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blues rock

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as with most modern rock music, Blues rock was grounded in the 60s

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easy to see its roots

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Rolling Stones and Yardbirds

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revived the Chicago Electric Blues tradition as part of the British Invasion

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British Invasion

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The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Dave Clark Five

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you have to ask what counts as blues rock

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ZZ Top?

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Santana?

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British Blues Rock

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the unholy trinity of British hard rock and heavy metal in the early to mid-Seventies

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Deep Purple

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Led Zeppelin

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Black Sabbath

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based on a 60s interest in American blues

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Chess records coming out of Chicago in the 50s

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Howling Wolf (Back Door Man)

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Little Walter

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Chuck Berry

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had a gritty feel to them and a sense of authenticity

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they first imitated these artists

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then developed a different approach

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came up with something that was very easily separable from American Blues of the 50s

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1. Led Zeppelin

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if we start with Blue Rock in the 70s, we have to start, of course, with Led Zeppelin

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Jimmy Page was the last man standing from the Yardbirds

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was one of the last ones into the group

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everyone else had quit

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brought in friend John Paul Jones

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Robert Plant and John Bonham joined, who were relatively unknown

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changed name to Led Zeppelin

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first two albums released in 1969

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you can still see late 1960s psychedelia in the music of Led Zeppelin

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clearly their roots are in the blues

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in the first four albums, there is hardly a song that is not based on some other song

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there has been litigation suits for this

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Jimmy Page was "grabbing tunes from the Blues tradition"

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he would argue that these songs belonged to a common vernacular that many people rerecorded

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also influenced by blues, folk and psychedelia

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representative track: Whole Lotta Love

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from 1969

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listen to the center portion of the tune, the outer portion are clearly based on a blues

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the center part is more psychedelic, you can hear early stereo with panning sounds from left to right as they go through your head, oh wow, groovy, its an atmospheric sort of section there that is very much a late artifact of late psychedelia

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2. Deep Purple

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Jon Lord, keyboardist

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had classical training like

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Keith Emerson

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English keyboardist Emerson, Lake & Palmer

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Rick Wakeman

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best known for being the former keyboardist in the progressive rock band Yes

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known for his pioneering work in fusing rock with classical or baroque forms, especially with Deep Purple

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Ritchie Blackmore, guitarist

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first important virtuoso guitarists after Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton

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known on the music scene when Deep Purple came together at the end of the 1960s

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1968: "Hush"

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originally done by Joe South

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Deep Purple was the bridge between Psychedelia of the late 60s and what's going to develop into Heavy Metal at the end of the 1970s

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at the beginning of the 70s Deep Purple and Black Sabbath aren't really thought of as Heavy Metal as if Heavy Metal was something separable from the rest of what was going on in Rock and Roll

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they were still thought of as Blues Rock acts

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Heavy Metal per se didn't really crystallize until the middle of the 70s

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Machine Head (1972)

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representative album

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"Smoke on the Water"

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"Stairway to Heaven"

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"Lazy"

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blue influences

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"Highway Star"

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classical influences

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Deep Purple has

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Blues based group like Led Zeppelin

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but more quotations of earlier music

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Ian Gillan

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perfected the idea of the high rock-n-roll scream

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Highway Star

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Space Truckin

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Black Sabbath

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when you talk about the roots of heavy metal, Black Sabbath is the group that is most often cited

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started out as a blues based group

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later specialized in a sort of scary, gothic horror kind of thing

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name came from a movie called "Black Sabbath" (1963)

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in the late 60s while it was flower power and sunshine in Southern California, in Birmingham, England it was dark and dirty where the gloomy side of psychedalia was born

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1979: Ozzy Osbourne's regular abuse of drugs and alcohol led to his dismissal from the band

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1970: Paranoid: archetypal album

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second album

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War Pigs

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Iron Man