Rainbow

Among the many points of contention that characterize discussions between metal fans, there's one that's more heated than the rest. When was metal born?

This isn't a question to be answered here, nor anywhere else, because any hypothesis would leave someone unhappy. Whether it's the sizeable faction that places the event at the end of the Seventies, or the small but fierce one that argues the term was already applicable back in the Sixties, or the one that dates it to 1970, with hard rock bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep.

Indeed, many of the more careful writings on the subject treat these bands not as mere forerunners, but as an integral part of heavy metal itself. The very term "new wave of British heavy metal" implies that the word was already in use before the arrival of Iron Maiden.

Still, it's impossible not to notice how the heaviness certain sounds have taken on, partly thanks to technological developments, makes today's conception of metal quite distant from the still-classic, if hard-edged, rock of Led Zeppelin and their peers. A young listener today, even with no background knowledge, would instantly recognize Iron Maiden as metal, while being more hesitant to slap that label on Deep Purple.

Without wanting to settle whether those origins really count as metal or not, since there's fairly broad consensus on that front anyway, one could narrow the question to make it more manageable: when did metal's sound make that small leap that makes it recognizable to the ear as such, judging by today's standards of sonic violence? To put it bluntly, when did metal - even if it already existed - become "modern"?

It's a question that doesn't seem to interest fans all that much, perhaps because it's seen as a compromise meant to please every faction a little. This writer, however, believes there's one year that stands out above the rest thanks to a couple of landmark releases, records that in some way broke away from what came before and set more or less precise templates for a huge amount of what followed. Namely 1976, with Judas Priest's "Sad Wings Of Destiny" and Rainbow's "Rising".

Rainbow were born out of an idea by Ritchie Blackmore, former Deep Purple guitarist, who hadn't left the band on peaceful terms. Relations soured over the course of 1974 and became irreparable during the "Stormbringer" period, with the musician openly unhappy about a couple of tracks influenced by American soft rock and soul ("Holy Man" and "Hold On", both excellent, incidentally).

Among the most difficult personalities in rock, Blackmore is one of those brilliant despots who, whenever he's had the power to do so, has had no qualms about swapping out his bandmates depending on his mood that day. If in Deep Purple he didn't always have enough leverage to get his way, in Rainbow there was never any argument about it, and simply shortening the name - originally Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow - certainly didn't make things any more democratic. Still, given the band's legacy, there's not much to complain about.

After a notable debut album, though a more placid one with a few too many blues digressions, Rainbow truly took flight. From that first record, only the singer, Ronnie James Dio, was retained, likely in order to avoid straying too far from the aesthetic of a project still in its infancy.

First encountered as part of Elf, the American band that repeatedly opened for Deep Purple, Dio had strongly shaped Rainbow's debut with his fantasy-themed lyrics and his aggressive, emphatic, distinctive voice, equally influenced by his love of opera and hard rock. Listening back today, he comes across as a Bruce Dickinson ahead of his time - maybe not in timbre, but certainly in expressiveness. Dickinson himself, like almost all the more melodic metal singers, has never made a secret of that debt.

The three new supporting players are Tony Carey (keyboards), Jimmy Bain (bass) and Cozy Powell (drums). The latter two would later make a name for themselves in the world of hard rock, though Powell at least was no newcomer (he had served under Jeff Beck a few years earlier). The band's technical level is high, and Blackmore is able to create his most ambitious album ever (if not the best one, it's certainly the one with the strongest claim to being so).

“Rising” is the album in which heavy metal marries ancient settings, pompous atmospheres and spatial sonorities (contrasts that would come to define the genre like few others), while also flexing its muscle in a sound polished to perfection by Martin Birch's superb production. Already sound engineer and/or producer for Wishbone Ash's “Argus” and every Deep Purple album from 1970 up to the band's first split, Birch would go on to restore that muscle once he was behind the desk for Iron Maiden.

A good minute of cosmic synthesizer opens “Tarot Woman”. The epic ride tells of a fortune teller warning a man of a dangerous encounter to come. “Run With The Wolf”, on the other hand, is a midtempo driven by Blackmore's squared-off, relentless riff, though it's enriched by Powell's jagged drumming style.

Even when a bluesy aftertaste emerges, as in the frantic “Starstruck”, the music sounds as though it were beamed in from another era compared to what Deep Purple were playing just a couple of years earlier. A gem of technology and dynamism.

The first side of the vinyl closes with the pleasant “Do You Close Your Eyes”, unanimously regarded as the token filler track, and perhaps not unfairly so. On the other side, though, lie two masterpieces.

With those ten meandering seconds of drums, “Stargazer” boasts one of the most famous intros in rock history, after which a stately, cadenced build-up kicks in, seeming to aim straight for the centre of the cosmos. Its orchestral overtones, scented with Egypt, have earned it comparisons to Led Zeppelin's “Kashmir”, but here everything is rendered on a grander scale and the atmosphere is darker. Leaning on beds of celestial keyboards, Blackmore climbs into one of his most gruelling, twisting solos, all Middle Eastern inflections and excessive use of echo. Dio is no less impressive, belting out a magnificent lyric of mystical intensity, telling the story of a sorcerer who has his followers build a tower to be used as a launchpad to the heavens. Blind faith leads to the deaths of many of them during the construction of that superhuman feat. When the sorcerer finally leaps and crashes to the ground, they're all left disoriented, watching their certainties crumble.

In the heat and in the rain, with whips and chains.

So many died, just to see him fly.

We built a tower of stone, with our own flesh and bones,

just to watch it fly, but we don't know why.

Now where do we go? […]

Where was your star? Was it far away, was it far away?

When did we leave? We believed

It's hard not to pale in comparison after “Stargazer”, but “A Light In The Black” pulls it off, sent hurtling forward on a hammering rhythm section, while guitars and synths trade off in psychotic solos that sift through the whole arsenal, from classical music (Bach above all) to exoticism, by way of science fiction. In the parts where the electronics take over, it almost sounds like the soundtrack to some video game that wouldn't come out for another ten or fifteen years — think of the near-shredding solos in the music Rob Hubbard wrote for the Commodore 64.

The lyrics retrace the steps of “Stargazer”, with one of the followers brooding over the sorcerer's death and ending up gnawed once again by the worm of superstition and irrationality: 

I still can't quite believe it.

Did he really fall?

What to do now, I don't know.

Something is calling me back, like a light in the dark.

[…] I took the road home, towards the sky.

There in the sky I see your star

The album reached number 11 in the UK and 48 in the US. While the American figures may seem unremarkable, especially compared to what Deep Purple were pulling in, the result is still noteworthy given how innovative — almost jarring for the time — the sound was. Critical recognition was in any case unanimous among fans, so much so that five years later the magazine "Kerrang!" would name it the greatest heavy metal album of all time. Some might call that an exaggeration, but decades on it still seems like a reasonable point of view.

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20/11/2016