It might be my subculture that hands down these edicts, but they’re a pain in the ass just the same.

Thus, heavy metal not only reproduces itself, but it also increases its ranks by fragmenting off of every other guitar-rock art form. Rock ‘n’ roll was just rock ‘n’ roll until the Who and the Kinks hardened up their sound in a successful attempt to get somebody, anybody, to listen to their ravings. Ultimately, both of these outfits proved too full of themselves to make this their life’s work, but no great loss. Other people (the wild, the frantic, and the twisted) got the picture and further pounded on the iceberg of Rock so that Hard Rock might gain its independence. It did. Happy ending, eh?

You see, in every period of its existence, heavy metal has provided a crackling, muscular, luminous alternative to all well-balanced pop and the acknowledged rock establishment. In essence, metal is the original alternative music, and any time spent as rock’s ruling regime (1987-1989) was an outright aberration. If the sound coincides with the above definition and contains the components common to all metal (riffs, power chords, distortion), then there ought to be a parking spot for them outside the Big Heavy Metal Headquarters. And it doesn’t matter whether the limp-wristed rock press considers them a metal group, and it further doesn’t matter whether their character harmonizes with metal’s mainstream of the moment, and it additionally doesn’t matter how the artist evaluates and labels their own work.

Is it that simple? Yes, it is that simple. In theory.

In practice, however, the situation gets a bit dicey, especially when Seventies metal is put under the microscope for examination. Whole truckloads of music that were once adopted by metalheads have now been pushed back out into the rain, as if they’re somehow unworthy of the label, as if there’s not plenty of room for them to set up house. Certain bands were never seriously considered for affiliation, usually because they were supposedly too closely connected to other schools of rock - a lot of this could have been avoided if metal appreciants had just listened to the damn albums, but who am I to quibble? In the Seventies, metal had not yet declared its full autonomy from the prevalent rock tradition, and Excluders still have a hell of a time figuring out who was really "on our side." I mean, besides Alice Cooper and Kiss and Judas Priest, there were no sure things.

Which is exactly the problem. The history of metal is quite often the history, not of sure things, but of long shots. Sure things be damned, I say. Mainly this is because sure things often end up being a lot less certain than at first they seemed; there is the continuing ruckus/issue/debate/dust-up/gathering-lynch-mob over the Metallica "sell-out" as a perfect illustration of this principle (and, speaking of which, all the details and information needed to make an informed opinion on that subject can be found right here at Ultimate Metal Reviews, both in David Perri’s essay and Andrew Smith’s reviews). It’s never a bad idea to comb through the sludge that the Seventies left behind in a search of ensembles that were on the metallic borderline even then, and that subsequently became persona non grata when the genre became self-governing in the Eighties. We can’t allow ourselves, as fans and connoisseurs, to let bits and pieces of metal’s legacy slip through some crooked floorboards. And we can’t let our more militant, clannish impulses be the guiding ideology behind our choices.

The Excluders are right about one thing; there are definitely criteria that must be met for any random work of art to be considered metal. There is no need, however, to apply this criteria puritanically or without a fair hand. The objective should not be an uncorrupted and sterilized roster, but a full and diverse enlistment...

What follows is example and explication, all with the spotlight on some juicy Seventies guitar-rock styles that spawned more heavy metal acts than maybe they ought to have.

The various labels used to describe these bands - well, metaphors fail me. The labels suck. Whether one screws on a "blues boogie" or wedges in a "boogie rock" to a band’s stylistic description, one is doing an injustice. These irresponsible earmarks describe the music poorly, if at all, and completely miss the point of what "boogie" means. If a random college textbook can be trusted (and I’m not for one moment implying that it can), then "boogie" actually means that "in a subdivision of each beat in the left-hand figures so that, in a measure of four beats, there are actually eight pulses, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, bullshit bullshit bullshit." So much for definitions from musical academia. But the text goes on to say that "some uses of the word ‘boogie’ during the 1970s and 80s do not fit the meaning described here." And how.

Certainly, the Cacti and Status Quos employed shuffle beats and blues patterns more often than other heavy metal outfits of their time, but this was an honest and straightforward artistic choice. Nothing about that choice caused the resultant music to be diametrically opposed to metal. In fact, if you’re itching to splice on a category, you could do a lot worse than "blues-metal." These bands made the decision to heavify their sounds, while still drinking deep from that blues-rock stream that fed the metallic Nile well. They were traditionalists, and I find no reason to fault them for it. Traditionalism is no sin - unless you’re some addle-pated, Excluding bag-of-wind, who’s not too sure of which tradition you’re protecting.

