the 20 HEAVIEST SONGS BEFORE BLACK SABBATH

THE COMMON CONSENSUS IS THAT BLACK SABBATH WERE THE FIRST heavy metal band. And maybe they were. But that doesn’t mean they wrote the first heavy song. Because while Ozzy and co. certainly took the concept of intense, sinister music played by evil-looking dudes to new sonic and visual heights, there were plenty of unnerving sounds designed to scare the bejesus out of men, women and children being created well before Tony Iommi’s deathly “Black Sabbath” tritone riff signaled the end (or the beginning?) of the musical world as we know it in 1970.

So lean back, strap in and take a trip back to the prehistoric age (the mid to late 1960s, for the most part) as Guitar World unearths some pre-Sab heavy metal thunder (and yes, that tune is on the list) with the 20 heaviest songs before Black Sabbath.

THE TROGGS

WILD THING (1966)

originally recorded in 1965 in a folky vein by American act The Wild Ones, but in U.K. band The Troggs’ hands the following year it turned into a proto-garage-punk rave-up with a bashing, three-chord motif, hyper-sexualized vocal and, um, ocarina solo. This version became the template going forward, from Jimi Hendrix’s fiery (literally, he set his Strat ablaze at the climax) feedback-laced performance of the song at the Monterey Pop Festival in ’68, to The Runaways’ and X’s punky takes, to Bruce Springsteen’s stomping, arena-shaking live renditions. The song is