Sabotage (1975)

I never had this one back in the day. 

I had the Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath cassette I told you about last time, The Headless Cross, and, eventually, We Sold Our Soul For Rock and Roll, the Ozzy-era compilation. My brother had The Mob Rules and so I heard that one a lot, too. (As I was just discussing in the comments from last time, Sabbath wasn't really a part of the "active" 80s metal discussion - at least the MTV/metal-press part of it.) The only song from Sabotage to make We Sold Our Soul For Rock and Roll was “Am I Going Insane (radio)” * and it wasn't really a favorite, so it never occurred to me to pick it up. 

* I never understand that (radio) bit until looking this album up for this post. It's Cockney-rhyming-slang for "going mental," i.e. "radio rental."

Cut to the 21st century and of course you can listen to anything you want, practically, on YouTube or elsewhere. But I still somehow never really knew this one start-to-finish until 2021, and the effect was like getting a new Sabbath-mk-1 record, something I didn’t think was possible. (Technically, it and the next two albums are all in the same boat in this regard, but neither Technical Ecstasy or Never Say Die are in Sabotage's league. We'll get to those next time, though.) Don’t let the cover fool you: this is one of the band's best.

And hey okay, let's talk about that cover. Holy moley that is dreadful. 

Apparently this was one of those by-the-time-we-found-out-it-was-too-late-to-do-anything-else things. That seems unlikely, though - I mean, they just put out two covers that weren't even covers not too long before, this, couldn't they just put out another fake-cover like Master of Reality? Here's what I think: Tony and Geezer look cool, and Ozzy probably thought he looked cool. (Bill's hopeless; that doubling-effect in the mirror makes him unfortunately look like a twisted Humpty-Dumpty. Why is he wearing his wife's red tights?) 

So they said hey, two out of four (okay Ozzy, sure, three out of four, whatever you say) and shrugged it off. Sorry, Bill. This theory does not seem corroborated by any of the band's recollecting, but makes sense to me. Anyway, it was no one from photographer's to designer's to band member's idea, apparently, just a combination of failures on many parts.

Let's get thing started with yet another blistering side one opener:

Hole in the Sky

If you’re asking questions of metal that this song doesn’t answer, I think you need to go back to… the question store? Sorry, thatone really got away from me. But I mean it: you can expand in directions away from this song, but you really cannot reduce metal beyond this point. It's like boiling out everything but some compound's essence or some irreducable equation I could point to to justify how ass-kickingly awesome this song is or how many times I've cranked it and scared my kids the past two months. Everything from the buzzsaw guitar to the smashing cymbals to the screaming Ozzy seems to be tailor-made for my own metal tastes.

As ever, part of that reason for that is undoubtedly that Black Sabbath played such a formative role in my own metal tastes. But most of the reason is just hey, this song really rocks. 

I don't know what to make of some of the lyrics, though. "And even though I'm sitting waiting for Mars / I don't believe there's any future in cars." Hrrm.

Don’t Start (Too Late)

Just a little ditty/ intro to:

Symptom of the Universe

I picture someone, let's say Frank Sinatra, could just as easily have been my grandfather, hearing this in 1975 and having one of those Fall of Ancient Rome moments, like within these sounds is the sound of your own doom, the banshee come down from the mountain. ("Keep away! Keep away!") 

How would Elvis have reacted? On one level he'd have denounced Sabbath as druggies and probably used that deputy badge Nixon gave him to try and set up a sting of some kind. On another, he probably pantomimed a karate move or two and swallowed a few more uppers. 

Regardless, here's a commonly held Sabbath classic; how many have we heard so far? I've lost count. If you isolate each section, there's really nothing special going on here (and even some annoying enunciation Ozzy brings to some of the lines - nothing to sink the awesomeness, just a few lines where you have to question his asylum-garbled reading of the line. Ozzy gotta Ozzy, whattyagonnado) The riff is cool enough, but it's just open-E-string stuff. Bong Metal 101. Ditto for the bass. The way Bill joins the riff (riding that crash symbol) is cool - and Kyuss must have thought so, too, as they do the same on "Green Machine" - but again, nothing special, really. But combine them all and "YEEEEEEEAAAAAAH!"

And to top it all off, those last couple of sections are cool as hell, too. 

Megalomania

“Why don’t you just get out of my life ?
Why doesn’t everybody leave me alone?”

Ahh, back to nightmare rock. I’m not the biggest fan of that fade-in looped effect on Ozzy’s voice, but once again, OGO. Sort of like YOLO, but the Ozzy version. This song’s pretty epic and would make for some good horror fuel in the right venue.

The Thrill of It All

Oh man! That second riff can cut through timber. Ozzy’s voice, too. Has anyone tried any logging with this song? At the right speed, I bet it would be deadly. I can picture the fifty foot speakers trucked into some stand of timber and the scientists with their clipboards. Fire it up and find the right RPM-speed.

And then the whole other section with the “OH YEAH!” parts and those spaceship keys. Great stuff. As great a side two opener as "Killing Yourself To Live" was on the previous record.

"Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it / cuz I got no reason to lie.

Forget your problems that don't even exist / and I'll show you a way to get high."