Besides, to deny ourselves of these blues-metal acts would be to reject the injurious honky-rock of Elf, the outfit where Ronnie James Dio first honed his chops and that would later metamorphose into Rainbow...the dry, dusty stateliness and road-weary wanderlust of Blackfoot, with their ample collection of rhythmic ass-shakers as supple as old boot leather...and the strafing, biplane run of songs like "Night Shift," which embodied Foghat’s loyalty to their own brand of ransacking shuffle-attack. This would be a shame. Worse, it would be a stupidity.

Boogie rock, my ass.

In any case, prog’s underlying objective was to interbreed rock ‘n’ roll with as many musical categories as possible. Its musicians, to their credit, embraced and experimented with heavy rock very early on. In fact, some of the early work of progressive groups served as a root (albeit a minor one) in metal’s development. Yes may have been a bunch of namby-pamby, "embrace-the-love-and-light," hippola-mongers, but their "Heart of the Sunrise" absolutely slammed. Jethro Tull may have had the worst case of rock ‘n’ roll identity crisis ever, torn between Martin Barre’s love of an inflammatory riff and Ian Anderson’s don’t-squeeze-the-wildflowers acoustrianism, but no one can deny that "Locomotive Breath" is an exquisite train-ride into heaviness heaven (or is it hell?). And if you weren’t so busy scratching your head over that "sixteen vestal virgin" lyrical meandering, Procol Harum would strike you as a pretty hard installment from Progville. Most of the heaviness in the output of these bands was reserved for singular songs and limited passages, but occasionally an entire album (such as Tull’s "Aqualung" or Traffic’s "Mr. Fantasy") would feature an extended prog-rock take on metal. And this interest in the art form from those outside the genre walls added to the ever-advancing realization that heavy metal was a musical category in its own right, and not just rock’s scarier, uglier second-cousin.

It wasn’t until the Seventies got under way that a full-bore twining of the two art forms was attempted. Instead of using traditional rock as the bed on which to lay radical song frameworks and genre-crossing, these projects utilized hard rock as the base mode, the foundation off of which everything else was bounced. This prog/metal hybrid was created by progressive-minded individuals whose patience had worn thin with the vacant landscape that plain prog-rock had meandered into: dishwater songwriting, musical jerking-off, and a distinct lack of punch. Progressive-metal is now a widely respected and fruitful genre, but it had yet to get its bearing in the Seventies; serving two masters, progressive and metal, caused the music to be schizophrenic, uneven, and sort of wacky. Still, the spirit behind prog-metal also led to immense soundscapes, headlong concepts, and musicianship that was absolutely fearless.

Some of those bands - I’m thinking here particularly of Rush - are still rightly considered stately pillars of metal, and their inclusion in the genre is only doubted by ill-informed wankers of the lowest sort. Other groups have not exactly had the red carpet rolled out for them by metalheads. And therein lies our discussion.

When I mention Queen to other like-minded metal zealots, I often get a response somewhere in between a shrug and a nod, as of to say "Yeah, but who can figure those guys out?" Ambivalence might seem a natural reaction when you consider that, more than any other band (including Led Zeppelin), Queen stood for extreme experimentalism in a hard rock idiom. But it was definitely hard rock that Freddie and the boys dabbled in, even though they seasoned their records with nods to sweet swing, rinky-dink vaudeville, bottom-feeder funk, embryonic punk, rewoven disco, mini-operettas, licorice-pop, peppery salsa, and everything else, including the kitchen sink - with plumbing attached.

One might get the impression from the preceding list that Queen didn’t have any room left on their albums for heavy metal. One would be pretty damn wrong. In the first place, Brian May’s aristocratic riffing and chording made it a positive inescapability that the proceedings would never stray too far away from the regal heaviness that was their trademark. Numero dos, no matter how many aural-exploration tunes that Queen did, the band always surrounded them with a patchwork of hard material that can only be described as perfect distillations of pure heavy metal. If some glute-biter who’d been tuning into Top 40 for all his sorry life ever asked me for a perfect example of what metal sounds like, I could quite happily direct him to "I Want It All," "White Man," "Hit Man," or "It’s Late"... all by Queen, and every one the undiluted essence of iron and steel. (This list, incidentally, is woefully incomplete.) Then there is the matter of "The Prophet’s Song," off of 1975’s "A Night at the Opera"; in all honesty, I see nothing in the catalogues of even metal’s Holy Trinity that better encapsulates the Seventies metal ethic. It’s overly long, and it is chock full of mytho-religious overtones, presentiments of doom, and lyrics like "He told of death as a bone-white haze/Taking the lost and the unloved babe" that should come off as corny - but that end up chilling your spine instead. The term "masterpiece" gets thrown around an awful lot, but that particular piece leaves the term wanting.

