David Lee roth

 

Please bear in mind what is regarded as metal now bears no resemblance to metal back then.

 

Interestingly, Sammy Hagar and Montrose are not here yet!  

 

 

That said, Roth's solo output is hard to split hairs about - hard rock or metal?

 

I don't really care - great party music for metal heads.

 

Let's stop all this "Glam" nonsense, shall we? Cinderalla, Poison and Quiet Riot were Glam. No-one in the late 1970s or the whole of the 1980s or 1990s thought Van Halen were a Glam band - let's not start now, eh?

 

For a proper idea of what "Glam" means, watch some early 1970s ABBA, Glitter Band or Slade videos - and Slade weren't really Glam either.

 

Glam is an essential core of the development of heavy metal - without it, metal probably wouldn't have developed as far as it has - Glam is largely responsible for popularising metal in the first place, attracting fans and musicians alike, and it started way before Black Sabbath - who, with the make up, could be considered glam, if I was feeling mean.

 

Van Halen were always in the metal camp, even if they did cross over into other genres frequently - Eddie defined a lot of metal's most defining licks, and Roth's screams are better than Halford's. Sorry about the blasphemy there.

 

It's true that they were "more glamourous", if you need to be literal, than many of the other metal bands of the time, but UFO and The Scorps - and even Iron Maiden - were partial to spandex every now and again. Where do you draw the line? BTW - why on earth are Spinal Tap listed as Glam and not Mercyful Fate? Tap are Comedy Metal, and wore way less makeup than King Diamond. Why isn't Fish/Marillion listed in Glam?

 

At this rate, Motorhead are probably the only "true" metal band ever to have existed!

 

/ends rant against glam haters

 

 

Montrose is a kind of edge case, as is Hagar - metal related, and the music was kinda metallic, but then there's no border between Hard Rock and Heavy Metal when you go back to the 1970s.

 

Ignoring Black Sabbath, who didn't really influence anything much until the 1980s, the music of post-Phenomenon UFO is the benchmark for metal, pre-1975. There's also some very interesting material on Dust's 2nd album, from 1971, IIRC, and Jeronimo's 2 albums. The music here is a departure from the more obvious hard rock of Vanilla Fudge, Sir Lord Baltimore et al, who often get (wrongly, IMO) cited as proto metal.

 

The Sweet (you knew it was coming!) were probably the first band to play heavy metal as it developed through the NWoBHM and beyond, with Queen not far behind - if they were behind (I'm not too sure about release dates, but The Sweet were more popular in 1974). They certainly convinced Judas Priest to stop pursuing the plodding Black Sabbath lines and go for something more uptempo, with added spirit - and Priest were the spearleaders.

 

/makes me(n)tal note to start a History of Heavy Metal thread... it was Metal then, it's Metal now