Supertzar

Epic, with the choir and all. I love that title.

“Am I Going Insane (Radio)” 

That ending laughter montage is all fun and games until that one laugh – you know the one I mean – starts up and then isolates. That is a disturbing sound right there. It's all the more prominent on the beginning of:

The Writ / Blow on a Jug

Good lord, that laugh. WTF.

For some reason I picture a disco ball going with this one, especially with Ozzy coming in with all that intensity and the sustained chord ringing out. It has that mid-70s ambience to me. Also plenty of Ozzy-fury and a fireworks display of metal bonafides. Great ending to the album. Ozzy's vocals falter a little in the last section, but still a nice send-off. 

"Are you Satan, are you man?
You've changed a lot since it began."

~

Although there are two albums left to go in the Ozzy era, with Sabotage, the high water mark has been reached. Which is not to say there is not more compelling music and Sabbath saga to come; perish the thought.

The album is titled what it is because apparently they woke up to how much money had been siphoned off their earnings to that point and spent their time split in the studio between all the legal wrangling related to this. It's easy to forget that these albums were all platinum sellers. I think Sabbath were all paying taxes in the UK, so they made a lot of other people rich before they saw dime one. (Or shilling one, I should say.) But I don't know the ins and outs, only that, like many successful bands at some point, they took a closer look at their business arrangements and didn't like what they were seeing. You can miss a lot when you're focusing on the coke and tours or "the scene" part of being a rock star and not the bottom line. It's understandable. It's also what rapacious music industry types live for. Be wary, be watchful; always have someone sober in the band.

See you next time.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

Hey, let’s talk Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath!

My brother had a ninety minute cassette with this on one side when we were growing up. He doesn’t remember it – I asked him - which is probably because I more or less appropriated it from 1982 on. He remembered owning the actual album, but that must've been later, or maybe he hid that one from me, lest I appropriate it as well. 

Fun fact: I listened to that tape from West Germany 1983 all the way through Rhode Island 1993 without ever even knowing the song titles. What? How? Pre-internet, man. Said cassette only had "Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath" written on it, no other markings. And you couldn't just bike to the library and look up the song titles for SBS back in those days. Nope. As established previously, you wanted to know anything about Black Sabbath, you had to go find some dirtbag somewhere, probably in a garage filled with smoke with empty huffed-paint cans all around. And how would you know if he was even right?

I mean, I suppose I could have picked up the cassette at the mall or something and looked the titles over. Maybe I did, who knows. I have no memory of doing it if so, nor a memory of a single other friend who owned it. I don't know if I ever even saw the cover until I bought the CD in the early 90s.

So after phoning it in for three albums, Sabbath returns to their cover design A-game. (Designed by Drew Struzan, a man on the cusp of an extraordinary career.) I always thought the front cover represented what was waiting for the man on the back cover (a hypocrite) after he died. But apparently they're meant to be different people, just a good and evil, duality of life sort of thing. Striking: one of the all time greats. 

(Sidenote: it's a good thing my brother and I didn't have this cover, as it would have definitely been confiscated by the parental units. I've spoken elsewhere of talking my parents into letting me keep Judas Priest - my Devil and Daniel Webster moment; peaked early, alas  - but one look at that cover and that would have been that.)

Let's jump in.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

When Ozzy first heard this riff, he screamed "WE'RE BACK!" Tony must have felt relieved as well, as it broke a spell of writer's block. It had to be something being in a band with someone like Tony Iommi. How many monster riffs did this guy come up with? For rock guitarists, pound for pound has anyone else come close? Eddie Van Halen, maybe? Jimmy Page? And the other guys in the band are Geezer, Bill Ward, and Ozzy! Lightning in a bottle.

A five star song if there ever was one. What an ending. The whole damn thing. Everything is perfect. 

A National Acrobat

And speaking of riffs - here's another of my favorite ones. This is such a perfect song two for a record. Do I think that because SBS more or less formed my idea of how albums and album-sides should go? Possibly. It's a chicken-and-egg question I never solve. All I know is when I first heard Nine Inch Nails' Wish EP years later, that fantastic one-two combo of "Wish" into "Last" always reminded me of how perfectly "Spiral Architect" follows "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and I used to tell anyone who'd listen.

These lyrics are so perfect.

"I've lived a thousand times / I've found out what it means to be believed."

I like this comment from that lyrics page: "(The song) describes the thoughts of an unborn child. In the end, the lyrics give some general advice about life itself. As we were all born, we should live our life to the fullest." A generous interpretation? But sensible.

Fluff

I'm not the person to ask about this one. I love it. One of the first things I ever learned to play on guitar. Might be filler for others, I don't know. When Sabbath fans talk about this kind of thing usually they nominate "Laguna Sunrise" as their soft-spoken Sabbath acoustic tune. 

Sabra Cadabra

Just isolate that intro. Cool riff, cool band joining in, then Ozzy's vocal entrance around the fifty second mark - that's rock and roll, my friends. 

That's Rick Wakeman on the keyboards and boogie-woogie keys. He and Yes were recording in the studio next door, and he popped over to say hello. He refused compensation, but they paid him in beer. Hey, that's more than Eddie Van Halen was compensated for his work on "Beat It". 

