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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.”
