Styx and stones well just Styx......

[Thumpalumpacus]

How is HBA doing these days, Brian?

This thread does bring up an interesting point though. Can anyone draw lines between blues rock, hard rock, and metal? Sure some stuff is obviously blues rock, but hard rock has a lot of blues influence. The line between hard rock and metal can be pretty fuzzy sometimes too. Can one of our more musically inclined members come up with a clear difference between these genres?

Having played all these genres, I'll be happy to give my opinion when I'm home on my laptop.

Blues rock is rock played with blues tonalities, but with a more-varied songwriting structure, often including bridges, codas, etc which are very rare in blues. It has obviously more energy than many blues artists throw down -- but others like Stevie Ray or Buddy Guy certainly like playing their blues with rock energy. What defines them as mainly blues in my book at this point is song-writing structure (because they're basically writing in 12-bar blues format, or more rarely, 8-). When I think of blues-rock, I think of bands like Cactus, early Zeppelin, or Foghat, stuff like that.

Hard rock may be blues-based (think Cream, Zeppelin, Hendrix) but it need not be so -- UFO, Thin Lizzy, Molly Hatchet and many other bands show a pretty diverse set of influences. Cream obviously updated blues classics, and supercharged them with rock's energy. Sometimes the result barely sounds like the original at all (I'm thinking of "Crossroads Blues", covered by Cream as "Crossroads"). Note that there's a bit of overlap between "blues rock" and "hard rock". A band like Cactus could be, and was, considered both, depending on who you asked.


Heavy metal is only rarely blues-based. Its riffs may be based on the pentatonic scale (early Sabbath did this a lot, often throwing in the b5 which is also a blues motif to give their songs that evil vibe), but metal too generally has a broader array of influences, especially in incorporating classical music into its palette. Metal is usually played at tempos significantly faster or slower than the other two genres we're discussing. Lyrically speaking, metal often addresses a wider array of topics than the other two genres, anywhere from fantasy to the occult to railing against what they see as society's flaws.