And to think that one of our rival sites has such defective taste that it categorizes Queen as "pop-metal" (I’m not naming any names, lest they become more of a fountain of misinformation than they already are). This is shoddy evaluation and even shoddier classification. And no band with (sniff) pop intentions would put such a lengthy a cappella segment smack-dab in the middle of an epic of such effortless excellence like "Prophet’s Song." By way of comparison, Queen resembled a Seventies version of Faith No More - riding roughshod over song conventions, banging together genres like so many pie-plates, and stridently refusing to stay in one spot for even a moment more than was necessary. The barest truth is that they were the furthest thing from a pop band. They were a metal band, damn it.

And, if I may say so, ditto in the case of Kansas. Now, don’t go arching your eyebrows and flaring your nostrils like that - it makes you look like Snidely Whiplash. Don’t give me that skeptical once-over. Did you ever listen to their albums? Hah! I thought not. If Queen was Faith No More, then Kansas was Dream Theater: overbearing as the day is long (and a hundred times more interesting because of it), martial, elaborate, with a naivete so blatant that it couldn’t be anything other than genuine. Consistently glossed over with listless - and often nonexistent - entries in metal lexicons, this group was perhaps the least vaunted and most influential of the prog-metal forefathers. Quite odd, since both Dream Theater and Yngwie Malmsteen have made no secret about their admiration for Kansas - and those are two respectable references to have.

True, Kansas has never been one to court the metalhead faithful, but they’ve never been a band to beg for support from anyone, even the prog cultists. One would think that this would count in their favor, but Kansas remains the number one reaper of quizzical looks from metallic crackpots when I mention them in connection with our illustrious tradition.

Once again: listen, listen, listen.

Listen to "Icarus - Borne On Wings of Steel," the greatest song that Led Zeppelin never recorded. It is a blueprint for what metal - be it Seventies, progressive, or just plain heavy - ought to sound like, from the falling-off-a-cliff-and-growing-wings-at-the-last-second dynamics to Rich William’s Blackmoresque cry-and-snarl guitar technique. Better yet, play this and Iron Maiden’s "Flight of Icarus," one right after the other, and get a lesson on how two different decades oversee the exact same theme.

Listen to "Belexes" and "The Devil Game" (from their self-titled debut and 'Song for America,' respectively) and hear what it sounds like to be on the very edge of lunacy or diabolic temptation - or possibly both at the same time. Listen to Phil Ehart, an immensely underrated drummer, lay down fills and rolls with all the precision of a psychotic engineer.

Listen to "Lightning’s Hand," off their umpteen-million-selling 'Point of Know Return' album, and hear a point-counterpoint conversation between guitar and violin, ornamented throughout with synthesizer filigree. Sounds a bit prissy, I know, but Kansas adds enough crunch to make the floors rumble. The story concept in the lyrics - namely, that lightning is a conscious, sentient being who resents the intrusion of our aircraft into its territory - is so completely engaging that one might not realize what cool music it is until the fourth or fifth listen.

Listen to "House on Fire" or "Silhouettes in Disguise" or "Black Fathom 4" or "Three Pretenders" and experience a vintage band that has retained its creative richness into both the Eighties and Nineties. Absolutely nobody writes songs like these anymore except for Steve Walsh, long-time skipper of the Kansas galleon, and their greatest asset is how impossible they are to define or summarize beyond a sweepingly broad tag. A broad tag like...oh, I dunno...maybe Heavy Metal?

But I’m not here to lament the MIA status of Paw, no matter how much a lament on the subject is needed. Instead, I’d like to rethink the logic that somehow edged the classic Southern-rock bands out of the metallic consciousness after the death knell of the Seventies. Even a cursory listen to their recorded output leaves one wondering what the hell is up. There is an awfully clear context of metal that these outfits operated in. Why do you hear them mentioned so seldom by metal historians, artists, and fans alike?

Well, one reason is that you do hear them mentioned. Metallica just covered "Tuesday’s Gone" for 'Garage Inc.' - but perhaps, given recent events, that isn’t as strong a recommendation for metal enthusiasts as it once was. Pepper Keenan of Corrosion of Conformity (who guested on that track) has shown some interest in delving into rural-metal territory, especially in his super-group side-project, Down; this influence is deeply buried, however, within the matrix of thrash and hardcore that Keenan is known for. Tesla used to dabble in a Southern sound quite regular like, but they’ve regrettably split. So have the avant-metal punkers, Meat Puppets, who used to have no qualms about talking up their Z.Z. Top fetish. A pretty meager harvest, I’d say.

