METAL BEFORE METAL: WHEN THE RIFF STILL HAD BLOOD ON IT

Bloodrock, Grand Funk Railroad, Sir Lord Baltimore, and the beautiful historical accident before heavy music learned to behave

By Kit Mercy

There is a terrible thing that happens to music after it acquires a name.

It begins dressing for work.

Before the name, there is only the sound. Nobody has purchased the correct boots yet. Nobody knows which guitar shape is permissible. Nobody has drawn the family tree. Nobody has written THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO THE 100 HEAVIEST ALBUMS OF 1971 and started screaming because Uriah Heep came in three positions above somebody's sacred cow.

The musicians are simply standing in a room discovering that electricity can hurt people.

That is where I want to live.

Not permanently. I require plumbing.

But spiritually.

And that is the territory Lou Toad has wandered into with these first two Metal Before Metal playlists, beginning with Bloodrock and then expanding outward through Grand Funk Railroad and Sir Lord Baltimore. He has stumbled into one of my favorite places in cultural history: the moment immediately before everyone agrees what happened.

Call it proto-metal if you insist.

I don't.

“Proto-metal” is a museum label.

Metal Before Metal is an event.

Proto-metal looks backward from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Maiden, Metallica and everything after, then identifies whichever earlier organisms appear to contain the appropriate genetic material.

Useful.

Scientific.

Dead.

Metal Before Metal asks a different question:

What did heaviness sound like when nobody knew what heaviness was supposed to sound like?

Now we have something.

Now the corpse is sitting upright.

---

I. BLOODROCK: BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING IN THE AMPLIFIER

Bloodrock is where this series had to begin.

Not because they invented heavy metal.

God spare us another invention trial.

Rock history already has enough imaginary patents being argued over by men who own seven identical black T-shirts.

Bloodrock matters because they demonstrate one of the essential properties of early heavy music:

Heaviness used to mean danger before it meant power.

Listen to the atmosphere surrounding these songs.

Gotta Find a Way.

Castle of Thoughts.

Double Cross.

Children's Heritage.

Dier Not a Lover.

Fancy Space Odyssey.

Jessica.

Whiskey Vengeance.

Kool-Aid-Kids.

Don't Eat the Children.

Even before we reach “D.O.A.”, the famous corpse on the dining-room table, the titles alone suggest that somebody has been opening mail addressed to the human unconscious.

Bloodrock doesn't merely sound heavy.

Bloodrock sounds unwell.

Important distinction.

Later heavy metal becomes extraordinarily good at presenting strength. The enormous riff. The leather. The armies. The motorcycles. The dragons. The occult architecture. The supernatural becomes iconography.

Bloodrock comes from an earlier swamp.

The supernatural still smells like something died under the porch.

Their heaviness is not clean.

It isn't heroic.

It doesn't arrive riding a horse.

It arrives because your neighbor's ambulance has been parked outside for forty minutes and nobody will tell you what happened.

That is why “D.O.A.” remains useful even after familiarity has dulled its original shock. Forget whether you personally find it frightening in 2026. That's not the interesting part anymore.

The interesting part is that somebody made that into commercially released rock music.

Not metaphorical death.

Not Edgar Allan Poe death.

Not some gentleman wearing a cape introducing Lucifer to a Marshall stack.

Medical death.

Metal tubing.

Blood.

Sirens.

Shock.

A body failing.

Rock music had discovered the emergency room.

And Bloodrock understood something later metal would spend decades rediscovering:

Sometimes the heaviest subject isn't Satan.

Sometimes it is mortality without costume.

A person was alive.

Now they aren't.

Next record.

---

And then Bloodrock gets stranger.

Which is why Lou's decision to go beyond the obvious song is essential.

If the playlist stopped at “D.O.A.”, Bloodrock becomes trivia.

Remember these guys?

Had that creepy song.

Heavy.

Sure.

Next.

But moving through the albums reveals something much more interesting: a band operating in that magnificent early-70s period when rock musicians were allowed to be stylistically incoherent because the walls between genres had not yet been reinforced by marketing departments.

Heavy blues.

Hard rock.

Progressive gestures.

Boogie.

Psychedelic residue.

Bizarre humor.

Science fiction.

Something resembling social commentary.

Something resembling six people trapped inside an electrical substation.

That's the good stuff.

Because metal before metal wasn't pure.

Purity hadn't been invented yet.

---

II. THE ORGAN IS HEAVIER THAN YOUR GUITAR

There is another historical crime being corrected here almost accidentally.

The organ.

I have heard guitarists discuss heaviness for hours without acknowledging the enormous screaming furniture occupying half the room.

Have you ever stood near one of those old organs when somebody decides to use the whole animal?