Ozzy allegedly sings "Lovely lady, make love all night long" during this part. But it sounds more like "Love me, lay-ay-yeaaahaa, maker of all my wrong ." I had my ears to the boombox a lot, growing up, trying to make that one out. 

Killing Yourself To Live

Here's a lot of people's favorite Sabbath song, including Kirk and Lars of some later-metal band. Pretty foolproof track. Ozzy sings his heart out on this album. Anyone who disagrees, try and sing along sometime. 

I'm not a huge fan of Ozzy's vocals. I think a lot of his work with Sabbath could've used another take or two, and his timbre gets whinier and whinier in the 80s and beyond. But listen to his work here and all over this record. There should be no doubt he was a hell of a vocalist. I think people have gotten used to slagging him off. Every singer's voice deteriorates over time. Metal is not an easy genre for tenors - not that any genre probably is, over a long enough period of time. I don't know how Ozzy didn't rend his throat to drug-smithereens by the mid-70s, never mind still being able to sing all of his old tunes throughout the 90s. 

Who Are You

I know that I must have been watching Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings a lot when I first discovered this album, as I have a consistent video in my head of Nazgul flying around on fellbeast whenever I hear this song. Wherever that intersection of metal, the occult, Tolkien, and weird cosmic skies pulsating with the mysteries of the damned meet, I bet it sounds like this.

Like "Fluff," I don't know if this is one that will hit other people quite the same way. I do a pretty mean a cappella version of this one, all the parts, and almost updated the evidence to prove it. But I'll save it for our inevitable road trip to Pelennor Fields. 

Looking For Today

Another Ozzy-kills-it song. That long lead-in to the "When was the last time that you cried? YEAH-EAH-EAH-EAH-YEAAAH!" is so great.  Not to mention that note he leaps to during the chorus and fade-out. 

Spiral Architect

Almost feels like one song too many after the perfect finish of "Looking for Today" but once the riff kicks in and things take off, it all makes sense. The journey from the primordial-riff-sludge of the title track to this is complete. 

I've been singing this one since my earliest memories, yet somehow this 2021 listenthrough really drove home this home:

"Of all the things I value most in life / I see my memories and feel their warmth /
and know that they are good
(And you know that I should; YEAH YOU KNOW THAT I SHOULD!")

Hell yeah to that. Geezer's lyrics in general are great on this record. But hell. Such an underrated bastard.

~

Not only do I love this album – always have, always will – it’s pretty much the one that defines heavy metal as a genre for me: how it should sound, feel, how it should comport itself. When a metal band raises a clamor (usually a minor-chord one) in contempt of its sensibilities, they lose me. (Ditto for Pyromania.) Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath is the reason I don’t like much metal after 1990 and also why I never connected with many other Sabbath albums growing up. That came later. They got the formula exactly right here, as they did on Paranoid, too, sure, but this is a fully mature effort: the band, mk-1, at the height of its powers. The clarity in songwriting and production is even more striking coming after the last albums, where sludgy mud-metal was the goal. Geezer's lyrics - nihilistic perfection on Paranoid and elsewhere - have moments of real hope and inspiration here without coming across as New-Age-y or forced. 

It's an effortless-sounding record. For Ozzy, Geezer, Bill, and Tony, it will never be as good as this again. Though the next one comes pretty close.

Vol. 4 (1972)

(1972)

This album was panned on its release, just as Master of Reality had been, but its popularity with grunge and stoner-metal bands of the 90s and beyond has rehabilitated it some. I never really took to it, though, even with the seven or eight additional spins I gave it as part of this project. To me it just sounds like the circumstances in which it was recorded: i.e. the band producing themselves in some mansion somewhere (a Bel Air one owned by John DuPont; who lends their mansion to Black Sabbath, for six effing months? This was a thing to do for the well-to-do in this period, for Alice Cooper, the Stones, Zeppelin, whomever.) with access to way too many drugs. Geezer estimates they spent about $70k on cocaine alone in the six months they spent recording it. Which sounds like a lot, and it certainly is especially in early-70s money, but over six months? Fleetwood Mac spent this much on coke in six days, probably, in the late 70s. 

I'd be curious on the economics of coke-inflation from 1972 to 1979. Where was that class in college?

Simply put, the album is a mess and so was the band when they were making it. Still plenty of Sabbath to sink your teeth into! This will be a pretty breezy entry. 

Wheel of Confusion

I can admire a good nodding-Sabbath groove, but there's more to life than just nodding off. Sorry, very boring. Ah well. Picks up a bit in the up-tempo section but a very underwhelming beginning to the album.

Tomorrow’s Dream

Slightly better but still nothing to write home about. 

Changes

Many consider this to be one of Sabbath’s best tracks. I don’t dislike it, but it’s always struck me as a bit overdone. Sort of like 80s Ozzy. The mellotron is cool, though, and these post-chorus stretches in particular.

