[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

I consider those closely related; obviously no one will confuse Yes with Slayer but the "metal" moniker covers almost as much territory as "rock" anymore; no one can figure out what it is and only barely what it isn't. An argument about that exact subject will take place in at least 5 bars tonight, and that's just in northern IL.

Sure. As one example, consider the Who vs Led Zep. Both are power trios with a lead singer, both featured ear splitting volume and crashing power chords, yet the Who tend to be considered Pop while Zep is Metal. The basic difference seems to be starting point, as Zep is grounded in the blues and the Who isn't.

And metal seems to have separated into thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, even orchestral metal. Can't tell the players with a scorecard.

The stuff I dove into wasn't even faintly metal. I liked the British art rock bands like King Crimson, Hatfield and the North, Henry Cow, and National Health, as well as the "Kraut rock" electronic stuff characterized by Kraftwerk, Can, and Faust. (A friend I knew back then was an artist who really wanted to work with some of those bands. The last time I saw him, he was complaining, because the old gang he had hung out with had dispersed. He'd just gotten email from Klaus Schultz, and no one was left around him who understood what that meant...)

Ritchie Blackmore agrees; that's why he's doing that medieval mandolin/pan flute thing now. Also check out Ian Gillan's solo stuff if you haven't already; covers a lot of ground stylistically. Personally, I heard "Smoke on the Water" when I was probably 2 years old, when it was still fairly new. Even had the 45. Blackmore's attempts at prog (which is what he really wanted DP to be) were mediocre but boy could he write a riff.

That covers a lot of folks I think - fantastic at writing riffs, but less good at constructing whole songs around the riffs. (Come to think of it, I used to hear "riff rock" bandied about as a category.)

I remember hearing the first Zeppelin album about the same time (my mother had the first album when it came out meaning I was technically a fan before I was born). That album was so rip-your-face-off visceral as to defy description. Proto-metal? Blues on steroids? Who cares; I know that album so well that if I hear someone else's copy of it (on whatever media) and there's more than a half-second difference between songs or change in pitch due to the way that copy was recorded, I notice it.

Oh, yes. I don't dislike Led Zep. There are simply other things I like better. I certainly recognize their contributions to rock (if only through the vast number of bands formed by people who heard Led Zep as kids and said "I wanna do that that when I grow up!". Fortunately, a least a few were able to take Zep as a starting point and go beyond those origins. The rest probably became copy bands.)

Warrant, Poison, and all of their B-list contemporaries are directly descended from The Sweet, and every one of them covered "Ballroom Blitz" at some point in their careers, to a band. A distillation of the Sweet, T-Rex, and Thin Lizzy will get you every pop-metal band who released a single from 1985-1992.

Ahh, T-Rex. I liked their earlier trippy acoustic period better. Marc Bolan talked about spending hours as a kid trying to duplicate some of the riffs James Burton played with Elvis's band. He didn't know about overdubbing...

I have some Thin Lizzy in my collection, too, though my reference point for Irish rock bands is Horslips.

I think my biggest problem with the whole thing is the compartmentalization aspect of it; I never cared about the sub-sub-sub-genre of a band until 3 years ago. Zeppelin could be prog ("Carouselambra" or "Achilles' Last Stand" for starters), blues, metal, or pop ("Fool in the Rain"). Pink Floyd could lay claim to the same thing, as could DP. Why don't we have bands this diverse today?

Because the record companies have forgotten how to sell them. And Zep had the advantage of the technical skills to pull that off. Jimmy Page could play pretty much any style of music he wanted to.

Another factor is that Zep could branch out because they had built a devoted audience, who would listen to what they did because it was Zep. A comparison in a different genre might be Ray Charles, who did a couple of successful albums of country music. He was simply pointing out that C&W was "white man's blues", dealing with the same topics he write a lot of songs about, and the figurative light bulbs blinked on over his audience's heads as they realized it. Ray showed them the soul lurking beneath the unfamiliar exterior.
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Dennis