It was today in 1970 that heavy metal was born with the release of Sabbath's eponymous album.
No-one can argue with this.
What can be picked over are the distorted bones of the pre-Sabbath corpus.
Millions of words have been penned in the quest to elicit the sparks, to name the building storm, to label the flames that would be consumed and consummated in Sabbath's debut.
Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, bits of The Who, Hendrix, Gallagher, Beck, Cream, Sir Lord Baltimore and many many more bands have been named as the darkening roots of heavy rock.
As a fan all my life I'd like to add one more band to the rocky road toward Sabbath's coming.
High Tide.
I only came across this band in the 2000's when I got a CD copy of their 1969 LP Sea Shanties. I wuz blown away. Within its bombastic bag of bone-crunchers, the sound is a maelstrom of fuzz, high-pitched riffs and a fabulously rich vocal. Sea Shanties is a work of some great heaviness I would say.
Now the differences between prog, heavy metal, heavy rock and hard rock can be argued till the seraphim fall but I'm sure any definition of heaviness would include dirge-like melodies, doom-laden lyrics, distortion-sawed chords and fabulous song titles.
Sea Shanties has them all in spades. OK, the overt presence of the Dark Lord can't be felt like it can in the first grimoire from Ozzy, Tony and the brummy coven, but in High Tide's blistering opus a thick heavy watermark was left in 1969 for all to see and follow.
I often wonder if Black Sabbath had heard Sea Shanties before launching themselves onto the Earth?
Anyways, here it is, courtesy of modern means, High Tides' Sea Shanties from 1969. See what you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpBCXof2qCc&list=PLEMzLROuENR2TrnybowmwRELji6w26THM&index=1
