We turn our attention now to blues rock and I'm going to divide that into British
blues rock and American blues rock in terms of this discussion.
As I said in the first video all of these styles are sort of grounded in things
that happened in the 60s. And blues rock is one of the ones that's
easiest to see its roots because of course we talked about blues rock a lot
in the History of Rock Part 1. groups like the Rolling Stones and the
Yardbirds who in the early 1960s and into the mid 1960s kind of revived this
Chicago electric blues tradition as part of the British invasion.
So that, that continued, in fact one of the groups we're going to talk about, Led
Zeppelin. Essentially sort of developed out of the
Yardbirds but we're getting a little bit ahead of our story.
we'll start talking about the English groups and then move on to the American
groups. And that's partially because in many ways
the American blues rock band, it seems ironic that this should be the case.
But the American blues rock bands actually are, are, are very influenced by
the British blues rock bands. You would think that the American blues
rock bands would be influenced by blues in America.
[LAUGH]. But actually, they many of them were sort
of introduced to American blues by the British musicians who came over in the
60s. So we'll deal with the American blues
rock bands a second. And then we'll ask the question when it
comes to blues influences, what counts as as blues rock to somebody like ZZ Top
count as blues rock or someone like Santana.
So let's, let's, let's see what we come up with here, let's turn to blues based
British Rock. As I said here just a minute ago blues
based rock coming out of Britain is very much based on a 60s interest in American
blues. So this would be primarily the recordings
coming out of Chess Records in Chicago in the 1950s.
We're talking about Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter Bo Diddly, even
records by Chuck Berry. All coming off that Chess Records and
having a kind of a kind of a, a real kind of gritty feel to them.
and a real sense of authenticity that a lot of the British artists in the 1960s
were really, really drawn to. When, when they started to do blues rock,
they, initially they, they did it by imitating those records trying to sound
as much like those records as they could. But they developed a kind of a different
approach to the music, it, it in part of sort engaging tradition.
And really came up with something that's really easily separable from American
blues American blues of the 50s. British blues rock is clearly influenced
by it but really becomes its own thing and that's what continues now so what I
said before. The Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and
then into the late 1960s, Creme with Eric Clapton a, a very, very important.
So as we talk about British blues rock, I'm only going to have a chance to talk
about a few of those groups, so those of you who are waiting for me to talk about,
in fact, this goes for the whole the, the whole class.
If you're waiting for me to talk about your favorite group and I don't, it's not
because I don't think that they're an important group or worthy of note.
It's just because that we're condensing material down.
So if, if you if you, if you don't hear something about your favorite group and
you want to make a contribution to it, the discussion forums are a perfect place
for you to bring that up and, and, and plead your case for, for, for a group
that you don't think that I've spent enough time on or didn't get a chance,
chance to get to. So, I'm going to try to choose
representative examples. So, just understand that they're just
representative examples and they don't define or are better than other groups
and this kind of thing. So, we'll start of course with blues rock
in the 70s, we've gotta start with Led Zeppelin.
And their roots of course in the Yardbirds.
Jimmy Page having been sort of the last man standing from the Yardbirds after
the, he was sort of one of the last ones into the group.
Everybody else had quit. He was left holding the bag with the band
name and a bunch of gigs that they were supposed to play.
he brings in a friend of his, who was a studio, also a studio musician in London
during the 60s John Paul Jones. who played bass and keyboards for the
group. And two guys who were relatively unknown,
young Robert Plant on lead vocals and John Bonham on drums.
And together these four guys did started out as if they were going to be the new
Yardbirds but then changed the name to Led Zeppelin the first two albums
actually being released in 1969. And in many ways you can still see late
late 1960s psychedelia in the music of Led Zeppelin and so it's very easy to
sort of follow that transformation. clearly their, their roots are in the
blues a friend of mine has, has published an article in, in which he basically
tracks the first four Led Zeppelin albums and there's hardly a song there that
isn't based on some other song. I'm sure that you know that in, in, in
the case of Led Zeppelin there's been litigation and copyright infingement kind
of suits that have been settled out of court and this, this kind of thing.
So it's really clear that, that more, more than just influences here to a
certain extent. There were Jimmy Paige was grabbing tunes
that were very much part of the blues repertoire.
He would argue that their songs didn't belong to anybody.
They were part of a sort of common vernacular that a lot of people
re-recorded and so there was no real crime in putting his name, Robert Plant's
name along with that. I'll let you decide about that.
But the one thing that's clear are the influences in blues.
Also in folk they were very influenced by folk and of course psychedelia.
So if you want to hear a, a representative track of this early on
from Led Zeppelin, listen to Whole Lotta Love.
I'm sure you've heard it plenty of times from 1969, Whole Lotta Love".
But listen to the very center section of the tune.
The, the outer portions of the tune are clearly based on a blues lick.
Right, that, that part of it really sort of gives us the blues connection there,
and the lyrics that go with it and Robert Plant singing.
But the center part is this almost sort of psychadelic kind of deal.
