HEAVY METAL

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

The first-record argument, staged as promised. The question of which record was the first heavy metal record has no answer, and this book’s obligation is to show the ballot rather than stuff it. The candidates most often entered, with their cases: Link Wray’s Rumble (1958) (the distorted power-chord slab, a decade early; the Kinks’ You Really Got Me (1964)) the riff as the whole song, through a slashed speaker; Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum (January 1968) (the earliest album on which sheer heaviness is the organising principle; the Beatles’ Helter Skelter (November 1968)) a famous band deliberately chasing maximum abrasion; Led Zeppelin’s debut (January 1969) (the blues rebuilt at metal weight by the band that scaled it; Deep Purple’s In Rock (June 1970)) the virtuosic wing’s founding document; and Black Sabbath (February 1970), the record on which every element of the eventual design language is present at once, which is why the largest bloc of the genre’s historians votes for it. Each case defines the genre as the thing its candidate did first. That is how origin arguments work, in every volume of this series, and why none of them ever closes.

Memoirs by participants, all to be read as interested accounts: Tony Iommi, Iron Man, the source for the factory accident and its consequences; Ozzy Osbourne, I Am Ozzy; Geezer Butler, Into the Void; Rob Halford, Confess, the source this book defers to on his own story; David Lee Roth, Crazy from the Heat, the source of the brown-M&M account as its teller tells it.

Histories and oral histories. Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast, the fullest single-volume history of the genre; Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman, Louder Than Hell, the standard oral history; Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, the sociology of the audience this book’s fourth chapter leans on; Robert Walser, Running with the Devil, the musicology behind this book’s account of the tritone, the power chord and the genre’s harmonic language.

Led Zeppelin and their business. Chris Welch, Peter Grant: The Man Who Led Zeppelin, for the touring splits as the promoters recalled them; Mick Wall, When Giants Walked the Earth. Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, the most-read book on the band, is used here only with flags flying: it is built substantially on secondary tellings, and band members disputed it from publication.

AC/DC and Bon Scott. Clinton Walker, Highway to Hell, the fullest account of Scott’s life and death; the London inquest record as reported at the time.

The deaths and the disasters. The Cincinnati task force report on crowd management (1980) for the Riverfront Coliseum deaths; the published inquest reporting for Scott and Bonham; the federal accident investigation record for the Leesburg crash that killed Randy Rhoads. Where this book states what a coroner or investigator found, that is the document it means; where books have speculated past those findings, this book has not followed them.

The Runaways. The band members’ own divergent memoirs and interviews, and the 2015 press investigation in which Jackie Fuchs made public the allegation this book reports; the differing recollections of others present are part of that published record.

The equipment and the sound. Jim Marshall’s often-given accounts of the JTM45 and the stack, the guitar press’s substantial technical literature on valve amplification, and manufacturer histories for Marshall, Celestion and Laney; the physics of clipping, compression and intermodulation is standard audio engineering, stated in any electronics text.

The live industry. The trade press of the period (Billboard and Performance, joined from 1981 by Pollstar) for grosses, itineraries and the merchandising trade’s per-head folklore; Bill Graham Presents, the promoter’s oral-history autobiography, for the San Francisco professionalisation of both the concert and the T-shirt.

The British scene. The music weeklies (Sounds above all for the NWOBHM years, with NME and Melody Maker) for release dates, reviews, and the contemporaneous record of the argument between punk and metal as it was actually conducted.

On the business. The mechanics in Movement Four (recoupment, packaging and breakage deductions, cross-collateralisation, controlled compositions, the separation of publishing from recording income, the 1978 mechanical rate rise) are standard industry practice of the period, set out most clearly in Donald Passman, All You Need to Know About the Music Business; the specific percentages in the platinum worked example are illustrative, and the text says so where it works them.

For chart positions, certifications and release dates, the Official Charts Company (UK), Billboard and the Recording Industry Association of America certification database.

Where figures are disputed, the size of Led Zeppelin’s Atlantic advance, the Guinness loudness measurements and their theatrical garnishes, the Tampa gross, the retail value of Kiss licensing, the US Festival’s attendance and fees, the NWOBHM pressing runs, the exact cost of the first Black Sabbath album, and every per-head and buy-on figure in the money movement, the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.