Black Sabbath (1970)

Black Sabbath is the source of all metal rivers and tributaries.
Join me as I take the black Hajj through their discography. This is the way.

(1970)

"Oh no, please God help me..."

Been listening to tons of Sabbath lately. As per usual when that happens the thought occurs - why not blog all this crap up? Make everyone else listen to it too? Or at least read long with me listening to it? (Or give people eighteen or nineteen posts to skip over. Something for everyone!)

Real quick: (1) Black Sabbath invented heavy metal. They share its discovery with Albert Hoffman (the inventor of LSD-25) and whomever was in charge of the sheet metal factory where a young Tony Iommi - later 'the riff master god of heavy metal' - sliced off the tips of his middle and ring fingers in an industrial accent. This forced Tony, then just an aspiring guitarist, to alter his style of playing to what we now know as "the Black Sabbath sound" (or "that sounds like heavy metal.") In the beginning, that meant light strings that were tuned to a lower pitch so he had an easier time bending them and playing a lot of his notes with an open 'E' string accompanying them, to make a bigger, thicker sound. Along with Bill Ward on drums, Geezer Butler as dungeonmaster/bassist, and Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, their sound meshed to loose ("its hour come round at last!") metal on the world. And (2) Sabbath was neither the first nor my favorite metal as a kid, but it was near-first and near-favorite, and my appreciation has only deepened in all the years since. 

Plenty of McAnecdotes and 'memberberries to come, but let's drop the needle on side one and jump into this madness.

Let's start with that cover up there. If there is a heavy metal equivalent to the Tales from the Darkside opening credits, it is that, and several years ahead of things. When Yeats asked what rough beast...? it was that cover he was asking about. Holy hell. Designed and photographed by Keith McMillan and freaking people out for fifty-one years, it might not even be my favorite Black Sabbath album cover, but there's no doubt that it's goddamn perfect. What atmosphere. 

Recorded live in the studio over a single day in October 1969, you can hear all - literally all - of the twists and turns of the heavy metal genre to come in Black Sabbath's thirty-eight-plus minutes. No small feat, and one they'll repeat a few more times in these early-to-mid seventies years. This sort of thing - midwifing several genres - was in the air at the time. Every other album from 1969-1971 seemed in retrospect to announce the musical changes to come in the years and even decades to come.

One final bit of preamble before diving into the songs: You’ll see some quotes here and there in these posts, but I’m not doing a deep dive on the subject. I considered it. Each of the founding members have written a memoir (some more than one), there are documentaries and Mojo-magazine perspectives, etc. All of which would be a pleasure to read and even more of a pleasure to see all grouped together on my shelves next to other rock biographies. That’s not what I’m going for here, though. This is a series of posts from the “I already have all the albums; I’ll see you in Hell!” side of the Dog Star Omnibus dream factory. 

All songs written by the band except the two covers ("Evil Woman" and "Warning.")

“Black Sabbath” 

Bands with their own theme song aren’t so common. And I bet of the ones that have them most of them aren’t great. I’d have to see a list, though; all I can think of is “Iron Maiden.” And that one’s awesome. So’s this one. Holy moley. Opening with a metallized version of the tri-tone from Holst's "Mars, Bringer of War" and some truly tortured vocals from Ozzy detailing an encounter with Satan:

"Butler, obsessed with the occult at the time, painted his apartment matte black and placed several inverted crucifixes and pictures of Satan on the walls. Ozzy Osbourne gave Butler a black occult book, written in Latin and decorated with numerous pictures of Satan. Butler read the book and then placed it on a shelf beside his bed before going to sleep. When he woke up, he claims he saw a large black figure standing at the end of his bed, staring at him. The figure vanished and Butler ran to the shelf where he had placed the book earlier, but the book was gone. Butler related this story to Osbourne, who then wrote the lyrics to the song based on Butler's experience."