And if you listen to it with the headphones you can hear, you know, early
stereo with them panning sounds from left to right like they seem to go through
your head, oh wow groovy. You know, this kind of thing, and it's
just really sort of an atmospheric sort of center section there that is very much
a later artifact of, of psychedelia. Remembering that the album that it's on
was released in 1969. But, the tune that probably is most
emblematic of Led Zeppelin peop, people will argue there's what, what the most
emblematic tune is. But really Stairway to Heaven has really
got to be thought of as, as that tune I think.
if, if by nothing else by sheer popularity.
I, I read a statistic once that said that some where in the world some radio
station is playing Stairway to Heaven at every single second of the day.
so, It's a song that, that, that never stops,
being played and being programmed. the tune itself, brings together a lot of
what we're talking about. There's, there's definitely a kind of a
blues tendency at the very end. The, the aggressive section at the very
end of the tune is very sort of blues based.
Think of the guitar solo that launches into the second half of that.
The beginning of it, however, is much more sort of cosmic and folk oriented
starting with a single acoustic guitar. The lyrics are are a little bit more sort
of philosophical and get away from sort of love relationships to sexual
relationships into things that are you know, vaguely philosophical and this kind
of thing. So, you see all the, even in a group that
sort of trades in a kind of hard driving kind of blues sound, you seen a kind of
conceptional nature of what's going on. Especially in that fourth album,
sometimes called 4 Symbols, sometimes called Zoso, sometimes simply called Led
Zeppelin 4. That album that Stairway to Heaven is on
various conceptional kind of thing. Sort of partners to Led Zeppelin and big
in the United States but really big in Europe is a group called Deep Purple.
Who featured keyboardist Jon Lord who had sort of classical training ala somebody
who we'll be talking about later Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman or one of those
classical the classically trained keyboard players.
and and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who was one of the first, first important
virtuoso guitarists after Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and had been a studio
musician in the 1960s working especially for Joe Meek.
during the mid 1960s with a group called the Outlaws.
And also Screaming Lord Such. So, Jimmy, I mean Ritchie, Ritchie
Blackmore, already somebody sort of known on the music scene when, when Deep Purple
came together at the end of the 1960s. Had a pretty big hit with a song called
Hush. A song originally done by Joe South, it
was a number four hit in this country in 1968.
they really bridge Deep Purple really is the bridge between Psychedelia of the
late 60s, and what's going to develop into heavy metal at the end of the 1970s.
At this point, groups like Deep Purple groups like Black Sabbath, who we'll talk
about in a minute, aren't really thought of as heavy metal as if heavy metal was
something separable from the rest of what was going on in rock and roll.
They were still thought of as blues rock act.
it wouldn't really sort of the idea of what heavy metal is, separate from
everything else, wouldn't really sort of crystallize until the second half of, of
the decade. But anyway, when you think about Deep
Purple, if you're looking for a representative album of what they do.
Machine Head from 1972 is probably the best representative.
That's got Smoke on the Water on it, for example.
a, a, another one of those tunes, like Stairway to Heaven, that always seem to
be playing on some radio station somewhere in the world at all times.
you've got a track on there called Lazy. Which really shows the groups blues
influences Highway Star is a, a, a fantastic track that, that shows some of
their classical influences. so when you think about Deep Purple I
think there's a comparison with Led Zeppelin.
Both are blues based groups but there's a little bit more emphasis in the Deep
Purple sound toward quotations of classical music, and this kind of thing.
Of course, the lead singer in that group, Ian Gillian sort of, perfected the idea
of the kind of rock n roll scream, the high scream.
you can hear that in certainly, Highway Star, and you can hear that in Space
Truckin as well. All of these things, the Richie Blackmore
virtuosity. The references to classical music the
sort of the sort of high scream and all that kind of thing, all become
prototypical elements of heavy metal as it develops.
The third of our sort of triumphant of British blues based groups is is Black
Sabbath. Course when we talk about the the roots
of heavy metal, Black Sabbath is probably that group that is, is really sort of
most most often cited in that regard. The group started out like so many of
these British groups as a, as a blues based group.
They decided to go in the direction of, of sort of, specializing in this, sort
of, scary gothic horror kind of thing. And got their name from a movie called
Black Sabbath that featured horror film icon Boris Karloff.
The, the, the movie's from 1963. It's actually an anthology of three films
together. But nevertheless, Black Sabbath check it
out on the internet, you'll be able to find the movie poster for that.
and as I say, blues based but with a sort of gothic penchant this, this, this thing
for a sort of things dark. Ozzy Osbourne has said in interviews, the
lead singer of the group, Ozzy Osbourne has said in interviews a couple of times
that, you know, in the late 60s in California it was flower power and
sunshine but. But they were in Birmingham in the north
of England. Birmingham wasn't sunshine, it wasn't
flower power. It was dark, it was dirty and it the, the
whole sort of dark side of psychedelia comes comes out in this.
probably the, the arch, archetypal album for Black Sabbath before Ozzy leaves the
group in 1979 is Paranoid. It's their second album from 1970 and
it's got such tracks on it as Iron Man and War Pigs.
The ones that saturated FM radio in the early 1970s.
And really made a name for the group. Well now we've talked about British blues
based rock. In the next video let's turn to the
American blues based bands.