And Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild was recorded a full year before Helter Skelter and used the term heavy metal in it's lyrics as well.

Right, right, right.  Good points all around.  

Comics are a little clearer - Seigel and Shuster codified a set of tropes that are used to define "superhero" to this day, and Simon and Kirby did the same with "romance comics" but even those kinds of arguments don't work for music.  There's really no starting point for any particular genre -  there's a bunch of bands/individuals doing stuff that sort of sounds like  Genre X, there are a bunch of people that are arguably working in genre X or maybe not, and then there are some grounds/people who are definitely Genre X.  

Truth. And let's not forget things like The Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive, released in August '67, which can be classed under a number of designations, including proto-metal.

Proto metal

Vanilla Fudge is best known for their super heavy magnum opus version of  Diana Ross and the Supreme's hit You Keep Me Hangin' On. Worth checking it out on YouTube

The weird coincidence of Emitt Rhodes is that the song and album was released just about the same time as Paul McCartney's first solo album. And on both albums, Rhodes and McCartney played all the various instruments themselves as well as all the backing vocals and all the songwriting. Some pictures of Rhodes on the album jacket look similar to Paul as well. 

Badfinger was such a great Beatlesque pop band in the early 70s, signed to the Beatles' Apple Records company and backing up George Harrison and others at the famous Concert For Bangladesh. Tragically I believe 2 of their members committed suicide when their record label dropped the group and they were financially struggling

Unless I missed something, a) no one said Bob Dylan invented talking blues, and b) no one said it had an influence on rap either.

Oh, and c), "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is not talking blues. At all. Not by a long shot. While it's true that Dylan wrote and recorded many examples of the talking blues, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is much more indebted to the quick-fire lyrical whit of the likes of Chuck Berry's "Maybellene", but amped up to an even more intense and rapid delivery.

Also, for the record, I called "Subterranean Homesick Blues" an important early example of proto-rapping, which it undoubtedly is. I never said it was the first rap record or some such. The same can be said for some of the spoken "raps" (for want of a better term) that Lou Rawls would pepper his songs with in the mid-60s. Of course, it isn't until you get to artists like Gil Scott-Heron or the albums put out by The Last Poets in the early '70s that you really hear anything properly approaching the genre that would become hip hop in the late '70s. But, there's little doubt that a record like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was an important early step along that road.




Ah, some things we have in common, then. I too am deeply passionate about popular music and the developmental history of the art form (yes, I do consider it an art form. Commercial art, for sure, but art nonetheless). I also worked as a professional music journalist between 2007 and 2010, by which time I'd realised that there really wasn't any money in it any more. I wrote regularly for mainstream UK music publications, such as Mojo and Q, along with many record and gig reviews in smaller publications like Rock 'n' Reel. I even had a piece about a Chicago-based singer-songwriter published in the Chicago Tribune (which was probably my greatest achievement as a music journalist).

So yeah, I know my stuff too.




I betcha I could!




Yeah, clearly the Beatles didn't "invent" heavy metal. It's very difficult to pinpoint any one specific record where the various musical tributaries that lead to the genre coalesced into something that was unquestionably heavy metal (although the first Black Sabbath album gets my vote). But what is true is that "Helter Skelter" was an important antecedent, along with earlier riff-heavy offerings by Jimi Hendrix and the Kinks, as you point out. Actually, a lot of heavy metal evolved out of acid rock too.

But here's the thing that sometimes gets forgotten by armchair music historians: when talking about records that have wielded influence on popular music, it's not enough to have been first, you have to have been popular enough to have impacted the public imagination enough for people to have been influenced by you. "Helter Skelter" was on an album that sold in its millions in Britain and America, and so was much more influential on the world at large than some earlier example of heavy guitar rock that maybe sold only a fraction of the number of copies (I'm thinking of a record like "Summertime Blues" by the Blue Cheer or something here).

Oh, and something related to heavy guitar rock that the Beatles really did do first was deliberately use guitar feedback on a record as an effect. The buzzing, mid-range feedback at the start of "I Feel Fine" (recorded in October 1964) was the first time that feedback -- which until then had been the bane of audio engineers everywhere and something to be avoided at all costs -- was used as part of the song on purpose. But anyway, I'm digressing really.





I never said any such thing. What I said was, "you can also hear the roots of hip hop in the drums and tape loops of the Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows'". I would never suggest that the Beatles invented tape loops...that would be ridiculous.




See, I know that for a long time "Rock Around the Clock" was widely held to be the first rock 'n' roll record and then it became fashionable for smart alec music journalists to point to records like "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (a.k.a. Ike Turner) and say, "no, that's where it all started", but I disagree. I think the old cliche about "Rock Around the Clock" being the first rock 'n' roll record is basically true.

Of course, it greatly depends on your personal interpretation of what constitutes rock 'n' roll, but to my ears, a record like "Rocket 88" isn't quite it -- it's jukebox blues or rhythm 'n' blues, but it's not quite rock 'n' roll. There are many other jukebox blues records from that era that come very close to sounding like early rock 'n' roll too, records like "Down the Road Apeice" by Amos Milburn for example, but "Rock Around the Clock" just has that something extra. A little more aggression, a little more swing, a little more excitement. Just listen to the mighty "crack!" of that snare drum on Bill Haley's record or the sheer abandon and swagger of the guitar solo. That's rock 'n' roll!

Edit: Of course, I'm not actually suggesting that Bill Haley "invented" rock 'n' roll, he was obviously influenced by other artists, but I am saying that "Rock Around the Clock" is the earliest record that you can point to and say unequivocally that it's a rock 'n' roll record.