Hmm. As far as both establishing a mood of dread for the album and announcing their singular presence on the late 60s musical scene, this does about as good a job as you can do. It’s pretty somnambulant until it gets going halfway through (and you can picture the strobe lights and the paramecium blown up and projected on the day-glo walls and the air thick with weed smoke). Not so much a song as one would traditionally think of one, more of an overture to the band's whole career to come.

Ozzy’s vocals this whole album are a little warbled. Not sure why. Is it the Superman-III-sized cannister of liquid LSD he was drinking from? The warping effect of a Satanic gravitational hellmouth just under the studio? Is he singing the entire album in-between chews on turkey drumsticks and frog legs? Possibly all of these things. Most likely he just was growing into himself as a vocalist. He still nails it, it's just asterisked. 

“The Wizard”

When I first heard this as a kid, I remember thinking “That doesn’t sound like a wizard at all.” My wizards sounded more like "Merlin the Magician" (Rick Wakeman, his King Arthur album). No harmonica. Does Gandalf have a harmonica? He might, actually - anyway, point being, I had a limited idea of what wizards should sound like. 

Evoking musically the sorcerer's vocation or no, this is a classic. Some great, classic-Sabbath structure here. 

I used to watch The Wizard on CBS on Thursdays at 8 pm in the 1986-1987 season. Anyone else? You'd have had to be skipping Cosby and Family Ties, which at the time was a tough thing to do. The show tanked and is largely forgotten today - probably rightfully so, who knows, I haven't seen it since it aired. But would the show have survived had they licensed this song? Absolutely it would have. One of the great what-if no-brainers of history. 

Sad what happened to David Rappaport. I just discovered looking at his wiki that the showrunners of The Wizard later created Baywatch (!) and even had a Wizard-esque tribute in the show's fifth season. I apologize for this diversion, I just want someone to cut scenes from the show to this song and put it out there.

“Behind the Wall of Sleep”

This song showcases the talents and interplay of the band pretty well, as does the next one. Every song – this one included – is such an indelible one-of-a-kind slog classic. No one did head-nodding heavy metal riffing like Tony, Geezer, and Bill.

This one might drag here and there like the stoned beast that it is, but the return of the riff with the waltz time is one of my favorite things ever. There’s a sloppy fade-out/ fade-in to the next song, which is the kind of thing that happens when you record an album live in the studio in one day. Or maybe they just liked the sound of it. 

The vocal/verse pattern here reminds me a bit of "War Pigs." Not so much the lyrics.

“N.I.B.”

Here's a stone cold classic to finish side one. ("My name is Lucifer / please take my hand/ OH YEAH!") Surely side one of Black Sabbath is listed among the great side ones of history. 

I always thought the song meant “Nativity in Black” because that was one of the things the all-metal-is-satanic folks promoted in the 80s. But apparently not, according to the Wikipedia. "Nibs" was some kind of reference to the goutee Bill was styling at the time. Now I see it and think Men In Black and my brain keeps trying to make something out of it. I don't have a Deities and Demigods handy, so I can't check but I bet there's an appropriate D&D reference to make here. 

Ozzy's "Your love for me has got to be real" bit is so warped-sounding. There's a reason Ozzy's main item for sale from 1970 through Y2k was "Is this guy actually crazy or what?" Maybe it is still. I think it changed to "How is this guy still alive?" somewhere back there.

Stoner/ sludge metal owes it all to Black Sabbath, as does every other kind of metal. I'll be saying this a lot; I apologize in advance. Pick a band any band and follow their river back to its source, and its source back to its source, and sooner or later, you end up in “N.I.B.” It is the dark sea to which all Klingon warriors yearn to return and sail and see the skulls and madness in the breaking surf over the deck. 

Show me any spot in Sabbath’s first five or six albums where that isn’t the case, though. 

Some great damn metal right here, friends.

“Evil Woman”

Cover of the old Crow tune, also covered by Ike and Tina. Irresistible riffin’, chorus. Has a bit of a limited range of movement, but no big whup. Recorded at the behest of the label who wanted a radio-friendly tune. Glad they did.

