Punk or Metal?

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by Folder

Like I said in an earlier post I would personally consider Guns and Roses hard rock not heavy metal and I understand that a lot of people thought that Motorhead was more punk than metal but when I titled this thread I tried to think of "popular" bands that were along this "so called divide" between New Wave/Punk/Alternative vs Hard Rock/Heavy Metal or whatever. I think for some bands of that era the categories were pretty loose, especially as you get towards the end of the eighties when I think for some bands the two branches started to merge.

I think a lot of us on this forum may be a little too old to truly understand what my original post was asking, including myself. I was talking to a friend who's a few years younger than me about this thread and he was adamant that this divide was very real when he was in high school.

[...]

Of course. In the typical high school milieu, it's all about us vs. them. It's the mentality that the whole idiotic school spirit/varsity elite competition thing fosters, training people to allow their enthusiasms and energies to be programmed into totally mindless and irrelevant activities that serve the interests of selected elites.

It's perahps only natural that those schismogenic social pathologies find expression in people making war over music and clothes.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by philbo

Man, I don't know what to tell you.... Around 1976 I found that I no longer enjoyed any of the music I could get from mass media outlets (AM/FM/record stores). So I quit buying music and justed wrote and recorded my own stuff for the next 20 years or so. That went on until about 1995, when I started buying blues and jazz CDs.

I guess I missed this big schism between punk and metal you're talking about in the OP. Who won the war?

For me it was earlier. (And I'd listened to blues and jazz since middle school -- when I wouldn't listen to all that lame British Invasion or the simpering Cali beach pop that had all but pushed real surf instrumentals off the radio.) As the 70s rolled on and the commercial rock scene became depressing and dominated by a certain bone-headed mentality, I moved into outsider progressive (Family, Gentle Giant, later Can, Faust, and others). I cut off my hair in '73 (because, by my count, at least half the people you met with long hair by then were compete and utter idiots and drug-addled knuckle-draggers. I had no problem with smart drugs -- but stupid drugs like reds (Seconal, big in Cali dude-rocker circles), quackers (Quaaludes), big with both rockers and disco drones), and PCP (Oh, lordee, don't even start me) and the behaviors they fostered in those who got lumped in with the now-mainstreamed 'counterculture' decidedly annoyed me. (Eventually, you could add cocaine to the list of drugs whose use and users I disdained, but it took me a few minutes to figure that one out. It really does screw up your thinking. )

But by '75-'76, I finally felt like a new era was right around the corner. Much of the best of it was perhaps over before the 80s, but there were a number of artists who managed to continue making interesting and occasionally even somewhat groundbreaking music.


PS... I saw someone mention the Dictators. They were, of course, one of the earliest of the NY gutter punk underground. It was with great anticipation and excitement that I and a number of my friends found ourselves waiting outside the Whiskey in LA... but they struck me as the biggest bunch of phoney-ass poseurs I'd ever run across. My impression was that they were a bunch of single digit IQ idiots of the lowest order. I was horrified by what they tried to pass off as punk.

PPS... I saw someone mention the Pistols. I loved the Pistols album. And still do in many ways. It was a great moment in rock. And Lydon managed to somehow transcend the essential and acknowledged phoneyness of the set up to produce some truly harrowing rock and roll -- even as he tried to laugh it off. And, you know, Jones was probably the perfect guitarist for that moment, as he had a good ol' rock and roll attitude and unchallengingly familiar moves -- while almost completely eschewing the dominant rock guitar ethos of the era (exemplified by the metal tweedlers and the rock proto-grinders). But to say they could play... that's a bit of a stretch. I mean, they had a bass player who could often barely move from point a to point b. Certainly, they weren't stupid enough to let himplay on the album (or is there one song, it's hazy) but picking an instrumentalist just for his looks and then putting him on bass (because you think he'll do the least damage there)... it's not a great way to put together a real band. At least all the guys in the Monkees could actually play the instruments assigned them. (And occasionally, they'd even let them play on the later records; so generous.)

[Folder]

Originally Posted by blue2blue

Bands like Led Zeppelin and Motorhead helped establish heavy metal. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Led Zeppelin was the first band I heard referred to as heavy metal (by SF/LA 'underground' DJ legend B. Mitchell Reed) right around the time of their first release. But, of course, most folks these days will argue against including Zep and possibly Motorhead. But that's just rewriting a very real past to fit a shallow and illusory contemporary sensibility.