I understand they used this in the new version of The Stand that just aired. I didn’t watch but going from the review here it was to mirror a similar scene between Harold and Frannie from the 90s Stand miniseries that used “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” That’s kind of the best scene in the original miniseries, you ask me, so homage-ing it even with Black Sabbath will bristle me somewhat, but it’s an interesting choice as far as Stand subtext goes. I don’t recall if Harold and Frannie have a scene in either the original novel or the expanded one or what song accompanies it. Anyway, it's interesting that to update the 90s adaptation (which used a popular 80s song) of a book written in the late 70s that they went back to the early 70s. Or maybe not interesting. I can't tell anymore.

FX

How to rate such things. This is just the lads on drugs throwing different things against Tony’s guitar while it’s plugged in to a reverb pedal. I like little moments like this on albums, though, to break things up, and it’s always fun playing around with fx. Especially when you’re loaded.

Supernaut

Here’s the album’s best track. Not perfect but pretty damn cool. Apparently the other bands that Sabbath toured or partied with always told them “Supernaut” was their favorite song. 

While we're here, what exactly is a 'naut? I get the nautical reference and it's probably just that but how did this become something affixed to things? As a kid I never understood how a British naval ship translated to "cybernaut" in that old Avengers episode, or, like -gate from Watergate, I guess, it just became something to add to things? A "supernaut" is what? The lyrics don't help much.

Snowblind

Side two opens up with this one, which veers close to the same riff as “Wheel of Confusion,” so it’s boring twice removed. Couple cool bits here and there. The weird thing is how un-cocaine-like this song is. They wanted to name the album Snowblind to reflect its participants state of mind, but the label nixed it.

Cornucopia

This is a pretty cool riff/slog. I instantly want to play some NES in the basement. “You’re gonna go insane! I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR BRAIN!” screams Ozzy. Who you telling, Ozzy? 

This song is undercooked, though, and it’s too bad, as it probably could’ve came together into something more awesome.

Laguna Sunrise

Nice enough little filler. Kind of reminds me of a dream montage in a 70s movie.

St. Vitus Dance

Trying for something a little off-time here, but not sure it worked. It’s a cool enough riff, kind of – actually, it’s a bit much. (This one should've been named "Snowblind.") It feels like it could’ve gone somewhere different but was forced into the direction recorded here. 

Under the Sun

Not a bad ending. Appropriately doom-metal-y. Kind of encapsulates the album actually, with its intermittent, muddied charms poking up through the muck here and there. Doom metal riff, Ozzy’s vocals kinda iffy in spots, muffled bass line (apparently Geezer was an absolute wreck during the recording of this.) 

~

The band went it alone on this one, productionwise, and maybe they needed a Bob Ezrin or Mutt Lange to whip them into shape. I doubt they'd have listened even had a steady hand been guiding the ship.

One thing that did jump out to me though: this is really a dry run/ dress rehearsal for Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath. Similar progressions and mixes here and there, similar melodic ideas, similar song placements, etc. Except Sabbath is the fully-finished, polished, and lacquered version of what they appear to have been going for on this one. 

Vol. 4 is the Bag of Bones to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath's Duma Key, perhaps. Makes sense to me anyway! 

Later (2021)

"Sometimes growing up means facing your demons."

Short and spoiler-free: Later has a great hook that engages you for most of its two-hundred-plus-pages. It unfortunately starts to wobble a bit in the last stretch and then the floor falls completely out in the last, baffling chapter. Mind your footing. 

Longer and spoiler-ier: 

Jamie Conklin lives with his mother. No father or siblings, just an uncle with Alzheimer's in a local home. His mom is a literary agent, and Jamie sees dead people. "It's not like the movie with Bruce Willis," he lets us know. He doesn't see every dead person, just some, and they always recognize him and wave or otherwise alert Jamie of their presence. The dead, always dressed in the clothes they died in (not counting things like ball-gags, which apparently do not translate to the great beyond) must answer truthfully any question put to them. It's unclear, really, how Jamie learns this - he seems to have an intuitive understanding of it at the novel's beginning; the novel is, by the by, told in first person flashback, so Jamie is looking back at his life from the vantage point of twenty two - or why this would be, but it's a cool enough little rule for the story to follow. 

Things get complicated (Uncle Harry's Alzheimers worsens, there's a not-Bernie-Madoff-hedge-fund story (why not just have it be Bernie Madoff?), Jamie's Mom Tia's star client dies) when Liz (Tia's cop girlfriend) asks Jamie to help in a case where a killer has died without revealing the details of his last plot. 

The dead killer does so - begrudgingly - but then he tells Jamie that Tia has cancer. Is this true? Jamie wonders if there's some asterisk to this particular spirit. Turns out there is; here's a dead guy who not only doesn't just tell the truth, he can stick around, out of spite for Jamie, some kind of outsider-spirit with anime beyond what Jamie's used to. Jamie can't turn to his mom or even Liz (with whom his mom has broken up over her crooked-cop drug-running and later drug-using ways) so he turns to his next-door neighbor, whose dead wife spoke to Jamie in the first chapter. The neighbor is one of those King characters that has spent a good deal of time in the occult section of the library (or the fiction-Author 'Ki - to Ko ' aisle) and knows certain things about how to get rid of troublesome spirits or vampires. He recommends the Ritual of Chüd, i.e. lock tongues with the enemy in astral battle and battle wits and wills.

