MetalTalk.com

The origin of the term heavy metal in a musical context is uncertain. The phrase has been used for centuries in chemistry and metallurgy, as shown by citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. An early use of the term in modern popular culture was by countercultural writer William S. Burroughs. His 1962 novel The Soft Machine includes a character known as “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid.” Burroughs’s next novel, Nova Express (1964), develops the theme, using heavy metal as a metaphor for addictive drugs: “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms—Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes—And The Insect People of Minraud with metal music.”

Metal historian Ian Christe describes what the components of the term mean in “hippiespeak”: “heavy” is roughly synonymous with “potent” or “profound,” and “metal” designates a certain type of mood, grinding and weighted as with metal. The word “heavy” in this sense was a basic element of beatnik and later countercultural slang, and references to “heavy music”—typically slower, more amplified variations of standard pop fare—were already common by the mid-1960s. Iron Butterfly’s debut album, released in early 1968, was titled Heavy. The first recorded use of heavy metal in a song lyric is in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” also released that year: “I like smoke and lightning/Heavy metal thunder/Racin’ with the wind/And the feelin’ that I’m under.” A late, and disputed, claim about the source of the term was made by “Chas” Chandler, former manager of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In a 1995 interview on the PBS program Rock and Roll, he asserted that heavy metal “was a term originated in a New York Times article reviewing a Jimi Hendrix performance,” in which the author likened the event to “listening to heavy metal falling from the sky.” The specific source for Chandler’s claim has never been found.

The first documented usage of the term to describe a musical style is in a May 1971 Creem review by Mike Saunders of Sir Lord Baltimore’s Kingdom Come: “Sir Lord Baltimore seems to have down pat most all the best heavy metal tricks in the book.”Creem critic Lester Bangs is credited with popularizing the term via his early 1970s essays on bands such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. “Heavy metal” may have initially been used as a jibe by a number of music critics, but it was quickly adopted by fans of the style.

The terms “heavy metal” and “hard rock” have often been used interchangeably, particularly in discussing bands of the 1970s, a period when the terms were largely synonymous. For example, according to an entry in the 1983 Rolling Stone encyclopedia, “known for its aggressive blues-based hard-rock style, Aerosmith was the top American heavy-metal band of the mid-Seventies.” Few would now characterize Aerosmith’s classic sound, with its clear links to traditional rock and roll, as “heavy metal.” Even some acts closely identified with the emergence of the genre, such as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, are not considered heavy metal bands by some in the present-day metal community.