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| I can stare at this album cover for ages... |
Formed in Birmingham, England in 1968, with OG members Tony Iommi (guitar), Bill Ward (drums), Geezer Butler (bass) and Ozzy Osbourne. The inspiration for the name-change/sound came from watching people line up at a movie theater to see Boris Karloff’s Black Sabbath and a vision Geezer Butler had of a silhouetted figure standing at the edge of his bed; Ozzy and Butler wrote the lyrics for “Black Sabbath” and the band used “the Devil’s Interval” to lend the music an ominous sound. Just to note it, the cinema crowd anecdote come up in only one source: Wikipedia. Either way, thus was born heavy metal (at least in one telling).
Black Sabbath started as a six-piece group called the Polka Tulk Blues Band - so named “after the cheap brand of talcum powder Ozzy’s mother used.” They clipped that to Polka Tulk, then switched to Earth, and, after finding out another band used that name, and after writing the song (I think), eventually to Black Sabbath (they also cut a couple members, a saxophone player, I think, on the grounds they should have a full horn section or none at all). Even after discovering an audience existed for heavy, occult-themed music, their first manager, a Birmingham club owner named Jim Simpson, pushed them to play…something else. From a Rolling Stone remembrance of the band’s early days:
“One of those tunes a poppy, piano-driven number called ‘The Rebel’ that Simpson’s Locomotive bandmate Norman Haines had written. They also tried their hand at writing an original, titled ‘A Song for Jim,’ a jazzy, syncopated song, which featured Iommi on flute.”
Apparently, one can hear that…period on recording of a live show in Dumfries, Scotland, but the first, widespread exposure of the Black Sabbath sound came with a performance on John Peel’s Top Gear in 1970, where they played , “Black Sabbath,” “NIB,” “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” and “Sleeping Village.” Their general momentum bought them enough space to book a couple days (which, here, means literally two) to record their first full album of originals, which they released as an eponymous album on Friday, February 13, 1970. They recorded most of that material on the first takes (per Butler, “We never had a second run of most of the stuff”), but it still sold really well, hitting No. 8 in the UK and No. 23 in the U.S.
From that point until the end of the Ronnie James Dio era - and nothing after that will be included here, for the record - two themes run through Black Sabbath’s history: 1) steady, robust sales of their albums despite steady critical opprobrium and very little radio air-play; and 2) drugs. So many drugs. For as long as everything held together - until 1981, loosely, though Ozzy was out by 1979 (reunions excepted) - they did quite well as a band. As much as Ozzy gets credit for who/what they were, the (maybe?) official band bio credits Butler for the balance of the lyrics and Iommi as “the musical architect.”
They churned out albums at a steady clip: Paranoid (1970); Master of Reality (1971, which finally moved famous music critic/tastemaker, who had shit on everything before to surrender: “naïve, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel – but in the tradition [of rock'n'roll]...the only criterion is excitement, and Black Sabbath's got it”); Vol. 4 (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973); Sabotage (1975); Technical Ecstasy (1976); Never Say Die! (1978); and, with Dio replacing Ozzy, Heaven and Hell (1980) and Mob Rules (1981). - and the only real dip in sales came with Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die!. All of those went gold (even if it took 20 years for Never Say Die!), and most went platinum. And, again, with very, very little radio airplay. Over time, the albums grew more sophisticated musically (more later) and more time-consuming and difficult to record. To answer why, consider this quote from Ward on recording Masters of Reality, one of a dozen I could have chosen:
“We were getting into coke, big time. Uppers, downers, Quaaludes, whatever you like. It got to the stage where you come up with ideas and forget them, because you were just so out of it.”
Again, that was early as 1971. It sounds like all four members were some level of very fucked-up all the time, but, by the time Iommi kicked out Ozzy, he “was on a totally different level altogether.” They lured Dio out of Rainbow and he had the talent and lungs to goose Black Sabbath’s sound in a new direction (see below), but all that collapsed amid ego clashes and the ensuing recriminations that came to a head during the mixing of a live album called Live Evil - e.g., Dio wanted more involvement and credit, the old guard (just Iommi and Butler by then; Ward bailed in 1980 due to a combination of alcohol abuse and hating playing without Ozzy) didn’t want to give it to him, aka, entirely normal creative-person/band shit. Dio pissed off to form his own solo project (taking Ward’s replacement Vince Appice), but he would come back, Ward would come back, Ozzy would come back, etc. I forgot the other thing that defined Black Sabbath: line-up changes, some of them powerfully abrupt.
