Happy Metal Monday, headbangers! This past week, metal lovers on X started discussing this article: THE WHO's ROGER DALTREY: 'We Were The First Heavy Metal Band' published on Blabbermouth.net. I shared it with my husband Fred who isn't a metalhead per se, but is a rock guitarist and frontman of our new band, Fred and Sally, who knows quite a bit of the metal stuff I like on top of having the extensive rock knowledge he has, and here's what he had to say: 'That's actually plausible because The Who was the loudest band! Pete Townshend had those Marshall stacks!' So, The Who created the LOUD sound of heavy metal/hard rock (the rock subgenres were once one and the same), but aside from that, he also said, 'Pete Townshend and John Entwistle are excellent musicians who set the standard for hard rock/heavy metal as well. In those days, the whole band had to be great to get a record deal.' Of course, I'm familiar with famous songs like "Who Are You?" and "Pinball Wizard" but I will be listening to more of The Who.
I used to think Jimi Hendrix was the first musician to create the blueprint for intricate lead guitar playing in heavy metal, but now, I think many others including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Black Sabbath and of course The Who, were all part of the same zeitgeist, as it happens in the arts often where musicians feed off of each other. I don't mean ripping off one another as much as riffing off of, being musicians of the same time period, sharing the same influences like The Beatles and often jamming together, exchanging ideas and techniques. Metal lives on, and we're all still learning from these guys today.
Fast forward to 40 years ago: Tonight, I'm playing Dokken!!! I often say my favorite heavy metal band is Ratt or the Scorpions, but as deeply soulful and hard rockin' as those great bands are, and as much as I love the phenomenal frontmen Stephen Pearcy and Klaus Meine (I've only seen the former perform live, though Klaus is incredible on live footage, and might be the best live singer, ever), it might be Dokken. Dokken has the best ballads! These troubadours knew how to play on the girls' heartstrings. I also happen to know more of their songs. With emotional ballads as well as fun, anthemic songs in their repertoire, younger me loved them like no other band. Don Dokken's vocal tone is beautiful and ear-catching ("I'd like to see you in the morning light"); the intelligibility of his delivery is second to none, and his tone is dynamic from tender to piercing when he wants it to be. I still know pretty much all of Dokken's songs from Tooth and Nail and Under Lock and Key by heart, albums I bought on LP. I even had their poster on my wall that I got in The Village.
Tonight, I also want to talk about hair metal. Back in the day ('70s-'80s), bands like Def Leppard and Van Halen were all considered heavy metal. To me, a "heavy metal leaning" glam metal band is a heavy metal band regardless of guys in spandex (leather's hot on stage and restricts movement, y'know?) or even their guitar set up (mainly distortion, or does glam mean LOUD?). Just because some metal guys like Don Dokken are pretty boys who came after flashy, GOATed frontman David Lee Roth aka Diamond Dave doesn't make their music sound glam like David Bowie, or the band's lighthearted image take away from the serious virtuosity of George Lynch's metal guitar style like Eddie Van Halen or Jimi Hendrix, Don Dokken's vocals or heavy laden bad boy lyrics like "The Hunter" ('You're the only one I could call my own, But then the shadows fall and I'm gone again') performed by the man who put the "Don" in Adonis (just learned he's an actor, too) to every teenage girl's heartbreak, or at least to the ones that didn't prefer the tailored high fashion designer duds clad '80s glam band Duran Duran (synth pop band with "glam leaning guitar"). To call spandex glam is the joke, hair metal the classist epithet, and ultimately, it's a sexist joke like drag, but how I loved hair metal music, anyway.
I'd also like to address melodic metal. Great vocals also made heavy metal the revered branch of rock it became, bringing to mind classic metal singers par excellence from Klaus Meine to Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson, Ronnie James Dio and so on (shall we add Roger Daltrey to the Mt. Rushmore of metal vocalists?) whose songs were aggressive yet always melodic enough to showcase those voices; heck, even AC/DC was melodic. What's called heavy metal these days includes thrash (punk metal) and nu metal subgenres fronted by rap/screamo, and often no guitar solo - there's not much melody there as much as patterns but we love bands like Meshuggah who are highly technical in their own right and nu metal that was birthed by some of the best singers and creative bands of the new era like Evanescence whose songs are very melodic. The heavy metal scene venerates seasoned musicians, but as musicians of any genre, we don't have to only conserve what already is; new players and sounds are always welcome as music is for everyone to play and enjoy. That having been said, Dokken wrote some particularly melodic, beautiful metal song melodies, solos, riffs and fills, all parts of melodic metal songwriting. Happy serious listening and have a rokken Dokken week! \m/
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Related article: Dee Snider Defends Jimi Hendrix Against ‘Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani are Better’ Claims - metalheadzone.com