Which he does and Jamie wins, rather easily, and commands that the spirit not only stop haunting him but come running whenever he beckons him. "Oh I'll whistle and you'll come to me, my lad." as a matter of fact. Which at least the author acknowledges is a completely bizarre thing for a young 21st century boy to say by attributing the wording to his professor friend. Even so, it's an awkward thing to read/ repeat a further dozen or two dozen times to come. 

After much agonizing over what might happen, Jamie finally does beckon the spirit at the end of the book to battle Liz - now in a destructive drug tailspin - kidnaps him and takes him to her distributor's house in the boonies. Hi-jinks ensue. Jamie wakes up with the cops and then in the next chapter, his uncle - the Alzheimer's patient - dies and his spirit tells him he's his father.

Needle scratch!

There follows a baffling few pages where Jamie first imagines how it could have gone and then says "no wait, that never happened." It's a confusing chapter on many levels, especially for that. Is King reversing himself? What? Here are paragraphs in question:

"Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars * on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars - I wouldn't have been more than four or five - Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. ' Easy-peasy.'"

* I'll break in to say this reveal happens on pg. 244. If you're a writer and leading up to a last chapter reveal about incest, maybe a hidden in plain sight mystery-scars-supporting-said-reveal might have been mentioned somewhere early on?

"And of course there's that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact * that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can't carry a tune in a tin pal can probably produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer, Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.

Except hold it, wait one,

That whole story is fiction."

* I don't know who needs to hear this, but incestuous coupling does not actually produce supernatural offspring. Nor is it even reasonable to imagine hey, just a horny, grieving couple of siblings deciding - as adults - to bang, or for one of them to just up and rape the other, then carry on as business partners/ siblings/ caretakers. What in the goddamn world? 

Jamie goes on to say he is only speculating about all the above - or is he? - but the whole damn thing is confused, both the above and all after. (Also, Jamie seems to have forgot his catchphrase is "Check it out," not "hold it.") This last chapter is a succession of things that don't make sense on top of inconsistencies in the writing voice on top of failure to resolve the threads that are there. At least It, with its famous batshit gangbang in the sewers, did not end itself resolving an entirely different novel that no one had been reading up to that point.

(A comment over here cracked me up re: Later's parallels with It: "a weird-sex thing popping up (at the end of) an It spinoff is kind of appropriate." Can't argue with that.)

King always says his endings surprise him. (The pointed opposite of the book-a-year goldmine-author from the first part of the book, who has the ending in mind and works backward - more on him to come.) I don't think he's just being cute when he talks about his process; I think he literally does close his eyes and take dictation from his muse. Any writer has his or her process, and it's worked pretty well for King. The thing is, you're supposed to edit this, though. No one wants to read the unexpurgated narrative of anyone's muse, so when the day's communing with spirits ends with "Incest reveal, last chapter."  the writer needs to stop and say "Well, I'm sure this makes sense in the muse dimension, but have I been writing that book?" If the answer is no, then you go back and make sure that a re-read will reveal oh, how masterful, this was subtly hinted at and its dynamics emphasized to make sense as a reveal all throughout. 

It isn't, though, so it doesn't. It feels like the kind of twist you get at the end of 1408 or Identity or some other non-John-Cusack example. King sometimes does not resist (and sometimes flat-out insists upon) this kind of zigzag-and-crash-the-car strategy. ("Dedication" comes to mind.) 

Worse, the things he had been building are rendered nonsensical by the reveal. Here's one example - not the only one:

"All of this seemed normal to me. I don't think the world starts to come into focus until you're fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just kind of take what you've got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became a lot of mornings. I didn't even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz's snarly hair. My mother's hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly (...) I had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks - yes, I still see them - and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I'd pick the dead folks.

Any day of the fucking week."

Keep in mind Jamie is making that observation looking back on his life post incest reveal, even if the reader doesn't know it yet. Would that not be a sensible place to maybe hint to the reader that these things, while real and relatable, don't make sense in lieu of subsequent events and reveals? Sorry: when you're bound to a demon-outsider from beyond and then you find out your uncle is your father and your entire familial set-up is a poorly-constructed lie, you're not going to be sitting there reflecting on that and not bringing up any of the aforementioned. It would tie together. At the very least it's a missed opportunity; at worst it's intentionally misleading the reader. 

It's too damn bad, because this could so easily have been a great book. It's got a good hook - I see dead people; the dead people tell me truths, etc. - and a good complication - uh-oh, this one dead guy might be lying to me - and even if you commit to the incest reveal as the novel's raison d'etre, it's got a sensible enough theme - the dead tell uncomfortable secrets. But that only works if that reveal isn't just thrown into things in the last chapter. Like I said, you know from page one that Jamie is writing this with everything that happens in his rearview; it's purposefully constructed that way. But at no point does King avail himself of any opportunity to help his own reveal. This isn't just stylistic choice; it's an engineering issue. You can't just throw that on top of the story we were getting and expect it to hold such weight; it's like one of those commercials where you see how strong Saran wrap is compared to others and the watermelon goes crashing through the wrap and the narrator says "Be reasonable." 

