“If you want to trace the origins of heavy metal back to anything, that’s where I would go”: Music journalist says this Jimi Hendrix song gave birth to metal music
Is it possible to pinpoint the birth of heavy metal? Obviously, many generally agree that the genre is the handiwork of Black Sabbath, but according to author and music journalist Jason Schneider, it was actually Jimi Hendrix who got the wheels in motion.
In a new interview with Booked on Rock, Schneider – who just released his new book That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence – contests that The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1966 version of Hey Joe could be where metal first found its footing.
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“People have debates all the time about the origins of hard rock or heavy metal,” he says [via Ultimate Guitar]. “But I think going back to that time, 1966, when Jimi and bands like The Who were just first starting to make records, they wanted volume. And of course Cream, Eric Clapton: the birth of the Marshall amplifier.
“I think all of that just, if you want to trace the origins of heavy metal back to anything, I think that’s where I would go.”
As Schneider points out, the recording sessions for Hey Joe saw Hendrix fighting against the engineer to reach the loud, high-gain sound he was used to.
“Jimi approached it as if you were on stage, so he instinctively just cranked his amp up to maximum,” Schneider explains. “And that’s something that the studio engineer had never experienced before.
“So, all of a sudden, here’s Jimi playing at top volume, and all kinds of things are rattling around the studio. But Jimi refused to turn down. And that was the sound, so they had to kind of eventually work out a compromise.”
Of course, it was Black Sabbath’s arrival in 1968 and their massively distorted riffs which truly set the foundations for what would become the heavy metal genre we know today.
But did Hendrix, Clapton and other guitarists who loved cranking the gain on their amps pave the way for them? Jason Schneider certainly thinks so, and we can totally buy it.
Watch the full interview below:
The post “If you want to trace the origins of heavy metal back to anything, that’s where I would go”: Music journalist says this Jimi Hendrix song gave birth to metal music appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
