Quote:
Originally Posted by Certif1ed
This is the point really - there are accepted lines, and I'm not disputing them, just using them as the base to explore; The thing with Spooky Tooth is that they were not a minor band - they released several albums and worked with a Classical composer (Pierre Henry) who was pretty influential in pop music himself.
Anyone could go back, and plenty have in the many histories that are dotted about on the Internet and a very few books - but none are specific, except by mentioning particular bands, like The Who and The Kinks, Blue Cheer and so on - but with little real exploration, and little credit to the bands that really paved the way.
Anyone could say that Venom played thrash first, yadda yadda, although it's clear to me that they didn't. You cannot keep going back - someone played 16th note "tremolo" riffs first (probably Brian May of Queen), like someone played with both hands on the neck of the guitar first (the latter was Steve Hackett of Genesis, not Eddie Van Halen, as many like to think! Even Les Paul only played one-handed hammer-on licks, IIRC).
The stuff that happened in the 1980s is reasonably well documented, but again, the histories depend on people who were "there", and "there" was different places for different people, so it tends to be a jumble, with everyone claiming to be an authority but not really being able to describe the music except in exaggerated terms which are and often inaccurate as a result of the exaggerations.
There are loads of loose ends in there to tie together - if you want to accept established histories, then fine. It's possible that all that will happen here is that we'll confirm everything in them - but I doubt it!
There's no point in regurgitating other people's scanty histories - I'm looking to create something with some meat in it and uncover maybe controversial stuff.
Like possibly "Spooky Tooth were the true creators of Heavy Metal" or something along those lines.
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I think anybody can challenge the accepted lines of thought and there is always going to be sufficient proof and examples to do so. The accepted lines are there as a guideline only and if somebody wants to say that Spooky Tooth, were the first real HM band with sufficient evidence then its a valid opinion, but people will still constantly dispute that. I think as far as genres go, HM does well in that it has so many sub genres that are constantly being created but of course people will always argue about what fits into which sub-genre, a good example of this is progressive metal (on another thread here) in which there is a wide debate as well. As said above, HM does well with its sub-genres compared to the bands that are usually dumped say into the alternative rock genre, where most of the time half the bands don`t sound very much like each other at all.
I`ve got a metal genealogy where the metal sub-genres are issued like a family tree, since then I`ve really got into metal, as before this it really wasn`t my scene as it were. I disagreed with many of the groups included in each sub-genre on this genealogy back then. Now after several years of listening to metal, I still equally disagree with this family tree, point being its all so subjective.
To be honest with you my knowledge of Spooky Tooth is limited and will now make a point of listening to more of their stuff, but a quick look on wikipedia has them as Progressive rock primarily with not too much mention of HM!!!