“Sleeping Village”

A better than average slice of atmosphere. I always get this one mixed up in my head with the next one:

“Warning”

It becomes increasingly difficult to hear the 60s in Sabbath's sound, but it's all over these last two tracks. You can easily see the band in the same varied scene as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. on a track like this, but forging their own labored path through the wilderness. 

Ozzy’s vocals sound great if a bit nasally/ adenoidal on this one. (He manages to sing "care" and "man" in such a way as to make them rhyme pretty credibly, so hat's off just for that.) The sound of the asylum in his head, maybe. Sabbath has a lot of songs about going crazy. Not that this one is, it just sounds like Ozzy is projecting from a disturbed place. This becomes a thing: Again, with the crazy? Again, with the Satan? Anyway, great soloes.  

~

The album feels more like a claiming of space: a prelude to what was to come later the same year. It’s rambling and kind of drafty, like a manor estate gone to ruin, with a creepy lady standing in front of it.

Black Sabbath (1970)

Produced by Roger Bain 

Engineered by Tom Allom and Barry Sheffield

Tour of Duty (1987 to 1990)

Tour of Duty aired on CBS from 1987 to 1990. It was created by L. Travis Clark and Steven Duncan and produced (mainly) by Zev Braun – the latter a longtime vet of the industry and the former two vets of Vietnam themselves. African-American vets at that, which makes Tour of Duty one of a handful of twentieth century shows with African-American showrunners. And among those shows, it stands out as one not primarily about the African-American experience. It certainly doesn’t shy away from exploring any aspect of the black experience in Vietnam. I just mean it's not the main focus of the show; it aimed - and succeeded - to capture the experience for the American enlisted man, of any color. 

Race and class were of course in the forefront of the draft and the war, as some of the intertitles that start off each episode (example: "African Americans represented more than 16% of all draftees and 23% of all combat troops, despite being only 11% of the civilian population in 1967." Nothing inflammatory, just fact, but it sets a certain window for the tale to unfold. They use such framing well - and never too obnoxiously - throughout the show) so any honest examination of Vietnam will incorporate such themes, of course. 

It was designed to convey the garden variety experience of an infantry platoon on a tour of duty in Vietnam. (A tour of duty was one year. Countdown to DEROS (Date Estimated Return from OverSeas) began the minute the ramp lowered on the C130 troop transport.) And while it does do that, it ended up being a little more like Combat or one of those shows, where the steady and recurring cast got into episodic adventures with a steady stream of guest stars against a theater of war backdrop. Put another way, if you wrote down everything you’ve ever heard about in conjunction with Vietnam, you’ll see it on Tour of Duty, all happening to one group of friends. That said, there’s an awful lot of real (if sanitized for television) detail throughout the show, and Vietnam-readers will pick up threads from many different places, most notably from S.O.G .by John L. Plaster in season three. (Great book, if a little confusing.) 

It’s got good performances, characters you care about, and inventive use of set and production design to convey its Indochina landscape. It was way better than most of its audience noticed at the time, I'll wager. And by virtue of being on TV (and rated PG in other words) it was an effective counterpoint to the edgier Vietnam fare that flooded multiplexes from the late 70s to the late 80s. In short, Tour of Duty, while never shying away from controversy, wasn't afraid to show a little of the heroism along with the ambiguity, or to start and end with the basic (gasp) idea that just maybe the salient point to make in all things was not that Americans were imperialist stooges committing genocide. 

(Although if that's your bag, fret not - plenty of characters still make it. This isn't some state department recruitment video or anything.) 

CBS was likely more interested in moving mass amounts of tie-in soundtracks (which it did) than contributing meaningfully to the positive representations of Vietnam veterans. Everyone was riding the wave of popularity ushered in by Oliver Stone’s Platoon. That's how show biz works, although in Vietnam's case, it was a long time coming. People wanted to forget it for awhile and deal with it only at an arthouse-cinema remove. When it came back, it came back big - and like any fad, left a lot of scorched-earth product behind. A lot of the movies and Vietnam media of this period blends together in memory. (I completely forgot this show existed, for one example, and that one even stars T of D's Tony Becker!) 

