HEAVY METAL

Hey, a list of 20 means that we don’t have to particularly take sides between Blue Cheer, Detroit and Birmingham, so everybody should be happy, right? Well, we’ll see. In any event, the idea here is to map out 20 key records that lead to the invention of heavy metal—and then we go ever so slightly beyond, just to make sure we have heavy metal proper, double-stamped, underscored. This is the approach I took in my book, Who Invented Heavy Metal? from 2015, back in print later this year through Wymer Publishing. Spoiler alert: that was a long journey, 120,000 words long to be clear, and our tale ended in 1971. Consider this the tidy 20-album challenge version of that exhausting exercise.

20

The Who – My Generation (December 1965)

Not the heaviest mallet in the garden shed but it’s 1965 so what do you expect? In any event, influenced many a metal-forger of the ’70s, and it’s mainly because of the chaos caused by Keith underneath, but also by the thug voice of Roger, the noisy inventiveness of Pete and the busy bass of The Ox. As well, call a bit of a place-holder for , which isn’t exactly fair, is