TOP TEN METAL ALBUM'S OF THE '60s

TOP TEN METAL ALBUM'S OF THE '60s

Richard Riegel

Even in the 1960s, virtually a prehistoric era as classic heavy metal goes, there were far more than 10 essential metal LPs released, and I had some trouble narrowing down the list. What I’ve finally chosen are albums that made metal impact as albums, and that became widely-known to the newer bands that would define the style in the early 1970s. This selection thus excludes not only many crucial pre-metal singles—everything from the Beatles’ “She's A Woman” to the Doors’ “Hello I Love You”—but also all-metallic albums like the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, which is as pure-noise as this stuff gets, but which has never outgrown its cult-fave status. So I haven’t forgotten metal-motivational types like the Kinks or Blue Cheer, there just wasn’t room. Ditto for the Pretty Things, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Steppenwolf...(save yer hate mail for bigger targets!) Anyhow, here’s the top ten LPs, roughly in chronological order:

THE YARDBIRDS

(Epic)

1966 (U.K.) 1983 (U.S.)

The importance you attach to this overunder-sideways-down clique of mollycoddles probably depends on your personal bedrock aesthetic. To wit: Now how much would you pay?!? (for a band that bequeathed Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page to the universe). Sales of air guitars tripled over the next decade. Personally I’ve always been a bit put off by monolithic Yardbirdism, as U.S. CBS scattered their recordings over a gaggle of random-selection albums, all copies of which are now in the sweaty hands of neurasthenic collector types who merely sniff the sleeves on warm days. All that said, the Yardbirds were already spinning mood frisbees and cranking up fuzzboxes from hell, while most of the other Brit Invasion groups still wanted to become ancient Negro bluesmen & marry blonde leggy things from Sweden. You can definitely credit these guys with the oldest known objectification of the electric guitar as a big loud phallic symbol to worship. They thus lit the torch upon whose smoke heavy metal would cough up its guts in the fab future.

THE WHO

The Who Sings My Generation

(Decca) 1966

This mod, mod world of an artifact also has plenty to say about the origins of metal, as it showed real early on just how loud & monstrous rock could get. The Who never did a studio album this raucous again, and had to resort to a slicker, haute-hippie approach to finally break in America. But Peter Townshend’s fiberglass-boomerang guitar, John Entwistle’s deviated-septum bass, and Keith Moon’s dynamited-grandstand drum kit on this set are all premature ejaculations of the explosive sheet metal to come. Roger Daltrey? Well, lots of metal groups ended up having blond lead singers, too. Besides, Rog's synthetic drug-stuttered vocal on the title tune is an amazing preview of the skunked-out kids (are alright) who would be puking all over arena floors in honor of this band by the lude-faced 1970s.

THE TROGGS

(Fontana) 1966

“Wild Thing” was absolutely the first anti-evolutionary hit from the British Invasion. Picture the summer of '66, with the Beatles, Stones, and Yardbirds getting more polkadotty psychedelicate by the hour, and suddenly these left-field troglodytes come up with a sound so raw & primative that the Kingsmen retired to an old farts’ home to meditate on their past chord profligacy. Some of the cuts on this album are as sweet as bubblegum wine sold before its time, but don’t let them scare you away from the title track’s double-decibels guitar and ran-off-theroad-and-struck-a-utility-pole bass. In 1966, these were rock’s FUTURE, as was the syncopated thump of “I Want You,” later nationalized by the MC5 as their dictatorship-of-the-masses “I Want You Right Now.” The Troggs are also noteworthy for having walked on as spear carriers in Lester “Metal Prophet” Bangs’s first great so-bad-it’s-good rant opera, James Taylor Marked For Death.

VANILLA FUDGE

(Atco) 1967

This album was just barely listenable even in ’67, when all us kids were coming all over the shrinkwrap in our lust to plug right into the just-moved-in-next-door sikeadylanic experience. Slapping it on the turntable today has a fun quotient somewhere in the vicinity of translating your mother-in-law’s romance novels into English. Even though these Adolescent Does from Long Island didn’t quite invent metal on this debut outing, they did stumble onto the crucial metal concept that absolutely any goon could take any song and decompose it into hea-vee rock just by making it overlong, overweight, and just over the head of the average mental deficient. Someday “real” metal dumpsters would make millions with this formula. Hiya, Carmine!

JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE

Are You Experienced

(Reprise) 1967

This album contains far fewer of those extended blooze guitar S&M sessions Hendrix became famous for on later records, but this was an extraordinary revolutionary disc upon its release. The set has a rather maniacal balance between Jimi’s wild-dogs guitar and the record company’s hip intentions to carve concise pop songs out of all the wahwah cheesecake flying through the air. The result is psychedelic-babble trash (in the best sense) lyrics, framing superslung riddim guitar so loud it’s like assaulting Frank Sinatra with a platinum chainsaw. Extra points to Hendrix in the TheyShaped-Metal Derby for recognizing the cosmic-squonk worth of the Troggs, when most hippos wouldn’t go near ’em with a ten-foot scratching post. This is the album that caused many a young dog soldier of the ’60s to hop onto a steel folding chair and holler, “Lay some shee-it on me!”

