Who is Metal Mike?
Michael Earl Saunders (born May 1, 1952), commonly known as Metal Mike Saunders, is an American rock critic and the singer of the Californian punk band Angry Samoans. He is credited with coining the music genre label "heavy metal" in a record review for Humble Pie's As Safe as Yesterday Is in the November 12, 1970 issue of Rolling Stone. (The original text is shown in the VH1 Classic documentary Heavy: The Story of Metal from 2007.) Six months later in 1971, he used the phrase again while reviewing Sir Lord Baltimore's first album, Kingdom Come, in the pages of Creem magazine.