I'm running a bit longer than intended so let's switch to bullet points and call it a day.

- There are conspicuous "editor" paragraphs strewn throughout that feel like notes from first readers transcribed into Jamie's voice. i.e. "Later I learned that..." or "Oh, and I erased Liz's messages" etc. Things that escaped the author on first pass that must be accounted for.  

- Speaking of those "later"s I will never understand leaving these sort of writer-clearing-his-throat/ running-tics used to just get him going. They extend to the repetitive phrases here and there ("champ" etc.) but FFS, get rid of these things when editing. The first paragraph of the book, for example, is like reading King clear his throat. None of this sort of thing is - as we see from subsequent events - true, or necessary. 

- Jamie in no way resembles a child of the twenty-first century, and his mother's job in no way resembles a literary agent's in New York City in the twenty-first century. This really took me out of the book in places. Had he set the book twenty years earlier, that'd have fixed it.

- I guess I haven't spent much time on the It connections. King fans are as used to kinda-sorta-related allusions as they are to bona-fide "this is directly from this other book" things. Both are wrapped up in all this stuff here. They're there but not there. Sort of like "Fair Extension." Or even the Turtle in It vs. the Turtle in the Dark Tower books proper. There's no real "answer" anywhere. I'm fine with the broad genre strokes of it all ("have a question about how to fight the demons and undead? Find the right library.") and have no real issue with the deadlights or Chud-ritual coming up. They certainly don't resolve or tie anything together and I don't think King is working off some kind of unified-multiversity playbook, he's just having fun. 

- Considerable time is spent developing what's-gonna-happen tension regarding whether or not to call back Thierrault. He even gets the proverbial warning from the dead (his friend the professor) about doing so and how it's a bad idea. Then it happens and it's not a big deal at all. "Go," says Jamie, and off he goes. A lot of air goes out of the balloon at this point. There was a better way to wrap this up; Liz's death and post-death scene, as well.

- Along the same lines, Chekov's gun, etc. should cancer be teased for Tia and then not return? Some good drama was made of this angle in The Outsider, could've worked here as well. 

- I haven't mentioned much about the fake-historical-fiction author and the Roanoke stuff, too. I wasn't too impressed with this, to be honest; none of it felt real to me. I liked the scene at the dead author's house and how it set the stage for the Liz/ Thierrault-terrorist scene to follow. But if there was some Misery-level novel-mirroring going on, it eluded me. Plus I just didn't buy this author as some huge multi-million-selling draw in the 21st century. Again, set the book in the recent past, and no problem. 

- Well FFS, the incest reveal again. That it happened in the first place, that we're to believe she just had the baby and built a business with Uncle Henry, that it's suggested without remarking on the True Detective hillbilly voodoo logic it represents that such a coupling produces magical offspring, all of it. It's possible questions were meant to linger to be explored in future volumes, but it hasn't been marketed as the first of an ongoing series, nor has anyone mentioned it post-release, that I've seen anyway. 

Either way, I don't have much interest in more. Whistle all you want, champ, my lad - I think I'll stay put. 

~

As mentioned last time, this will be the last post in the Hard Case Crime Chronicles series. Thanks for reading!

Master of Reality (1971)

In the beginning was the Word, and it was Ozzy, Tony, Geezer, and Bill. Join me on my dark Hajj through their discography, album after drug-drenched album. This is the way.

(1971)

"In Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe, Mick Wall writes that on their third album 'the Sabbath sound took a plunge into even greater darkness. Bereft even of reverb, leaving their sound as dry as old bones dug up from some desert burial plot, the finished music's brutish force would so alarm the critics they would punish Sabbath in print for being blatantly thuggish, purposefully mindless, creepy, and obnoxious. Twenty years later groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, would excavate the same heaving lung sound (and) be rewarded with critical garlands.'" 

So says the wiki. It's quite true; the sloggishness of this record (and two of the next three) was pretty popular with late 80s and early 90s bands. Moreso than any of the ones mentioned: Kyuss and Dinosaur, Jr., who each in turn birthed many bands in their wake. (I'll link to a specifically-Sabbath-y Kyuss song when we get to Sabotage.) For his part, Ozzy doesn't remember much about recording Master of Reality "apart from the fact that Tony detuned his guitar to make it easier to play, Geezer wrote 'Sweet Leaf' about all the dope we'd been smoking, and 'Children of the Grave' was the most kick-ass song we'd ever recorded."

I haven’t read either Ozzy's memoir or Symptom of the Universe, but I want to. That goes for Bill Ward's and Geezer Butler's and Dio's, too, if he has one. And any other books or Mojo retrospectives. That’d be one cool shelf. I’ll keep it in mind for the windowsill at the retirement home.

"Third album syndrome" is an occupational hazard, as much as "coke album" or others are for a recording band of any stature. A band usually has a backlog of material for its first few albums and then finds itself writing new material in the studio for the third one. Master of Reality feels like that a bit. It's really grown on me over the years, though. 

