Don Herron today notices that Lovecraft may have been the first to use the term “heavy metal” outside the realm of chemistry. Lovecraft used it to Morton in February 1924, and in the sense of money — heavy coins, jokingly imagining that Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird was paid in physical bags of heavy coin, the ‘heavy metal’. In the early 1920s Lovecraft usually picked up such slang from his boy printer and fellow fairground-carouser “Wisecrack Sandusky” who was an expert at such ‘slick’ talking.

Interestingly, when William S. Burroughs revived “heavy metal” as a counter-culture term in the early 1960s, it was at first also linked with money…

“In the 1962 novel, The Soft Machine, he introduces the character “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid”. His next novel in 1964, Nova Express, develops this theme further […] “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms — Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes — And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music.”

As well as seemingly originating on a planet with an atmosphere of “vaporized bank notes”, “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid” is also tangentially connected with cash in terms of his Soft Machine activities. An ex-mobster of the Nova Mob, turned renegade mob-buster, in the novel he devises plans to… “Wise up all the marks everywhere. Show them the rigged wheel”. ‘Marks’ being the American fairground and underworld mob term for a gullible punter who can easily be relived of their cash via a scam. And the “rigged wheel” being the common fairground sideshow wheel, subtly ‘fixed’ so as to cheat the ‘marks’. Burroughs thus seems to have been picking up on a tradition of youthful fairground slang from the pre-war mobster era, of which Lovecraft had probably been aware in the early 1920s. Possibly there was also, in such fairground and arcade environments, the role of the “Heavy Metal Kid” — being the trusted assistant who would cart away the bags of coins from the sideshows, slot machines and pinball tables.

This further suggests that Lovecraft was not only impishly imagining editor Edwin Baird being paid in physical bags of heavy coin, but that he had in mind that the coins were the very ones that had been passed over the counters to pay for Weird Tales.