JUDAS PRIEST released their debut album "Rocka Rolla" on September 6th, 1974, through Gull Records — and it flopped. Recorded across three London studios that June and July with producer Rodger Bain, fresh from BLACK SABBATH's first albums, it captured a band still finding themselves: blues and hard rock structures with progressive edges, far from the twin-guitar steel they would forge two years later. Rob Halford, Glenn Tipton, K.K. Downing and Ian Hill were joined by John Hinch, whose only PRIEST album this was. Bain rejected several of Tipton's songs as insufficiently commercial, among them "Tyrant" and "Epitaph" — both of which became highlights of "Sad Wings of Destiny." The record sold a few thousand copies and left the band in real financial trouble. Every heavy metal institution starts somewhere, and this is where the most institutional of them started.