The cover’s kind of lame. Admire its pop art sensibilities, perhaps. Maybe if this ever got enshrined as “Black Sabbath Font” it’d feel more consequential, or the black and purple pairing the "Black Sabbath effect." To me it looks like they didn’t come up with a cover.

The original vinyl came with a poster of the band in a misty forest, at least.

Things get started with "Sweet Leaf." That's Geezer coughing on a spliff there, immortalized on vinyl. This is one that has has escaped rational consideration and escaped into iconography. The groove is a little TOO slow for me, though. It’s not really a favorite or one I put on mixes for myself. But I acknowledge its stature and metal-stoniness and pay all appropriate respects.

Next: "After Forever" This just doesn’t gel, and it’s too bad. The structure is sound, the lyrics aren’t bad, the ideas are good, mainly Ozzy (or someone) just feels a step off. Geezer gave Ozzy a lot of lyrics to cram in, on this one and “Into the Void,” but he’s a bit more successful in the latter. An overtly Christian song despite such lines as "Would you like to see the pope on the end of a rope / do you think he's a fool?"

The album has a couple of intros/ outros given their own names, like "Embryo ." This leads into the best track of the album and an acknowledged Sabbath classic, "Children of the Grave." Metal can be boiled down to this riff, an audience headbanging before intermittent flames, and Ozzy’s vocals filling out the aural space. And that helicopter-drum sound added over things. Doesn’t even matter what he’s singing, but “all you children of today are children of the grave, YEAH!” is (wait for it) pretty metal.

"Orchid" is pretty little filler to start off side two. I like acoustic interludes on metal albums. Again, we have Sabbath to thank for such things, as it became something of a tradition. This leads into "Lord of the World", where that bubbling-bong Sabbath pace (at the speed of bongs!) proceeds with customary swagger. I don’t know what Ozzy is on about (“you made me master of the world…” and the lines around it) but who cares. Not a favorite, but I like the direction/ attempt and structure. There it is again. Bill, Geezer, and Tony worked well together; I look at them as the structural engineers of all the best Sabbath, building aqueducts to stand the centuries as Ozzy (and later Dio et al) run along the top screaming out to the masses. 

Speaking of that at-the-speed-of-bongs velocity of Sabbath, you know what’s a great neo-Sabbath groove? Everything on Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. That album is the best album Sabbath never recorded. Not in a derivative way, just along the lines of the general theme of this series of all rivers leading back to Sabbath. We'll hear from them again momentarily.

"Solitude" is MOR's “Planet Caravan,” so it’s a bit “mellow Sabbath by numbers” and you can see that sort of thing start to creep up in their catalog on this album, I guess. Still cool and all. Dreamy and effective.

And the album wraps up with "Into the Void." I guess this one was difficult to get down, according to all involved. Maybe they overthought it. The syncopation between riff and percussion isn’t totally straightforward, but it just doesn’t click the way it should.  (There’s an alternate take on CD 2 of the expanded version that to my ears sounds a bit more together.) When the second riff and verses coming in, everything goes back to clicking, though - no doubt there. I kind of wish they got the first part down a little more forcefully, though, as it sounds like it’d have rocked. (You know who did? Soundgarden: their version kicks ass.) 

The rest of the song is pretty killer. Not a top tier song for me but plenty of hooks and headbanging.. Iommi should’ve saved a couple of these riffs for songs of their own! There are perhaps two or three too many. Not that I mind. 

~

And that's a wrap on Master of Reality. It was hated when it came out, but its reputation improved over time. That seems right. Definitely a step down from Paranoid, but practically anything would be.  Dirtgrub-metal in the basement on the couch playing some Nintendo, lava lamp and black light optional, gurgling bongs and lots of dubious mustachery: not a bad recipe for a metal album, then or now. 

Paranoid (1970)

 All rivers in the kingdom of heavy metal flow from one source: Black Sabbath. Join me on the dark Hajj through their discography, one album at a time. This is the way.   

(1970)

I was prepared to begin by saying that Paranoid has to be the best album to come out in 1970, simply on account of how iconic, timeless, and acclaimed it is, but then I refamiliarized myself with all that came out in 1970. That was a hell of a year for new albums. (Hell, Black Sabbath isn’t even the only band to put out two new albums that year.) I’d still put the band's self-titled debut and Paranoid in my top five albums of 1970, but I’m unreasonable. I doubt, however, that it's controversial to suggest it's a classic beyond my personal reckoning.

This one should be pretty easy to write about since every song is five stars. One could quibble about this one or that one, but why? A weird hill to defend, never mind die on or be obliterated by the rock artillery fire of something like “Iron Man.” (Which as I type these words is playing as loud as I can get away with, in my office behind closed doors, while my daughter is in her remote classroom in the living room. If I'd been in second grade and my Dad was in the other room cranking Black Sabbath... I don't even know how to finish this sentence. The possibility is not even remote; it's beyond the realm of mathematics. Even nowadays mathematics.)

