MG 1st Rock Song?

["Gary M. Gillman" <garyg@inforamp.net>]

Mark is absolutely right that MG is the first "rock" song. We have to
remember as well that the Who's professional contemporaries would have heard
the Who play it live, when MG would have sounded like the world's first
metal song, which indeed it is too. (And yes I know Link Wray and Dick Dale
played proto-metal but it wasn't "metal" partly because they didn't have
Moon and JAE playing with them). BTW I never thought anything by Led
Zeppelin (a band that sounds increasingly dated to me) was half as original
as the Who. It's mostly loud blues, and the more rock-oriented stuff is
either grossly swollen rockabilly (Rock and Roll on Led Zep 1V) or a Who
knock off (Communication Breakdown) or a tad pretentious and boring
(Kashmir). (It's important to remember, in terms of Zeppelin's guitar sound,
that JP started as a session player. Can anyone conceive that PT could have
started off that way?) The mainstream sound of 70's-90's rock depended on a
sturdy, up-front rhythm guitar track, often played as suspended chords.
Think of Styx or Journey or Cheap Trick or Pearl Jam or Mellencamp or Steve
Miller or Rush or Bryan Adams, for example. All this came straight from
Townshend as he sounded in particular on WN and on stage. Sure, guitar
soloing in this era owes a debt to Page but those solos don't make the songs
in most cases - it's the rhythm tracks that carry Jack and Diane or Only a
Feeling or Swingtown or Summer of '69 and a thousand other hits of the era -
it's  mostly taken straight from the guitars on WGFA, Bargain and My Wife.
(What isn't are the streams that come from the Stones, eg. Aerosmith, or
Hendrix/Clapton, eg. Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughn).....Gary M.