I remember a friend of mine being aghast at the fact that John Paul Jones had written the string arrangements for R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People album. He felt it was a betrayl. How could one of the fathers of Heavy Metal get involved with one of those lowly alternative bands?

I on the other hand saw the alternative rock bands as being the true decendants of the "classic rock" bands of the sixties and seventies. I saw bands like Poison, Motley Crue and Winger as in some ways having more in common with Leif Garrett or Bobby Sherman.

In the eighties Robert Plant made a few derogaotory comments towards some of those pop metal bands like White Snake. He was supposedly embarrased by the idea that he was considered their progenitor. I know he was not happy with being compared to David Coverdale when the Coverdale Page album came out. I remember hearing a live concert of his once and he did a song by "The Cure". He was a guest VJ on MTV once and played a "Lets Active" video and said he would like to mow Mitch Easter's lawn. Most metal heads I knew at the time hated "Lets Active" and "The Cure".

[Folder]

Originally Posted by UstadKhanAli

Definitely. Cheesy hair metal looked really silly in a hurry with the Seattle bands, which were a direct punkish sort of backlash.

Yeah and the old guard rockers didn't get it. They didn't understand that they represented everything that grunge (which decended from punk/new wave) was against.

Axl Rose didn't get it.
"Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose hated each other"
http://www.musicradar.com/news/guita...h-other-170562

Eddie Van Halen didn't get it.
"Eddie Van Halen Pissed Off Kurt Cobain"
http://theoriginalunoriginal.com/the...f-kurt-cobain/

Kurt Cobain even considered Pearl Jam to be somewhat heavy metal.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by Folder

I remember a friend of mine being aghast at the fact that John Paul Jones had written the string arrangements for R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People album. He felt it was a betrayl. How could one of the fathers of Heavy Metal get involved with one of those lowly alternative bands?

I on the other hand saw the alternative rock bands as being the true decendants of the "classic rock" bands of the sixties and seventies. I saw bands like Poison, Motley Crue and Winger as in some ways having more in common with Leif Garrett or Bobby Sherman.

In the eighties Robert Plant made a few derogaotory comments towards some of those pop metal bands like White Snake. He was supposedly embarrased by the idea that he was considered their progenitor. I know he was not happy with being compared to David Coverdale when the Coverdale Page album came out. I remember hearing a live concert of his once and he did a song by "The Cure". He was a guest VJ on MTV once and played a "Lets Active" video and said he would like to mow Mitch Easter's lawn. Most metal heads I knew at the time hated "Lets Active" and "The Cure".

It's funny. Like a lot of guitarist wannabes (I didn't start playing until '71), I was almost entirely focused on Jimmy Page during my first enthusiasm for Zep. (I saw them in late '68. But my enthusiasm was over not too long after the second album started getting a lot of play. I was excited at first but ultimately, I found the album pretty irritating.) And I really didn't like Plant at the time. I barely even thought about JP and Bonham. (Typical beginning git player, I'm thinking.)

But, after trying to keep them tuned out for the early 70s, I was shocked to find myself really liking Houses of the Holy. It was so vastly different than the largely bonehead metal from outfits like Deep Purple and the rest of the loadie bands that was hugely popular then. It was... sophisticated. For the first time I noticed the other guys (in Plant's case, for the first time without great annoyance). JP's keyboards, for me, really made the album. And, of course, by then I was starting to understand music enough to get a grip on what a good drummer Bonham was.

I can't say I've really kept up with the Zep guys much since they broke up -- but I was intrigued by what seemed (at the time) the 'odd' pairing of Plant and Alison Krause and T-Bone Burnett for the Raising Sand project. And, while not quite as glossy or confectionery, I have to say I also liked the subsequent Band of Joy project with Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller in the girl-singer and git-playing producer roles. (Is Bobby now daydreaming about a project with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings? )

It's funny, in '72, I probably liked Robert Plant about as little as I liked anyone in rock. Yet now, he's kind of a favorite of mine, based mostly on those two late projects.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by Folder

Yeah and the old guard rockers didn't get it. They didn't understand that they represented everything that grunge (which decended from punk/new wave) was against.

