Callisto's overcome this Valentines Day.
He needs a caption!
To further celebrate heavy metal day here are some more obscure meteors of forgotten rockage, heavier than iron and as loud as a herd of stampeding centaurs.
Enjoy the wonder of Mojo's tribute to 'eaviness on You Tube.
Volume 1 blew my tiny mind.
Crank it up and windmill that axe!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMwu2iJXkPNIpZbAJeISBAobANdG_bpfB
Here's one the many fabulous album covers from which the tracks are taken.
I love this picture! Beans on toast, a sinking model ship and Concorde! Do you like it?
from the rare Thousands on a Raft LP by Pete Brown and Piblokto! 1970
Further junking brought up these bad boys in two emporia: the old Magistrates Court and Etsy, both in Pontefract.
All in good nick and just one pound each. Bargain!
I was particularly chuffed with the little Zowies, those comical miniature Hot Wheels with tyres too small for the redline they deserved. I had these as a kid and they ran on lino really well. These three take my small collection to five.
Do you remember Zowies?
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