No, the reason that I think your average metalhead is unwilling to accept the rural-metal acts into their hearts and CD towers is simple fear. We’re afraid that, if we allow anything with the appellation "Southern" to the party, we’ll give into some freakish herd mentality that will somehow transmogrify us all into hicks, rubes, and yokels. We’re afraid we’ll start getting deep urges to say "Soo-eee!" a lot, or to buy gun racks for our sports cars, or to own blacks labs, or to play the banjo, or to think Minnie Pearl is attractive. We see no advantage coming out of the rural side of metal, only draped Confederate flags and cowboy hats and missing teeth.

This thinking is downright sponge-skulled. I don’t know about you, but I’m from the Midwest, and the Midwest is widely perceived as a hotbed for metal activity. And it isn’t a mistaken perception, either; I live here and I ought to know. This makes the above anxiety nonsensical, because, as it is, we’re already a bunch of hicks, rubes, and yokels. Our earth-plowing, bread-basket simplicity is already well-noted. It’s this kind of common-clay atmosphere that breeds metalheads like blowflies. More than likely, we already own the black lab and maybe the gun rack too - although, to be honest, a Confederate flag looks pretty asinine when it’s worn by a psuedo-biker from the secessionary hotbed of Minnesota. We’re not cosmopolitan now, and it’s not a likely happenstance for the future. And neither are metalheads from any other part of the country (well, maybe L.A., but that’s really more of another dimension than a part of the States).

Even if heavy metal seems to be an undeniably urban phenomenon, this doesn’t mean we can’t embrace our more country-fried counterparts. I’m not asking anybody to start lobbying for The Outlaws to be on the ticket at OzzFest, or to start wearing leather and chains to an Allman Brothers show. There are obviously facets of Southern-rock that don’t overlap with rural-metal (the soft-hard dichotomy again). I do, however, expect a just reconsideration for Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And it might be expedient to mention that, on the very first Metal Shop (we all remember Metal Shop, don’t we?) that I listened to on the radio, Z.Z. Top’s "Woke Up With Wood" was the number-three metal track of the week...

Not all Seventies punk groups make for lousy metal bands. The Pagans sounded like somebody had gang-raped Sabbath and then hooked them on horse like the dealers did to Gene Hackman in "French Connection II." Getting on a riff and staying on it was the raison d’etre on Damned albums. "Sonic Reducer" by the Dead Boys could (and possibly did) teach James Hetfield volumes about two-fingers-in-the-air commentary. And Iggy & the Stooges knew the intrinsic value of metallic, battle-hardened effluvia, and thus prophesied death-metal.

Now, nothing here is going to make you forget about "Houses of the Holy," or even "Coda." But the stuff is there for the taking, and more power to you if you "accidentally" file these punk flame-outs in your "Metal" section. They’ve earned their stripes and there’s no reason to be ashamed.

There’s a couple of ways to answer that. First off, I could tell you simply to piss off. It’s not as if I’ve asked so much in the preceding plea for sanity and tolerance. I asked that Foghat and Elf be retained as worthy exhibits of our art form; I didn’t ask the metalhead community to make a run on Head East albums. I suggested that a second look at Queen and Kansas would be very beneficial; not for a moment did I hint that Genesis was a prog-metal band (although "Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats" sounds something like Tony Iommi fiddling with his amp knobs, though Tony would have got bored with it a lot sooner). I made an argument for Z.Z. Top and Molly Hatchet to get their fair due; there was no mention of the Charlie Daniels Band or The Eagles being included in our metalhead collections or prayers. A few kind words were said on behalf of the more punchy, rumble-ready punx. I may have bent the boundaries that separates metal from other genres, but I never desired that they be broken down.

In the second place, there’s really no evidence that a slippery slope must occur if you open your borders to previously excluded artists. When people get my general take on Seventies metal, a lot of them say something like "Well, if you let all those bands in, aren’t you going to have include groups like Journey or REO Speedwagon? Don’t they fit the bill just as well as these others?"

In a word: no. To be an Includer does not mean that including everything is mandatory. The Journeys and the REOs of the world are not sufficiently removed from the prevailing mainstream of rock, and their music incorporates excessive levels of pop. In short, they aren’t detached enough from the Top 40 crowd, even if their material happens to use the occasional metallic component. Even the poppiest metal band, be it from the darkest Seventies or the glammiest Eighties, looks positively threatening and electric in comparison with Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Janet Jackson, or The Backstreet Boys. That’s what makes metal metal.