![]() Just as significantly, you had artists who took Group-B bands like the Troggs, Who, Kinks, the Creation, and (quite importantly) the Move as the basis for their nascent heavy metal (I know I kind of skipped over the Move, but you can’t really understand the birth of Sabbath without being familiar with the post-Who thump-thump high-lama pop of the Move-but dear God, that’s another story).Īnd that’s the heart of the matter here, and that’s why Keith Richards said what he said in the Daily News. Likewise, Mountain, Cactus, Free, Jeff Beck Group (and every etcetera that was spinning on the turntable in the basement of your cool older cousin in Syosset while he dreamt of feather-haired foxes in peasant blouses) were all involved in the process of transforming Delta blues into something sinewy, fresh and thick with slabby tension.īut the Delta-based bands were not the end of the heavy metal story. Troggs, now took on even greater meaning.Ī pile of the notable early metal acts that trademarked the genre were very rooted in the Robert Johnson/Elmore James/Delta thing to grasp that concept, you just need to know two words: Led Zeppelin. Bo Diddley, which had morphed into Stones vs. As metal breech-birthed from its damp and suppurating womb, the lines defined by these earlier tribes became even more pronounced. ![]() Keith Richards clearly deeply believes that unless your music bears a visible imprimatur of Delta blues and shortnin’ bread walking bass, it isn’t to be taken seriously as rock and roll.Īs the 1960s tumbled into the 1970s, both Group A and Group B fed into the emerging strum und kerrang of heavy metal. In other words, you wouldn’t have caught the Pretty Things, Stones, or Who dead covering a song from The Music Man). (The Beatles are another thing entirely they took their primary musical imprimatur from vocal-centric rock-pop like Buddy Holly and the Everlys, and completely unlike the above bands, infused it with an almost slavish love for the well-structured songs of English music hall, American vaudeville and American musical theatre. ![]() To put it a little more simply, all these bands-the Stones faction and the Kinks faction-listened to Bo Diddley, but only the Group A branch integrated Robert Johnson and Elmore James into their work. Significantly, although these Group B bands drew from Chicago blues and the straightforward I/IV/V forms of Chuck Berry, they did not draw from the Delta in any real way, which is why you virtually never hear an open-tuned slide part on records by any Group B band. These groups certainly shared some of the same basic influences as Group A, but inflected it with lusty teenage primitivism fueled by barre chords. The other branch is, well, characterized by the more simplistic gory glory of the Kinks, the Who, and the Troggs.
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