Axl Rose didn't get it.
"Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose hated each other"
http://www.musicradar.com/news/guita...h-other-170562

Eddie Van Halen didn't get it.
"Eddie Van Halen Pissed Off Kurt Cobain"
http://theoriginalunoriginal.com/the...f-kurt-cobain/

Kurt Cobain even considered Pearl Jam to be somewhat heavy metal.

I was initially quite excited by the 'grunge movement.' That was quickly eroded by how lame and how cookie cutter much of the music was. To be sure, there were a handful of distinctive bands with a certain amount of stylistic integrity. But the tsunami of torn bluejean wannabes made me extremely cyinical about the potential for what was, after all, simply another retreat to pregurgitated nostalgia.

The guys in Pearl Jam always seemed to be good guys. (For a while some of them frequented my favorite coffee house.) But I have to say their music and particularly Vedder's studied soulful hippie fry vocals really struck me as a band stuck in the sound of the mid-70s -- but who would have likely raised little interest in that decade.

[Zooey]

Originally Posted by Folder

I myself would consider bands like Guns and Roses and Kiss hard rock, but for a lot a people hard rock is music from the 60's and 70's.

I grew up in a rural area with no TV reception, and very little radio. I used to form opinions of bands based on what the kids were saying in school and at church, and also based on album covers. "Hell" was not a word I was allowed to use, so when I saw the cover of Highway to Hell with Angus wearing devil horns, I imagined it must be the heaviest, most evil music imaginable. Same thing with "Bat out of Hell." It was quite a letdown when I actually heard the music, to say the least. But at least I ended up enjoying AC/DC.

I also grew up thinking that KISS stood for "knights in satan's service" and thinking that they were beyond the pale. When I finally heard their music in junior high I was gravely disappointed.

[Folder]

Originally Posted by Zooey

I also grew up thinking that KISS stood for "knights in satan's service" and thinking that they were beyond the pale. When I finally heard their music in junior high I was gravely disappointed.

When I was in junior high I was looking at eight track tapes in a Musicland record store.
They had the tapes behind a plastic wall and there were holes in the wall just big enough for your hand to fit through the holes but small enough so you couldn't steal a tape. There was an older kid with his hand through one of the holes holding the first Kiss eight track album and he told me they were his favorite new band.

At the time I was just getting into progressive rock. I remember thinking "wow they look pretty cool" and I imagined they must be a progressive theatrical rock band kind of like Peter Gabriel and Genesis or something.

A few weeks later I had saved up enough money to buy the album. While riding home in the car I looked at the cover and imagined that it would probably sound like "Close to the Edge" or "Brain Salad Surgery" or "Dark side of the Moon". I was excited to hear it.

When I got home and put it on the turntable I thought there must be a mistake. I took it off and looked at the label to make sure I had the right album. Did they accidentally put the wrong label on this album. I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard.
I remember thinking that I got ripped off. It was false advertising. How could you have an album cover with these futuristic looking space rockers but the music was stupid basic three chord rock and roll?

[rasputin1963]

From 1978 'til about 1987, I was SO-O into the stuff that came out of the UK. All that Punk, New Wave, Black & White, STIFF RECORDS, multi-culti, I just adored. I appreciated that much of it was a parody of 1950's and early-60's pop. As such, it had an irony to it I savored. Metal music is usually quite literal, not ironic, too bombastic and unsubtle for me (still is).

Needless to point out on THIS forum was the way that digital sampling was just getting started in New Wave music (ART OF NOISE, anyone?) and that, to any keyboardist, was riveting at the time.

The movie AMERICAN GRAFFITTI, in 1973, got me curious about all kinds of pop from my parents' era, so when Punk/New Wave came along and parodied that sound, I was hip to the joke.

[blue2blue]

Speaking of album covers that seemed to promise more or at least different than what the album inside delivered, let me toss in my first real rock record purchase (unless you count Sgt Pepper, which I guess you should): Grateful Dead by, well, you know.



I'd read about them. Heard their name in furtive whispers at my repressive suburban high school. Seen the psychedelic San Francisco photo layouts in the major coffee table warmers. I was ready to expand my consciousness.

But when I dropped the ol' diamond Shure into that groove, what comes out? What I characterized (in a review in my HS paper, yo) as rather thinly recorded biker R&B. (I was spoiled by the jazz and adult pop and exotica I listened to in my too-hip-for-rock-and-roll phase, the not-so fi on most rock records really took some getting used to. We're more used to rerelased remasterings now -- but check out 60s singles. Yow.)

