They were a favorite of my dad’s. On weekend nights, once my parents got a few drinks in them and their resulting sense of nostalgia overwhelmed them, my father would eventually get sick of Anne Murray or the Walker Brothers or whatever it was that Mom had on the turntable. He would retaliate once she got up to go to the bathroom, slapping down 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' on the record player before she could even properly settle in. This was a shrewd strategy, because it was a seventeen-minute track and it had broken wills stronger than my mother’s in its time. As for my father, he had the whole opus mapped out in his head, down to the very second. "Here it comes," he would warn me, right before a distended squeal, like a beagle being drawn and quartered, erupted from the speaker--somewhere around the eleven-minute mark. "He’s playing right on the frets, Jason," he’d exclaim, as if I didn’t believe it; then he would take a long, admiring swig of brew. I had no idea what a "fret" was, but I realized, just by the expression it brought to my mother’s face, that it was something wonderful indeed.

They goddamn sure didn’t look like a metal band on the covers of 'Having A Rave-Up' and 'Over Under Sideways Down'. In fact, from my omniscient, twelve-year-old viewpoint, they looked like four geeks and a spaz. The surprise came when I actually gave them a spin and their sound (so very un-Sixties) just about cuffed me to the ground; Exhibit A was definitely Jeff Beck’s guitar, buzzing like a giant, constipated horse-fly. After hearing the elegant drive of "You’re A Better Man Than I" and the swank of "Ain’t Got You," I could never again shake the sneaking suspicion that The Rolling Stones were actually a bunch of lightweight peckersniffs.

Interestingly enough, I didn’t even know the man was black at first. If you study the cover of 'Are You Experienced?', the whole Experience looks pale and greenish and queasy, as if they’re all hungover and less than enthused about the photo shoot. Years later, my mom would reveal to me that she once ran into Jimi while she was in England in 1969. She and two of her go-go-booted friends crashed a party in London, and there he was.

     "What was he like?" I asked, immediately excited.

     "Ugly," she said, after thinking it over for a moment.

That pretty well closed the subject of Jimi Hendrix in Mom’s book. And you couldn’t argue with her sentiment.
The music was not ugly.
The drill-bit discharge and anti-matter crackle with which Hendrix constructed his songs was the sound of Independence Day, of flares over a lake of oil, of viruses replicating in a healthy body. His was the role of constant innovator in the diamond-hard, fully-juiced, blast-blues that was the world of proto-metal. The gorgeous melancholia of "Hey Joe," the tender savagery of "Manic Depression," the straight-on nitro blast of "I Don’t Live Today," and (of course) "Can You See Me" all gave testimony to the fact that, if you’d never heard it before, there was no way to be prepared for it. And that has been the true hallmark of metal ever since.

Oh yeah, and there was also Blue Cheer, who ill-informed academic types always pull out of their hat as a "seminal influence on the metal genre." They did have a version of "Summertime Blues" that could bubble the paint on your walls; it was so good that The Who would later go on to rip it off. But one great song does not a decent band make. Their name was based on a potent LSD derivative, but listening to Blue Cheer albums taught me more about the terrible effects of drug use on the central nervous system then half a dozen health classes.
Bad bands, apparently, are one commodity that the metal scene has never had to live without.

In the days of my youth, Saturday mornings (for whatever reason) would always find my father oddly invigorated, full of both piss and vinegar; and this (for whatever reason) would always result in my dad showcasing his personal interpretation of Arthur Brown’s "Fire." "I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you 'FIRE!' " he would croak, as he followed the dog around the house. The dog (convinced it had done something wrong) would lower its ears and, finally, collapse in a corner from nervous exhaustion.
Arthur Brown could have that effect on you. The shrapnel drumming and creamy, propulsive keyboards would combine with Brown’s demented vocals and get whipped into a thick, rabid froth. The Crazy World was also the first act who would openly admit that they were putting you in the musical grip of an absolute lunatic, and metalheads have always enjoyed that kind of honesty---just ask Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, or Cannibal Corpse. Also, about a thousand goth bands owe Arther likeness royalties.
"I am the god of hellfire." It’s an odd, little lyrical snippet, and one that set a dubious, oft-misunderstood precedent for the future of metal.
Though nobody would ever accuse Dad of being a Satan-worshipper.
But I’ll bet that dog thought he was the Devil Incarnate.

Experience the band that almost invented metal. Even though Eric Clapton is now known primarily as a source of plywood-R&B and lickspittle pussy-pop, he and his bandmates in Cream were once simply the heaviest thing going. Only the group’s jazz improvisation fanaticism and Clapton’s strict adherence to blues dogma kept them from being the first metal band rather than the culmination of proto-metal. In all honesty, some of the pieces ("White Room," "Deserted Cities of the Heart," "Tales of Brave Ulysses") were more indicative of modern metal than some material Sab and Zep would give us. And their entire body of work illustrated the "band-as-volcano" concept, weaving together their lava flows of sound and pouring over the senses like throbbing magma. In their short heyday, before 1969 brought Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin I, Cream was nothing short of the most metallic of pre-metal bands. There is no substitute for them, and no excuse for them being left out of any collection.