Tour of Duty is my favorite of the TV attempts. (For my money, The 'Nam - at least that first one-year-character arc - was the best for comics and Platoon the best for cinema. I hear Danger, Close is pretty good, though; anyone see it? We're a long way from the 80s. But hell, we're even longer from Saigon.) It was a show with solid fundamentals, both with regards to TV production and to Vietnam. It never loses sight of its mission statement in either regard.

I’m especially glad to see so many veterans praise the accuracy and detail of the show. It’s good to have that stuff verified. My father was in the Seabees and did two tours (the first in Chu Lai, the second six miles down the road at Rosemary Point, Camp Miller) so it’s always been part of the background of my life. My Dad had a pretty good go of it, as such things go, nothing like flashbacks or outbursts at Asian-American waiters or things you might see on Highway to Heaven or what not. He opposed the cartoonization of it in 80s media (Rambo, Chuck Norris, the just-mentioned, etc.), but he equally opposed the Hanoi-Jane-ification of it. Beyond that influence, though, I grew up inundated with Vietnam-media the way I was inundated with any other trend or trope of the 80s, then I didn't think about it again until reading In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff in 2002. And have been reading steadily about it ever since.

I mentioned the soundtracks. If you can see the show with the original music (and “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones over the credits) all the better. The DVD set I have is missing all of those and over-uses the instrumental music which originally played over the end credits (composed by Joseph Conlan, a really nice piece of music) as well as some sound-alike versions of “Purple Haze” and others, or “On the Road Again”. Over and over.  I've seen the episodes all plenty of times as originally mixed, and they're definitely better. It was later released with the original soundtrack restored, and I need to get those one day. This sort of thing always makes me wonder: will the same thing happen to newer shows that used so much licensed music like Mad Men, The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad? Or does this sort of thing only apply to the licensing deals and lateral revenue streams of yesteryear, i.e. the $250k Mad Men paid to use "Tomorrow Never Knows" for a few seconds of screentime applies in perpetuity, while the Tour of Duty folks probably had to keep renegotiating with Allen Klein for "Paint It Black." Who knows. Anyway, I’ll try to note here and there where a change does significant damage. 

I'll devote the next three posts to each of the show's three seasons but wanted to introduce the show's main cast. In order of how they appear in the credits:

Terence Knox as the Sarge aka Zeke Anderson (SSG/SFC) 

On his third tour of duty when the series begins, Sgt. Anderson is the lifer who pretends he isn't, dedicated to keeping those in his charge alive and able to maneuver around the endless rotations in the chain of command above him. Sometimes. Resigned to dysfunction. He’s the soldier whose marriage breaks under the strain and whose daughter doesn’t know him but on whom everyone around him absolutely depends. Ditto for the show. Knox proved himself capable of anchoring an ensemble cast, and it’s too bad he never found a good fit on another show.   

Stephen Caffrey as Myron Goldman (2nd Lt/ 1st Lt)

Everything I just said for Zeke applies for the LT as well. The class issues in Tour of Duty are sometimes not very subtle, but they do a good job of sketching out some of the condescension in the upper ranks between commissioned officers and OCS officers, as well as the futility of it all. Lt. Goldman is trying to outdo his Dad (because of course he is) but like Zeke he becomes committed to something else. MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) was a corporation; the Lt. Goldmans of the war were like those division heads who managed to keep their employees from getting fired despite the determined (at times maniacal) mismanagement of the board. Caffrey gradually segued into stage work in the years after Tour of Duty, but he had some memorable turns on 90s TV (Seinfeld, and as John Ford in the last episode of Young Indiana Jones.)

