In the primeval soup of post-psychedelic rock, blues mutation, and amplifier worship, a sound began to crawl out—slow, loud, and unsaintly. It didn’t yet have a clean tag. Nobody knew they were inventing something. Nobody called it “proto” anything. In garages, pubs, basements, and busted VFW halls, it was simply heavy.
The term “heavy metal”, as a music genre, began to harden in the early 1970s, but its alloys had been smelted a few years prior. Like most sacred slang, the phrase had several disputed origins, drifting through science fiction (William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, where “Heavy Metal Kid” was a nickname for a character), and critic Lester Bangs' acerbic descriptions of overdriven rock.
But it was likely Steppenwolf’s 1968 song “Born to Be Wild” that first embedded the phrase in musical lore:
“Heavy metal thunder” roared from radios and Easy Rider's mythic trail, even if it described motorcycles, not guitars. Still, it stuck.
By the time Black Sabbath dropped their first self-titled album in 1970, something tectonic had shifted. Reviewers reached for “doom,” “dirge,” and “evil blues,” but increasingly landed on “heavy metal”—not as a genre yet, but as a feeling. Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin were labeled “heavy”, and sometimes “metallic”, but no one had built a proper box to contain them yet.
In the early 70s, the term was still derogatory, spat by music critics at bands deemed brutish, unrefined, or Neanderthalic. But as the decade progressed, the bands and the fans reclaimed it. It was a badge of pride—an acknowledgement of being too loud, too real, too rooted in the guts of the earth to be pop or prog.
Now, what we reverently call proto-metal—the 1968–1976 era of private press thunder and post-hippie grime—was not “proto” to those who made it. It was the sound itself. These were not blueprints. These were finished cathedrals, humming with low frequencies and dark premonitions. Bands like Sir Lord Baltimore, Leaf Hound, Bang, Stonewall, and Jerusalem were not trying to point the way toward metal—they were metal, as understood then: heavy rock with molten purpose.
But metal’s narrative was soon rewritten.
As NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) crystallized in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, with Maiden, Saxon, and Priest blazing forward, the earlier bands were suddenly reframed as “proto-”, as precursors. The industry needed a starting line, a retroactive origin story. And so the first wave was cast backward into the mythic.
Pour one out.
For the unknowing founders.
For the misfiled and misunderstood.
For the boys who thought they were just playing loud rock ‘n’ roll—
and accidentally bent the Earth’s magnetic field.
Their distortion still rings.
Their amps were the scripture.
Their riffs were the forge.
They didn’t invent heavy metal.
They just were it.
70s Metal (listen on shuffle)
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