Uriah Heep played Hobbit rock. The English progressive rock band’s unholy fascination with swords and sorcery, dungeons and dragons, and castles and fair damsels was enough to make you suspect the guys in the band wore sky-blue capes emblazoned with golden stars around the house. And owned extensive codpiece collections.
Depending on your feelings about Merlin-friendly fantasy, their pair of 1972 releases Demons and Wizards and The Magician’s Birthday were either manna from Middle Earth or laugh riots. I fall into the latter camp—I was once coerced into seeing a Lords of the Rings flick at a multiplex theater and spent the totality of its inexcusably protracted running time wishing J.R.R. Tolkien was still amongst the living so I could punch him in the kisser.
But musically Uriah Heep were one of the most palatable of England’s progressive rock bands, precisely because they put the rock, which in their case ventured into the metal realm, first. They were lean and mean and cast a unique spell thanks to Ken Hensley’s hard-charging steed of an organ. Throw in guitarist with mad skills Mick Box and the 43-octave pipes of David Byron, who is admittedly an acquired taste because at any given moment he may screech like a bat out of hell or shriek like a guy who’s balls are being squeezed really hard, and what you had was totally sui generis.
Their 1970 debut was entitled …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble was very ‘eavy indeed. At their best they could melt stone. At their worst they were every bit as insufferably pompous and pretentious as any progrock unit of the time, with the possible exceptions of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Rick Wakeman.
The Best of Uriah Heep, which was released in 1976 in the US but earlier in Canada and Europe, culls songs from the band’s first five albums, which were released between 1970 and 1972. People are always asking me why I review greatest hits compilations; some have actually gone so far as to ask me if they count, basically implying that I’m cheating or something when I write about them. The answer is simple—no casual fan wants to own all five of those albums, and a best-of spares you the agony of having to listen to the dross on all five.
The Best of Uriah Heep is a great album, period, which is probably why rock critic Chuck Eddy put it at Number 146 on his list of the five hundred best heavy metal albums in the universe, writing, “With short sharp shockers on Side One and Frodo-metal epics on the reverse, this comp sums up their initial droppings and does its best to ignore the unpardonable pretension of their adulthood, when they started hiring King Crimson vets.” Couldn’t have said it half as well myself.
Uriah Heep never broke big in the United States, never came close—career-wise only four of their singles hit the US pop charts, and only the great “Easy Livin’” cracked the Top Forty. And none of their albums ever broke into the Billboard top twenty. Personally I find this shocking—why the arena kids ignored the Heep’s alchemical Merlin metal while flocking to the classical shlock of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the flute-infested folk-metal shtick of Jethro Tull is beyond me. Could it have been their album covers? No. 1971’s Look at Yourself had an actual mirror on the cover, which must have been a far-out thing to gaze into while tripping, and both Demons and Wizards and The Magician’s Birthday featured the stoner-friendly fantasy cover art of the great Roger Dean.
Significantly different versions of The Best of Uriah Heep were released in the US, Europe, and Canada, and the listeners in the Great White North got the best deal because their version included cuts from the band’s first six albums and hence included the absolutely essential “Stealin’.” What the moose huggers of Canuckland did to deserve this boon is a mystery.
Be that as it may, the US version opens with the band’s best known cut (it was certainly the only one I ever heard for years) “Easy Livin’.” No wizardry on this one—just Byron singing about how he’s been forgiven since the woman he’s been pursuing down a lonely road has taken her place in his heart. Musically Henley and Box come charging out of the night and fog of Brocéliande Forest playing a grinding riff that never lets up, and the general effect is like being raped and pillaged for two-and-a-half minutes and change. Meanwhile Byron sings like a natural born man except on the choruses, where he goes castrato like a eunuch straight out of an Ottoman Empire harem. “Easy Livin’” is speed metal before the term was invented, and while I’ve never heard Lemmy talk about I’m sure he would have given it his filthy seal of approval.
“Lady in Black” sets us down in a mythological realm where Byron, a barbarian type with a bent for murder, mayhem, and grievous bodily harm, runs into a mysterious woman in black and begs her to “give me horses to trample down my enemies/So eager was my passion to devour this waste of life.” That second line makes absolutely zero sense but no matter, what matters is she turns out to be “the mother of men” and basically rehabilitates him, turning him in effect into a Middle Earth Quaker. The song is basically a folk rock slow trot, Byron ends every stanza with lots of “aah, aah aah aah!!! etc.” and doesn’t so much as utter a single banshee shriek, and in general the song has peaceable intentions and won’t quicken thine blood the better to smote thine enemies.
You drop the needle at the beginning of “Bird of Prey” hoping the bird in question will be one of Tolkien’s fell beasts or a a griffin or hippogriff or standard fire-breathing dragon but all you get is a lousy two-bit eagle. Ah, but the song itself is pure raptor, opens with a really bad-ass guitar riff accompanied by some heavy metal organ grinding, after which Byron’s vocals soar to epic heights before he sings the great lines, “I can see that look that says beeeeeewwwaaaare/Try to move in closer if you daaaaaarrrrre.” It’s funny and impressive at the same time, and you also get this cool mid-section where Hensley plays some Attila the Hun organ, Box joins him with some groovy riffage, and Byron largely remains earthbound.
