it, or you don’t.