CREAM

Disraeli Gears

(Atco) 1967

This is undoubtedly my favorite album from that mythical year of 1967, as it reminds me so forcefully how the times really felt then. This record also marks Eric Clapton’s best showcase ever, counting even the other Cream albums, as he’s no superstar with a big ten-meter guitar here. He’s just another trashy session man, as strange-brew anonymous as his muzzled-virtuoso mates Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. The metal part comes in both in the powertrio-with-a-lockedbathroom-door aural gyzm, and in the semiconscious content of the songs, all throwaway lyrics about the disposable leggy birds flocking to London that year. Purely incidental lyrics that let those donning-tight-vinyl-garments riffs glow for ages to come. (And the daglo eyeball capers on the jacket are also my favorite cover maybe ever, cuz I actually saw just such stuff when I “did” the demon weed back in those days. It was the damned American hippies later, who decreed that all stoned-mug filmstrips hadda be dry brown & buckskin in hue. That’s when I swore off the stuff.)

MC5

Kick Out The Jams

(Elektra) 1969

Cynical types no doubt consider this album an embarrassing souvenir of that odd period of Amerikan kultural history when the New Left kiddies really & truly believed that their newfound disaffection had something to do with the eternal hipster plight of all those cool spades down in the ghetto. Well, it is all that, as a matter of fact, but it also exhibits some powerful existential jollies Brother John Sinclair probably never envisioned, even in his wooliest-Marxist five-year-plan for his MC5 minions. The band had meantime stumble-bummed into some unmistakably white blues, with no hope of coolcat redemption in this life. Amphetamine “total energy” guitars as a suicidal political act, fused into an undifferentiated roar enhanced by the raggedy-ass live recording, done in the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, on the "Zenta New Year” no less. Modern beyond their years, the MC5 were clanging native souls into auditory oblivion while buzzwords like peace & love still wore a wet paint” sign.

BLACK PEARL

(Atlantic) 1969

This nearly-forgotten group is actually the missing link that made the wonderful (which I truly believe) Motorhead not only possible, but inevitable. Like many another ’69 baggie of white boys, the uncultured Black Pearl jazzbos were clumsily aiming at some monster soulsibling workout, but came up with terminally Caucasian speed & slobber instead. Heavy-tongue-action guitars licks the woodpecker decals off chord changes ordered straight from the J.C. Whitney catalogue. Vocals from B.B. (ha, ha, HAH) Fieldings so leering & greasy-haired you should run your stylus through a car wash after each play. The whole album gives off an aroma as funky as a usedbookstore copy of Penthouse moldy with somebody else’s long-spent wankoff antix. Needless to say, this record was one of the late Lester Bangs’s alltime faves & as usual he was 100 percent RIGHT.

THE STOOGES

(Elektra) 1969

This album’s heavee on the metal on two counts, as it feels just like chomping down on a tinfoil gum wrapper with your silver-filled molars. (Sucker!) Pain and pleasure go hook in claw in this debut, recorded by the Stooges only a week or so after they had met their instruments in a blind date group grope at a pawnshop. You guessed it: frazzled-rhino guitar scrapings, foaming-Drano bass thrum in all your cranial drains once a week, and an emotional effect so blank housewives are still swiping it to send in for rebates. Detached beyond his pimples, Iggy soon-to-become-Pop already had the fatal teenie blooze in hotshot 1969, when easy exuberance and sweet miniskirts still grew on trees. The Ig’s applied desolation turned out to be gloomily prophetic of metal’s permafrost moodiness, even if he was brainy enough not to fall for the cheap mental stimulants of factory-outlet Naziism. Wall-of-noise art absolutely as high as it gets.

LED ZEPPELIN II

(Atlantic) 1969

OK, OK, I admit that this may be the most significant metal album of history. This is the record that doo-dooed all over the map in setting heavy metal audiovisual standards for eons to come. Just because Robert Plant turned up at these sessions brandishing his blond fartdog hairdo and screechable tonsils, nearly every manjackoff metal vocalist in the 15 years since has ran a variation on Plant’s halfbaked theme. (And likewise has come up with a foil of a guitarist just like Plant’s bub Jimmy Page, all flashing fingers and no speaka duh English.) This album’s foldout-jacket painting of a gigantic zeppelin is also something of a Rosetta stone to translating ’70s-metal’s twin icons, as it symbolizes both bomber joints and fat phalli. As you might have gathered, I despise these guys to the utmost because the American radio programmers have rewarded their worst tendencies (“Stairway To Heaven”) instead of their best (“Immigrant Song,” short & speedfreak sweet) and the foolish Zeps believed ’em. But this remains a significant album.