Black Sabbath toured like maniacs, both on their own and on the festival circuit, which put them on the same stage with some surprising company (e.g., 1974’s California Jam festival in Ontario, CA, with Deep Purple, Eagles, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rare Earth, Seals & Crofts, Black Oak Arkansas, and Earth, Wind & Fire”). Even if the faces changed steadily from there on - interested parties can follow the twists and turns in Wikipedia’s entry - they never stopped touring for long, so it’s fair to call Black Sabbath a 50+ year-old band.
Well, that went on longer than I aim to, but…I mean, 50+ years and I’ve already cut 1981 through 2021. What comes next is what I want to take up the bulk of future posts in this (hopefully, long-running) series:
Five Things I Liked/Learned
1) Musical Influences
I got a kick out of this note on musical inspirations for members of Black Sabbath (from the official bio):
“There was ample room for improvisation, and Iommi, Butler and Ward were up to the task. In fact, Black Sabbath could swing with a jazzy temperament using bluesy forms and scales. Consider some of their influences: Drummer Ward grew up listening to Count Basie, bassist Butler had his head turned by Frank Zappa, guitarist Iommi found inspiration in gypsy-jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, and vocalist Osbourne was a rabid fan of soul music in general and Sam and Dave in particular. His voice was melodic and well-pitched, and he never resorted to the sort of histrionic screaming that became a hallmark of metal’s lesser lights.”
2) “Paranoid” Was Their Only Top 10 Hit
And that was only the UK; it struggled only as high as No. 61 on the U.S. charts. “Iron Man” went a little higher in the States - but didn’t chart in England - but how the hell does a song just about everyone knows never chart? (No, I know; it’s rhetorical.). Also fun: “Paranoid” was last-minute filler for the album of the same name (hold that thought) built around a Tony Iommi riff.
3) That Thought
Paranoid was originally going to be called War Pigs, after another famous song (which didn’t make the sampler, but it’s awesome, here you go), and the…well, it just feels like giving up, doesn’t it? At any rate, the original title for Vol. 4 was Snowblind, another famous song (which, again, didn’t make the sampler, etc., here you go). Apparently, the label changed the former because they thought they heard a hit in “Paranoid,” while it’s a little more obvious with “Snowblind,” a song fairly clearly about cocaine, which very likely hit record executives far too close to home.
4) One Way Dio Changed Their Sound
Because my musical ears are dumb, I can’t pick up on distinctions like this, but I love reading things like this and do try to listen and learn from it. This Iommi talking about Dio (from Wikipedia):
“Not only voice-wise, but attitude-wise. Ozzy was a great showman, but when Dio came in, it was a different attitude, a different voice and a different musical approach, as far as vocals. Dio would sing across the riff, whereas Ozzy would follow the riff, like in "Iron Man". Ronnie came in and gave us another angle on writing.”
5) Stonehenge and Scale
When I first researched the band Sweet, a couple details made me wonder if they didn't lend a little inspiration to Spinal Tap. Last week I learned Black Sabbath very directly inspired one segment (from Wikipedia):
“We had Sharon Osbourne's dad, Don Arden, managing us. He came up with the idea of having the stage set be Stonehenge. He wrote the dimensions down and gave it to our tour manager. He wrote it down in metres but he meant to write it down in feet. The people who made it saw fifteen metres instead of fifteen feet. It was 45 feet high and it wouldn't fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it in the storage area. It cost a fortune to make but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into.”
Yeah, yeah, it comes from after the period covered in this post, but how could I skip that?
About the Sampler
I had a pretty firm grasp on Black Sabbath’s “greatest hits” from the Ozzy era going into this, but, with some guidance (ht: @richardmiller), I made an attempt to branch out from there. Or some attempt. If nothing else, I deliberately held a couple favorites out of the sampler. May as well list them by album:
Black Sabbath: “The Wizard”
Paranoid: “Hand of Doom”
Master of Reality: “Sweet Leaf” and “After Forever”
Vol. 4: “Tomorrow’s Dream” and “Supernaut”
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: title track, “A National Acrobat” and “Killing Yourself to Live” (which I’m calling an “oops,” because the shine came off real quick)
Sabotage: “Hole in the Sky,” “Symptom of the Universe” and “The Thrill of It All”
Never Say Die!: title track, “Air Dance” and “A Hard Road”
Heaven and Hell: title track, “Die Young”
Mob Rule: title track, “Turn Up the Night,” and “Slipping Away”
To be clear, I’m not expecting any die-hard Sabbath fan to give that list a standing-o, not least because that selection remains heavy with songs that made various greatest hits compilation; I don’t feel bad either, because I like what I like and I like the Ozzy era.
Still, I learned a lot about Black Sabbath (aka, the goal of all this) and, yeah, Ronnie James Dio did have more talent and kicked them into a different gear.
Till the next one…
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