Legendary rock drummer Carmine Appice has doubled down on his long-standing claim that Metallica was the first true heavy metal band, in a new interview with Poland’s MetalSide.
Appice said (transcribed by Blabbermouth): “I consider heavy metal starting with Metallica. Before all that, it was hard rock. The crunchy guitars, the buzztone guitar, and the double bass following the guitar, that’s what started heavy metal. Everything else before that — Mötley Crüe and Van Halen, Blue Murder — everything’s hard rock. Heavy hard rock. But metal comes from the guitar for me.”
Appice first publicly made the claim in a 2020 interview with Pete Pardo of Sea of Tranquility, in the context of how grunge devastated hard rock’s commercial standing in the early ’90s. “Those days, nobody would touch us, because we were all dinosaurs,” he said at the time. “All the NIRVANAs and stuff — grunge was in, [and] nobody wanted to touch us, all the bands. Ted Nugent, DIO… I was playing with Edgar Winter in ’91, ’92, while doing Mother’s Army, and I was playing clubs with Edgar Winter — like 500-seat clubs. Dio was playing the same clubs with my brother [Vinny Appice on drums]. Everybody was [experiencing a drop in popularity]. Black Sabbath wasn’t happening. Ozzy [Osbourne] really wasn’t happening. Nobody was happening except Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and all those guys.”
When asked to reconcile Metallica’s resilience through that same era, Appice drew a hard distinction: “Metallica was not like all these other bands. Metallica, I consider the band that really created what you’d call heavy metal. All these other bands — Mötley Crüe, Blue Murder… It’s hard rock — that’s not heavy metal. That Metallica sound, that sounds like scratching guitars, that, to me, is what heavy metal is, which turned into death metal and speed metal, and every other metal. But Ozzy’s first album was hard rock. Mötley Crüe was hard rock. Whitesnake — it’s hard rock. King Kobra was hard rock. It was all hard rock. Blue Murder, they detuned a little bit, and it was heavy, but it wasn’t what I consider heavy metal. Heavy metal was that really scratchy guitar sound.”
Appice is the original drummer of Vanilla Fudge, with whom he still records and performs today, and is a founding member of Cactus and Beck, Bogert & Appice. He has also held stints in the bands of Ozzy Osbourne and Rod Stewart, co-writing the latter’s No. 1 hit “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rolling Stone ranked him the 28th greatest drummer of all time. His autobiography, “Stick It!: My Life of Sex, Drums, and Rock ‘N’ Roll”, was published in May 2016 by Chicago Review Press.