Now, I sort of liked it (and grew to love it when I figured out more who they were and what they were about) but it wasn't the psycho-orgasmic freak-out I was expecting. The band made up for it, though, when I saw them open live for the Jefferson Airplane later that fall ('67). The wall of amps behind them on the rotating stage (at the old Melodyland Theatre-in-the-Round before it became a megachurch) were howling with feedback -- much of it purposeful -- their live sound was much more like the next few albums -- which finally delivered what I'd sought with the first album.

Funny thing is, at this point, I've found myself listening a lot more often to the eponymous R&B album over the years than the subsequent Anthem of the Sun or Aoxomoxoa. (Great albums though. That's how to sort out your Dead fans. Lotta folks came on board when they went pop with American Beauty and Workingman's. Fine albums as well, but, you know. Different.)

[Folder]

Originally Posted by blue2blue

Speaking of album covers that seemed to promise more or at least different than what the album inside delivered, let me toss in my first real rock record purchase (unless you count Sgt Pepper, which I guess you should): Grateful Dead by, well, you know.

About twenty years ago I remember having a discussion with a guy at work about music and he believed that the Grateful Dead were one of the first heavy metal bands.

Later I found out that he had never actually heard any of their music but was judging them by their album covers.

Maybe he saw this one?

[Folder]

 

Originally Posted by rasputin1963

From 1978 'til about 1987, I was SO-O into the stuff that came out of the UK. All that Punk, New Wave, Black & White, STIFF RECORDS, multi-culti, I just adored. I appreciated that much of it was a parody of 1950's and early-60's pop. As such, it had an irony to it I savored. Metal music is usually quite literal, not ironic, too bombastic and unsubtle for me (still is).

 

I've been wondering if you would ever chime into this thread rasputin and I just knew what your answer would be. You're love and knowlege of all those 60's, 70's and 80's pop records (many of them obscure) tipped me off.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by Folder

About twenty years ago I remember having a discussion with a guy at work about music and he believed that the Grateful Dead were one of the first heavy metal bands.

Later I found out that he had never actually heard any of their music but was judging them by their album covers.

Maybe he saw this one?

Interestingly, that's one of the four Dead LPs I have. The first 3 and then that one. It's not very heavy metal. There's a sort of mutant reggae thing, though. There are some things on it I really like, but it's been a while since I heard it all the way through.


There's a rough and tumble, live in the studio feel to the first Dead album that suggests a sort of proto-punk ethos. As long as we're casting that one around a little loosely.

[the stranger]

All my favorite bands were crossover bands. DRI, Suicidal, Napalm Death, stuff like that. Stuff that took the fury, rage, and speed of punk rock and combined it with the metal sound for maximum damage. It evolved into something like Insect Warfare:

[Jimbroni]

Originally Posted by blue2blue

I can't say I've really kept up with the Zep guys much since they broke up -- but I was intrigued by what seemed (at the time) the 'odd' pairing of Plant and Alison Krause and T-Bone Burnett for the Raising Sand project. And, while not quite as glossy or confectionery, I have to say I also liked the subsequent Band of Joy project with Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller in the girl-singer and git-playing producer roles. (Is Bobby now daydreaming about a project with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings? )

How did I miss Robert Plant and Patty Griffin doing an album together? R U Serious??

[UstadKhanAli]

Yeah, see if you like it. I personally strongly prefer his collaboration with Allison Krauss to that album, but YMMV.

There had also been some talk about Robert Plant collaborating with Daniel Lanois a little while ago, but I don't know if that's gonna happen anytime soon.

[veracohr]

 

Originally Posted by blue2blue

The guys in Pearl Jam always seemed to be good guys. (For a while some of them frequented my favorite coffee house.) But I have to say their music and particularly Vedder's studied soulful hippie fry vocals really struck me as a band stuck in the sound of the mid-70s -- but who would have likely raised little interest in that decade.

 

I liked Pearl Jam for a bit in the 90's, when I was a teenager, but I moved on to other things and their later music didn't do anything for me. Then, this last summer, I watched their documentary "Twenty", and gained a whole new respect for the band. I still don't care for most of their music, but watching that movie gives some interesting insight to the band.