> > Black Sabbath was definitely a 70s band, but I don't consider them classics. I see them as the first real metal band, and thus they fall firmly on the other side of the spectrum from "classic rock".
>
> No way. The Kinks were the first metal band. ;-)

Nah. Certainly there were bands and artists before Black Sabbath who had songs in what is recognizable as the "heavy metal" style today, or who were playing sped-up 12 bar blues music on distorted electric guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly, The Who, and yes, The Kinks, all had an influence on what would become heavy metal. But I wouldn't consider any of them true metal bands. See, heavy metal has a birth story, and it goes like this:

In 1968, a young English guitarist from the industrial city of Birmingham named Tony goes in for his last day of factory work. He's recently hooked up with a band called Earth, who plays mostly jazz and blues, and he's going to quit his factory job and join them on a tour of Germany.

The man who normally ran the machine that cut big metal strips into sheets has called in sick, so our young hero is pressed into service on a machine he doesn't really know how to operate. He gets his hand too close to the cutter, and the machine severs the tips of the middle two fingers on his right hand.

This would be a devestating injury for any guitarist, but it appears to be career ending for young Tony, as he plays left handed, and thus his right hand is his fretting hand--you can hold a guitar pick with just an opposable thumb and one working digit, but fingering the frets with two fingers missing their tips to the first knuckle seems impossible.

Tony thinks his music career is over, but during his recovery his old factory boss tells him about Django Reinhardt, a gypsy guitarist who lost the use of his pinky and ring finger on his fretting hand during a fire but who learned to play using only his two remaining fingers. Inspired by this story, Tony first tries to learn to play guitar right handed, but soon gives that up. Instead, he enlists a friend to help him cast homemade prosthetic fingertips out of plastic bottle tops. He fits these over the missing fingertips on his right hand and goes back to playing left handed.

It hurts like hell to play with the fake fingers, so to ease the pain, he strings his guitar with ultra-light gauge strings and eventually hits upon the idea of tuning his guitar down to C# (a full step and a half down from normal E tuning) to ease the tension on the strings and thus ease the pressure on his fingertips. This also serves to thicken and deepen the sound of his playing.

To go with this new sound on guitar, the band decides to move in a darker direction, theorizing that if people will pay to see scary movies, maybe they'll pay to listen to scary music, too. They emphasize guitar riffs over straight chords, and distort the hell out of their instruments. They write a song called "Black Sabbath", alternately said to be based on a horror movie the band saw, and on a true experience the bassist experienced one night. Whichever it was, the song and the new sound catches on with their fans. The band changes their name from Earth to Black Sabbath to avoid confusion with another local band named Earth, and record their self-titled debut album in 1970. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Black Sabbath was really the first band to sound like a metal band all the time. Their sound was developed almost out of necessity because of Tony Iommi's accident, and the new sound propelled them in the new, darker direction that characterizes much of metal. Led Zeppelin had a similar sound around the same time, but took it in a more upbeat (compared to Sabbath, anyway) direction. The two bands really are the forerunners of all metal to come after them, as Sabbath gave birth to the darker, more serious and sullen side of metal, while Zeppelin gave rise to the sex, drugs, and rock & roll party side of metal. There's not really a metal band that came after Sabbath and Zeppelin that can't trace their lineage directly back to one of these two bands.

-- Dave