Tony Becker as Danny Percell (PFC/Cpl/SP4)

The grunt, Caucasian. From the backwoods of Montana, uncomplicated, has your back in the field, in the bar, at the base. Except for the few episodes where he briefly gets hooked on smack. (Like I said, they compartmentalize the war onto one group of folks – just roll with it.) Becker had more credits as a kid actor than many actors accrue in a lifetime and continues popping up here, there, and everywhere. 

Ramon Franco as Alberto Ruiz (Pvt/PFC/Sp4)

The grunt, Latino. From the Bronx, has a lot to prove in the first season, then burned by his trial by fire, then steadies into a seasoned hand over the three seasons. Ramon Franco most recently played the theater manager in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a credit which amuses me as I wonder if he came to Tarantino’s attention from his bold use of the n-word in the pilot episode of Tour of Duty, ("What's the matter, n-words? Ain't you never seen a s**c before?" I should mention that too: 80s TV standards were a little different than nowadays; ye of delicate ears and sensibilities and born-to-cancel be forewarned). Regardless, this is an actor who has been on everything from Miami Vice to the X-Files to Law and Order: SVU.

Miguel A. Nunez, Jr. as Marcus Taylor (Pvt/PFC/Sgt.)

The grunt, African-American, walking the line between his own destiny and the one others try to foist upon him. Part of me wonders how much of this guy is based on L. Travis Clark’s own experience in the war, and I wish there were more interviews with him and Steve Duncan about things. As a Navy vet, Duncan's experience was a bit different than an infantryman in a rifle company, but I assume their own experience informed aspects of all the characters, not just Taylor’s. Taylor's arc has a lot of personal touches missing from the other’s, though - just a hunch. Taylor gets most of my favorite moments from the series, and his arc is – outside Zeke’s – the backbone of the show. The actor has been employed steadily since the show ended, and he still seems to be going strong.

Stan Foster as Marvin Johnson (SP4/Sgt)

The grunt, innocent. Also African-American, but I think he fulfills the innocent-greenie role, even if others serve that purpose as he gets more experience as the series goes on. Also the first of the regular cast we see back in the world (in season three) and somewhat adrift. Stan doesn’t have too many credits at IMDB before or after Tour of Duty. Too bad; he's an indelible part of the show.

Anyone who is only in the cast for one season will be covered in the post for that season. Dan Gauthier joined the cast in season two and was in it throughout season three so I'll make an exception for him:

Johnny McKay (1st Lt)

The obligatory hotshot helicopter pilot. Gauthier had a long post-TOD career in soaps both daytime and nighttime as well as many other credits, including Friends and Ensign Levelle from “Lower Decks” (Star Trek: TNG). Gauthier brings an intensity to the role that transcends his Top-Gun-y demeanor. His love triangle with the LT and Kim Delaney is a fun part of season two, and the showrunners chose his character’s arc to punctuate the series in the last episode. Which makes sense: the helicopter remains perhaps the most visible symbol of the war for many Americans, so the image of McKay, whooping “Wooly Bully” over his headset and buzzing the tower, happily not fitting back into the world, is a resonant one. We’ll cover all that in season three, though. 

As for the two showrunners, after Tour of Duty they both worked on A Man Called Hawk, but information is kind of scant on them. Looks like L. Travis Clark died, but I can’t find much one way or the other on Steve Duncan. I watched the documentary that came with my DVDs and looked up a few things but really didn’t find much. * Both deserve a lot of credit for what they accomplished with the show – a blanket statement for everyone who worked on it. 

* If you google and find things and say “You should have tried harder, a-wipe!” I’m happy to be educated in the comments, up to and including the a-wipe. The truth is, Dog Star Omnibus, Inc. could no longer keep its internet-fact-finding team on the payroll, so a google or two is all I can manage. I regret this as much as anyone. I can't even get the official fan site www.hum60.com to open. Can you? 

L. Travis Clark

Next Time: A look through my favorite episodes, season by season, nice and breezy. Mainly I’m going to dump the screencaps I took and bullet-point the notepad blather I’ve been keeping for the past six months or so. Mark your calendars!