Did The Who’s ‘Live at Leeds’ really invent heavy metal?
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(Credits: Bent Rej)
Depending on subjective tastes and geographical loyalties, music fans have very different opinions on where their favourite genre originated. Most people seem happy to trace grunge back to Neil Young’s ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ and punk back to Iggy Pop and The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, but even in these instances, there surely can’t be one splendid source. What about heavy metal?
As far as Pete Townshend, the principal songwriter and guitarist of The Who, is concerned, he invented heavy metal with his energetic rhythm guitar on Live at Leeds. The 1970 album is frequently regarded among the greatest and most influential live recordings of all time. “We sort of invented heavy metal with Live at Leeds,” Townshend told the Toronto Sun in 2019.
Continuing, The Who’s guitarist and principal songwriter claimed that many of their rival contemporaries copied their style, making Live at Leeds a blueprint of sorts. “We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know, heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar.”
Townshend undoubtedly has a point in claiming to have influenced some of the heavier rock bands of the early 1970s. However, Live at Leeds arrived a little late to be considered a primary source of heavy metal. The Who recorded the album in February 1970 and released it three months later. At this point, Led Zeppelin already had two studio albums out and Black Sabbath had not long released their eponymous debut.
In his statement, Townshend may have used Live at Leeds as the enduring example of their explosive live presence. Since the mid-’60s, Keith Moon had entranced young mods with his deafening beats, and Townshend pioneered destructive onstage behaviour long before Jimi Hendrix set his first guitar ablaze. So, while Live at Leeds perhaps shouldn’t be deemed the source of metal per se, The Who were undeniably players in the genre’s early evolution.
If we take Black Sabbath’s arrival as the first hour of clarity in the dawn of heavy metal, we can trace this sound back past Led Zeppelin’s debut album to The Beatles’ 1968 classic ‘Helter Skelter’. The “White Album” cut is often cited as a source of metal, but guess where Paul McCartney found his inspiration for the song? That’s right, The Who.
McCartney, seemingly the most competitive of The Beatles, wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ after hearing a particularly riotous track by The Who. “The Who had made some track that was the loudest, the most raucous rock ‘n roll, the dirtiest thing they’d ever done,” he said in a 1985 interview. “It made me think, ‘Right. Got to do it.’ I like that kind of geeking up. And we decided to do the loudest, nastiest, sweatiest rock number we could.”
Unfortunately, McCartney neglected to detail the song that envied him so. Given the timing of The Beatles’ response, the song may have appeared on The Who’s 1967 album The Who Sell Out. However, the music on this album was mostly lighter than earlier releases, including the early hits ‘Can’t Explain’ and ‘My Generation’.
If I were to pick out a Who track as the source of heavy metal, I would likely choose the 1966 A Quick One cut ‘Boris the Spider’. Written by bassist John Entwistle, the song trudges through metallic pulses and features toe-curling vocals and plenty of distortion.
Due to geographical bias, Americans may trace the metal sound back to Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’. The song was certainly heavy for 1958, but its metal associations only really began in 1968, when Blue Cheer recorded a proto-metal cover of the song. I think our American friends will find that ‘Boris the Spider’ trumps this candidate by two years.
In reality, there is, of course, no singular source for heavy metal. Like most genres, it emerged gradually as a result of artists goading each other into increasingly weighty rock ‘n’ roll territory. The first metal song is a matter of subjectivity, so draw the line wherever you feel comfortable. For some, Dave Davies started it all in ‘You Really Got Me’, while, for others, it was all precursory until Ozzy Osbourne yelled, “I’ve seen a look of evil in your eyes”.
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