Black Sabbath

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Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath

Holy  Cuh-mo-li! It’s Tony Iommi! Iommi, Osbourne, Butler, and drummer Bill Ward. Four humans… one amazing band. They could do pretty much anything with just bass, drums, guitar and vocals. Black Sabbath are the Beatles of heavy metal. All roads lead back to Sabbath. Ozzy and the boys were inspired by Lennon and McCartney believe it or not: They just wanted heavier but just as catchier songs... and boy did they succeed. The title song of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath ("Sabbath Bloody Sabbath") has all the stuff a Sabbath fan bleeds for: It's rebellious and dark and wicked, but it's also gorgeous. Black Sabbath's rhythm section doesn't get enough props. If you listen to the way that Geezer Butler and Bill Ward play off of each other, that's the core of the heaviness right there. Add to that Ozzy's amazing voice and one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, Tony Iommi, and it's an unstoppable force. They're a fucking piece of the mountain coming down behind you, and you can't do anything about it. I was 16 when me and my best-friend picked up Rhino’s 2006 compilation Greatest Hits 1970-1978. It was life-changing to say the least- like hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time. Finally, music that sound-tracked the way I felt.  The Ozzy years were the best years, they got away with some rocking with Dio (shout out to the song "The Mob Rules"), but it was those first four albums with Ozzy that they are known for. They are Satan’s band.  “WarPigs” was the Vietnam protest song too dark to be sung in masses at Woodstock, a vision of men as abject creatures crawling through mud: “Now in darkness, world stops turning/Ashes where the bodies burning.” Although the song climaxed with the unforgettable image of “Satan laughing spreads his wings,” anyone paying attention to the horror in Ozzy’s voice probably understood: This wasn’t a victory song, it was an end times sermon.Their slow, groaning riffs rang so vividly in the ears of so many millions, prompting so many elaborations, that you almost have to adjust to the starkness now; is that really all Tony Iommi played, and how does it work so goddamn well? Iommi’s touch with power chords, and the gooey feel of his distortion when blasted through stereo systems, ensured that Sabbath songs would remain as indelible and perfect as a handprint in concrete, now and forever. For all the bludgeoning volume, Iommi delivered melodies—the coda of “War Pigs”’ is so soaring and orchestral, you can sing it. His contributions were as catchy as Osbourne’s, and the overtones generated by the two diverging and fusing are the reason your arm hairs stand up when “War Pigs” comes on. In 1970, Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut did something few were expecting—it sold very well, charting both at their home in the UK and in the United States. Their label, Vertigo, soon dispatched Black Sabbath back to the studio to record a follow-up, stretching their already-indulgent impulses into eight-minute songs about war and heroin and the glory of the guitar. When they needed one more tune, the band headed to the bar while guitarist Tony Iommi stayed behind and spent a few minutes writing a simple riff that chugged, paused, and kept prowling, like a predator always in search of its next meal. They recorded the song in a flash and called it “Paranoid,” the fulfillment of a legal obligation.Vertigo didn’t hear filler; it heard a hit, a trouncing three-minute assault by a young band that still favored excessive jams. Six months after releasing Black Sabbath, they issued the song as Black Sabbath’s second single and demanded that the album’s title be changed from War Pigs to Paranoid. The label was right about “Paranoid,” at least. Propelled by its lead single, Paranoid was the only Black Sabbath album to top the British charts for the next four decades. In the U.S., where it nearly broke into the Top 10 mere months after the band’s small stateside live-debut, it has gone platinum four times. Record labels realized that heaviness and spookiness could sell and that Led Zeppeling, Sabbath’s favorite band (other than the Beatles), were just the beginning. In ceding to Vertigo’s commercial instincts about “Paranoid,” both as a single and album title, Black Sabbath helped launch heavy metal not just as a genre but also as a veritable industry. But “Paranoid” itself foregrounds an adolescent sort of worry—about being depressed and not understanding the symptoms or root of it, about crying when others laugh, about breaking up with someone because “she couldn’t help me with my mind.” At the heart of Paranoid, however, are very adult concerns about the raging war in Vietnam, the button-push annihilation of atomic weapons, and the oligarchic structures that suppressed the working class in the band’s benighted hometown of Birmingham and beyond. Paranoid is rightly seen as an essential metal template. Black Sabbath were never intended to appeal to, never mind be understood by, rock critics. Nor were they designed for screaming teens, swooning debs, your mom, industry suits, or anyone else who eventually embraced prior demonstrations of peculiarly British loot as rendered by the Stones, say, or Zeppelin. There was nothing remotely cute or cuddly about Black Sabbath (Ozzy’s recent incarnation notwithstanding). Black Sabbath simply oozed upon us, unfestooned by any pretense of art, peace, love, understanding, or mushroom embroidery, and immediately defined heavy metal with no less certainty, fortitude, or foofaraw than that betwixt the chicken and the egg. Sabbath would go on to give us three more classic albums: 1971's Master of Reality, 1972's Vol. 4, and the aforementioned Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. After that, things would kinda' go to shit. But god damn... what a fuckin' legacy. They basically ARE the blue-print for heavy-metal. Ozzy would go on to a successful solo-career. They would leave their fans with their last album (2013's 13), go on a farewell tour (without original drummer Bill Ward! [SHAME!]), and that would be that. It would be the end of something very magic. It's...

Black Sabbath

[Disclaimer: Shout out to DIO for doing his best to keep the band going, but Sabbath is Ozzy & Ozzy is Sabbath. No way around it… This post is about their first five albums… No DIO. That ain’t it.]