Not the tasteful little church mist people remember from soft-rock retrospectives.

I mean the thing.

Keys depressed.

Amplification engaged.

Air leaving civilization.

Suddenly guitar music is negotiating with weather.

This matters because our retrospective concept of hard rock and metal has become extremely guitar-centric. Understandably. Guitar wins. Guitar becomes the symbolic weapon of the genre.

But in the late 60s and early 70s, musicians weren't working from the metal rulebook because there wasn't one.

If an organ produced the biggest, ugliest, loudest noise available, congratulations:

You've got yourself a heavy instrument.

The same logic applies to bass.

And drums.

And primitive amplification.

And distortion that modern engineers would spend forty minutes removing before realizing they had just removed the entire reason the record exists.

Early heaviness is frequently a story about equipment being pushed slightly beyond good manners.

That matters tremendously.

Because genre is not only composition.

Genre is technology being abused until culture catches up.

---

III. GRAND FUNK RAILROAD: PEOPLE'S HEAVY MUSIC

Then comes Grand Funk Railroad.

And suddenly the story changes.

Bloodrock walks into the hospital.

Grand Funk walks into the civic center.

The scale expands.

Grand Funk is crucial because heaviness here becomes populist.

Big.

Physical.

Direct.

Not aristocratic.

Not occult.

Not especially interested in creating a mythology around itself.

The mythology is the amplifier.

The first Grand Funk records possess a quality I desperately love: they sound enormous without sounding expensive.

There is a difference.

Expensive rock announces control.

Grand Funk announces mass.

Bass occupying municipal property.

Drums hitting with the philosophical sophistication of someone kicking open a warehouse door.

Guitar functioning less as delicate harmonic decoration than industrial cutting equipment.

Vocals emerging from the center of it all because somebody must testify.

Listen through material like “Sin's a Good Man's Brother,” “Aimless Lady,” “Nothing Is the Same,” “Mean Mistreater,” “Get It Together,” and those extended early performances.

The music doesn't simply say:

We are loud.

It says:

LOUD IS A SOCIAL CONDITION.

That may be Grand Funk's contribution to this particular story.

Heavy music becomes something crowds inhabit together.

The audience is no longer standing outside the machine observing.

Everybody gets inside.

This is before heavy metal becomes a nation with flags.

But you can hear the population arriving.

---

Grand Funk also exposes one of rock criticism's perennial class problems.

Certain kinds of sophistication are instantly recognized as sophistication.

Complicated harmony.

Literary lyrics.

Unusual time signatures.

Delicate arrangements.

European influence.

Certain other forms of intelligence require several decades before critics stop calling them stupid.

Knowing precisely how long to hold a riff is intelligence.

Knowing when repetition becomes hypnosis is intelligence.

Knowing that three notes played at unbearable volume may communicate something unavailable to fourteen notes played tastefully is intelligence.

Knowing what a room full of people needs physically is intelligence.

Grand Funk understood bodies.

Bodies are underrated critics.

The head says:

This seems rather simplistic.

The rib cage says:

AGAIN.

History eventually listens to the rib cage.

---

IV. SIR LORD BALTIMORE FALLS THROUGH THE CEILING

Then Sir Lord Baltimore appears.

Sweet Jesus.

Here the evolutionary diagram catches fire.

Grand Funk is heavy music achieving mass.

Sir Lord Baltimore is heavy music achieving velocity.

The first album still contains enough blues-rock DNA that we understand roughly which laboratory the creature escaped from.

But songs like “Pumped Up,” “Kingdom Come,” “Hell Hound,” “Helium Head,” “Ain't Got Hung on You” feel uncannily close to a future nobody had fully articulated.

Everything is leaning forward.

The drums don't merely keep time.

They attack the existence of time.

The guitar doesn't sit on top of the rhythm section.

Everybody seems to be tumbling down the same staircase.

And somehow the staircase is keeping tempo.

This is where Metal Before Metal becomes more exciting than a conventional heavy-rock history.

Because suddenly we can stop asking:

“Does this qualify as metal?”

What a dreary question.

Qualify according to whom?

The International Federation of Heavy Metal Accreditation?

Some tribunal beneath Birmingham?

No.

Ask instead:

What future possibilities are becoming audible here?

Now Sir Lord Baltimore becomes fascinating.

Speed.

Compression.

Aggression.

Vocals clawing upward.

Rhythmic violence.

The strange sensation that blues rock has been placed in a centrifuge.

You can hear ideas that will later become normal while they are still behaving abnormally.

That is historical electricity.

---

And yet, crucially, they don't stay inside the box either.

Because once again:

There is no box.

“Man From Manhattan.”

“Where Are We Going.”

Other detours.

Other impulses.

The musicians aren't protecting the brand because nobody has issued them a brand identity package.

