UPTOWN RUMBLE: Roots of heavy music in the bronx
Rock and roll emerged in the 1950s from African-American popular music. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, African-American musicians like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Fats Domino pioneered the blues-infused guitar riffs and uptempo gospel swing that would come to characterize rock and roll. By the late ’50s, as more white musicians began to play the style and its popularity increased, record companies latched on, and what had been called “race music” or “rhythm and blues”—music specifically for Black folks—became central to wider U.S. youth culture.
Rock and roll soon spread around the world. By the ’60s, newer British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones eclipsed their U.S. peers, adding to the global appeal of rock and roll. At the same time, in counter-culture hubs like Berkeley on the West Coast and the West Village in Manhattan, interest in folk and blues revivalism along with drug culture began to bring rock and roll into new territory. Rock and roll musicians started to emphasize the use of distortion, higher volumes, and other sound-altering devices, as well as a more rebellious attitude borrowed from folk and blues music.
Above: Poster for Black Sabbath concert at Gaelic Park, Manhattan College, 1971. Uptown Rumble collection, The Bronx County Archives.
Today, bands like Jefferson Airplane or The Beatles (starting with Revolver in 1966) are often credited with popularizing this newer style of psychedelic rock and roll. But one of the first bands to put the sound on vinyl were The Blues Magoos, who got together at DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx and released their first full-length, Psychedelic Lollipop, in 1966. The Blues Magoos epitomized the long-haired, unruly, and youthful energy of rock and roll of the late ’60s.
This type of fuzzier, trippier rock and roll spawned Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, and other acts who would prove pivotal to the development of even heavier registers of rock in the years that followed. One such band, Mountain, included Bronx bassist Felix Pappalardi, who was also a song-writer and engineer for Cream, another heavy-hitting band of the day. Mountain played the famous Woodstock Festival in 1969 as only their third gig and were considered among the heaviest bands of the festival. Their song, “Mississippi Queen,” is often cited as one of the first heavy metal songs.
The Blues Magoos, late ’60s. Originally formed as The Trenchcoats at DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx, The Blues Magoos were one of the first to record what became known as “psychedelic rock” and achieved commercial success with the release of the hit single “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” in 1966, charting 5 in the U.S. Courtesy of Peppy Castro.
In 1967, Bronxite Felix Pappalardi wrote the famous Cream song “Strange Brew” with Eric Clapton and Gail Collins before joining up with Mountain and making some of the heaviest music at the famous Woodstock Festival in 1969. He is pictured here playing a mellotron. Billboard, May 4, 1974, public domain.
Peppy Castro of The Blues Magoos, pictured here tuning his guitar in the late ’60s, not only pioneered psychedelic rock. When the original lineup of The Blues Magoos dissolved, Peppy reformed the band and took it in a direction of Latin-infused rock, influenced by his Columbian background on his father’s side, releasing Never Goin’ Back to Georgia in 1969. Because of a hold-up with the record label, the Latin rock Blues Magoos album came out after Santana’s groundbreaking Self-Titled, but it was technically recorded first. Courtesy of Peppy Castro.