“Sunrise” is pure Druid Stonehenge stuff except Byron is by the sea, and opens with an ascending organ riff that is followed by Byron and a choir of fallen angels hitting some real operatic heights, after which the tall, thin one gets all portentous while the band grinds out some metal exceedingly slow. The fallen angels come in and out, Box’s guitar and Henley’s organ mean you harm, as do the rhythm section of drummer Lee Kerslake and bassist Gary Thain, who was famously electrocuted on stage in Dallas Texas in 1974 but survived, only to be subsequently given the boot as a result of rampant drug abuse. He died from a heroin overdose the following year.
“The Wizard” is another semi-acoustic ballad and opens with Hensley singing, “He was the wizard of a thousand kings/And I chanced to meet him one night wanderin.” Very Arthurian, that, although I don’t recall Merlin being a party animal (“He told me tales, and he drank my wine/Me and my magic man kinda feelin’ fine.”) Once again Byron’s dragon-winged tonsils keep their talons on the ground, and when the song kicks into gear you get a nice melody and a chorus that obviously inspired the American prog-lite likes of Kansas and Styx. And the song goes rhapsodic towards the end, with organ a’soaring and harmony vocals that will make you feel like you’re partying with the magic man himself.
Side One closes with the very un-prog hard rocker “Sweet Lorraine,” which opens with grinding guitar and one helluva swooping Moog synthesizer. Then Box plays some chukka-chukka guitar while Byron offers Lorraine what may or may not be a lysergic invitation (“Would you like to take this magic potion with me/On a trip to a cosmic playground far beyond.”) The melody’s sweet as yon fair Guinevere, the chorus is bong-friendly cool (“Sweet Lorraine let the party carry on/You and I will swing the sea”), and Hensley goes Moog mad throughout, even tossing in a solo so far freaking out you’ll get lost in it, like some craven knave in an enchanted forest.
“July Morning” clocks in at 10:35 and you’ll be excused if you’ve heard that organ intro before because it’s a spitting image of the opening of Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Ditto the moment Box comes in on guitar playing Morse code, then things more or less come to a stop and Byron comes in sounding like Mr. Sensitivity, and it would be unbearable if Box’s crossbow guitar didn’t burst through the door spraying electric arrows. But you get three more verses of the same, and if it weren’t for the metal you get between them the song would be insufferable. Then you get a kind of Mexican standoff between guitar and organ after which Byron does a bit of vulpine shrieking. Hensley joins Byron on vocals here and there (“La la la la, la la la la, I’m looking for yoooouuuu!”) and it’s nice, as is the freaky loopy Moog synthesizer work of guest Manfred Mann, and you get this long take-out that will imprint the melody on your brain pan forever.
I kinda wish the industry types who put the comp together had gone with the similarly long “The Magician’s Birthday,” which can be found on the Canadian issue of the compilation, instead, because it’s an epic guitar rocker, even if the hokey kazoo and the equally hokey birthday greeting (“Happy Birthday, dear magician”) annoy. That’s the problem with progressive rock—you find yourself wanting to edit the shit out of the long ones, because the players tend to throw in everything but Pavarotti, and sometimes he even makes the cut.
“Look at Yourself” is speed metal of Deep Purple hue; Hensley plays electric chair organ with proggish intent while also handling lead vocal duties (and does an admirable job of it) because Byron’s tonsils were in the shop getting fitted for new wings or something. You get a percussion interlude gratis new drummer Ian Clarke over which Hensley grinds your nose into the dirt with some really heavy organ. “Doo doo” sings Hensley over and over while Box and Hensley vie for speed demon supremacy, and it sure sounds good.
Closer “Gypsy” opens with a syncopated organ riff, Box joins him in some whiplash-inducing stop-start, after which the band gets three times louder and you get more heavy metal herky-jerky, while Byron takes the hood off his tonsils and sends them soaring and screeching into airy realms while Hensley goes dissonant free-form on organ and Box saws remorselessly away with his axe, felling entire forests. This is archetypal bang your head noise, then everything stops and Hensley does some mystico-noodling. Then the whole damn band goes into free jazz mode, making an admirable racket. Not afraid to go running off the edge of the cliff Roadrunner style, these guys, and I say kudos for them. A little medieval metal mayhem never hurt anybody.
Nobody else sounded like Uriah Heep, hell it’s quite possible nobody else wanted to sound like them, which could be the reason history hasn’t accorded them the same respect as their progressive rock contemporaries. They made metal the base of their progressive rock, and Magi and merkins aside they rocked as hard as anybody. It would take Rush and Metallica to catch up with them, and even those bands lacked the added dimension provided by the uncanny sorcery of Ken Hensley’s conjurer’s keyboards.
They could be as hard-nosed as Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin, as pastoral as the latter as well. And they weren’t as leaden-slog dreary as Deep Purple either, as anyone who’s suffered through “Smoke on the Water” for the thousandth time and isn’t a damn fool will tell you. Uriah Heep pulled the sword from the stone and proceeded to smite their audiences with it, and you can put that in Gandalf’s pipe and smoke it. Dragons awake!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