This is why early genre excavation can be so exhilarating.

We are accustomed to musical cultures after decades of specialization.

Metal bands know what metal sounds like.

Punk bands know what punk sounds like.

Industrial musicians know what industrial sounds like.

Shoegaze musicians can purchase pedals specifically engineered to sound like records made by people who were trying to figure out what their pedals did.

Culture accumulates instructions.

But these bands are operating before many of those instructions exist.

They're making decisions without knowing which decisions history will later classify as important.

Imagine the freedom.

Imagine the stupidity.

Imagine the beauty.

---

V. BEFORE METAL HAD AN UNIFORM

There is a temptation whenever discussing this period to turn everything into lineage.

Band A influenced Band B.

Band B influenced Band C.

Band C begat Band D.

Eventually somebody invents Venom.

Fine.

Lineage matters.

But culture doesn't really move like that.

Culture leaks.

A teenager hears something through a wall.

A guitarist sees another guitarist use an amplifier incorrectly.

A drummer notices that audiences respond when he hits harder.

A local band steals something from a touring band who stole something from a blues record whose producer stole something from gospel whose singer learned something from church.

Nobody files paperwork.

Twenty years later historians draw arrows.

But at the time?

Fog.

That's where Metal Before Metal lives.

In the fog.

Bloodrock doesn't need to sound exactly like what comes later.

Grand Funk doesn't need to pass a metal purity test.

Sir Lord Baltimore doesn't need to receive a retroactive membership card.

They are interesting precisely because they inhabit the disputed territory before stylistic consensus.

Heavy music is still deciding whether it wants to become:

blues,

psychedelia,

progressive rock,

boogie,

garage music,

metal,

something else entirely,

or all seven simultaneously because the van leaves in twenty minutes.

---

VI. THE BEST PART IS THE FAILURE TO PREDICT THE FUTURE

This may be the great pleasure of the whole project.

We know what happened.

They didn't.

We hear Bloodrock and detect metal.

We hear Sir Lord Baltimore and detect metal.

We hear Grand Funk and understand that particular form of overwhelming amplification as a foundational part of hard rock culture.

But the musicians themselves were standing inside a present tense.

No heavy-metal museum existed.

No VH1 documentary voice had declared the canonical narrative.

No algorithm was suggesting “proto-metal essentials.”

Imagine encountering these sounds with no category available to protect you from them.

A huge distorted guitar enters.

What is that?

A bass rattles the speakers.

Is something broken?

The organ begins screaming.

The drummer seems personally offended.

The singer has stopped trying to sound attractive.

The song is seven minutes long.

Nobody fades gracefully.

Your parents hate it.

Your older sibling says it's incredible.

Your neighbor says it's noise.

Three months later you've purchased an amplifier.

There.

Metal.

Not yet the genre.

The impulse.

---

VII. DON'T CALL IT PROTO ANYTHING

This is where I plant the flag.

Not because “proto-metal” is wrong.

It's perfectly useful terminology.

But usefulness can become anesthesia.

Calling something proto-metal subtly tells us that its primary importance lies in what it eventually produced.

I reject the custody arrangement.

Bloodrock does not exist merely because future bands happened.

Grand Funk does not exist to explain later hard rock.

Sir Lord Baltimore does not exist as a footnote beneath Sabbath.

These records were complete events when they occurred.

Nobody listening in 1970 was experiencing an incomplete version of 1980.

They were experiencing 1970.

That's the secret.

Historical music becomes much more alive when we stop treating the past as an inferior draft of the future.

The distortion wasn't waiting to become heavier.

The drums weren't waiting to become faster.

The imagery wasn't waiting to become darker.

The audience wasn't waiting to acquire denim.

They had arrived.

We are the late ones.

---

So let the project keep its slightly confrontational title.

METAL BEFORE METAL.

Bloodrock first.

Grand Funk Railroad.

Sir Lord Baltimore.

Then onward.

Not a genealogy.

Not a Hall of Fame.

Not another attempt to identify which four men technically invented everything.

A séance conducted through amplifiers.

We go backward until the familiar categories begin dissolving.

Back before metal understood itself.

Back before the logo.

Back before the uniform.

Back before somebody explained which records were important.

Back when rock music was being pushed louder and uglier and stranger by people who had no idea which parts of their experiments would survive.

Somewhere in Texas, Bloodrock is turning death into a song.

Somewhere in Michigan, Grand Funk Railroad is discovering that sheer volume can become communal architecture.

Somewhere in Brooklyn, Sir Lord Baltimore is playing something so fast and violent the future briefly becomes visible through the smoke.

Nobody knows what to call any of it yet.

Perfect.

Turn it up before somebody names it.

Kit Mercy
August 19, 2026