Let’s look at that cover. Is "WTF" the appropriate question? Ozzy thought so, saying in 1988 “WTF does a bloke dressed as a pig with a sword in his hand got to do with being paranoid, I don’t know.” Black Sabbath has some of the coolest covers going and some of the wtf-iest going.  The cover was again designed by Keith McMillan (no relation). They missed an opportunity to get the cover model from Black Sabbath back and make a trend out of it. At least if it was her in the samurai armor (or whatever the hell you want to call this get-up) there’d be some kind of continuity. Ill-considered, sure, but continuity.

Side one opens up with “War Pigs,” which was originally titled “Walpurgis,” as in “the Satanic version of Christmas,” according to Butler. I don’t know if that's what it is, exactly, but who am I contradict Geezer Butler? “Satan isn’t a spiritual thing, it’s warmongers. That’s who the real Satanists are, all these people who are running the banks and the world and trying to get the working class to fight the wars for them. (But) the record company said “Too Satanic!” So I changed it to ‘War Pigs.’” Ozzy adds (this is all from the Wiki) “Geezer just wasn’t interested in your average ‘I love you’ pop song.”

Ever hear Faith No More’s version of it? Not bad. I used to have it and “Woodpeckers from Mars” on a lot of mixes 1994-ish. Hell, 1994-1995 I was listening to Faith No More all the time. I haven't in awhile; I should. 

“Paranoid” is “Paranoid,” what can you say? One of the best opening riffs/ first verses in metal history, and one of those I-can’t-believe-they-whipped-it-up-on-the-spot sort of deals. Except I can believe it, because that happens so often in music. (See "Dancing in the Dark," "Sweet Child of Mine," so many others.) Anyway, I suspect if you owned an electric guitar in the 80s and were in any way a metal fan, this – and a lot of this album, or as much as you could – was one of the first things you learned how to play. (And if you were like me, once you mastered the riff to "Paranoid," you announced yourself as a "guitar player," even if it was the only thing you knew how to play. It's fun to be fourteen. Usually.)

“Planet Caravan” is the quiet number, a tradition for (most) Sabbath albums to come. This is one of those songs that probably sounds a lot better if you’re high. I mean, most songs do. Not all songs. Faster Pussycat is a notorious exception to this rule. This is a cool mellow, either way, but there’s a certain float-through-the-universe feeling that seems tailor made for marijuana. I love the little bass-and-pan-flute runs that punctuate the melody.

“Iron Man” Isn’t it funny that this song exists and has nothing to do with Tony Stark? That’s true of a couple of Iron Man named things, I guess, but it’s an uncommon enough example of two iconic things sharing the same space.

“The song “Iron Man” was originally entitled “Iron Bloke.” Upon hearing Iommi play the main guitar riff Ozzy remarked it sounded like “a big iron bloke walking around.” Butler wrote the lyrics as the story of a man who time travels into the future and sees the apocalypse. In the process of returning to the present, he is turned into steel by a magnetic field. His attempts to warn the populace are ignored and mocked. This causes Iron Man to be become angry and vengeful, causing the destruction in his vision.”

So says the wiki. Some reactions: (1) ”Iron Bloke” is funny. (2) I love that one of the lyrics is “He was turned to steel in the great magnetic field” but there’s an explainer about how he was turned into steel by a magnetic field. Kind of literal, there. That goes for all of them. And (3) Metal rules. I think it diffused along the culture enough now where it wouldn’t be weird to see just about do a cover, but one of the things I loved about the genre as a kid was how metal could do a cover of anything but not everything could do a cover of metal. Madonna couldn’t just turn on a dime and sing to her audience about all of the above. Ricky Nelson couldn’t sell “Paranoid” to his audience. But Black Sabbath (or Megadeth) was free to do anything it basically wanted to do (so long as it didn't have keyboards. Obvious keyboards.)

Like I say, it’s changed, but I still hear a little bit of “my gang” in this song and I love it. This is the kind of metal shit (along with Van Halen’s “Everybody Wants Some” and any number of other examples) that defined my adolescence. Kids in the 70s and 80s and maybe even the 90s might have all had that in common, as there was a shared “finishing school” of metal iconography that included things like "Iron Man" and there was just no way around it. 

“Electric Funeral” opens side two. This song is possibly my pound-for-found favorite Sabbath song. That’s a tough one. I don’t know, truthfully, what my favorite Sabbath song is, and part of this project is nailing it down some. (You better believe I’m keeping a spreadsheet!) The lyrics are so disturbed-kid-back-of-class-back-of-the-bus-notebook-full-of-mushroom-clouds-y, that riff and slog is just so dirtbag-metal-y, and the fast-break-out part with the frog-voiced “E-lec-tric fyun-ral…” over and over is just great.

And then you get “Hand of Doom.” Good lord this song. I was driving around the other day and this was playing and it was lightly raining in the late afternoon – dwindling light, long shadows. It really drove home how perfectly it captures the “bleak” light, and how underutilized it is for the right sequence in a movie. Not necessarily a drug overdose montage either. (In my head I see snowy, cold 70s streets like The French Connection or something, some kind of cross-montage, steam rising from coffee cups, weary eyes on stakeout, girls with heroin eyes in minidresses flanked by sailors, etc.) Just fantastic, and another example of Sabbath having all the freedom in the world (and bestowing said freedom on the genre itself) for choice of topic or exploration of mood.

“Rat Salad” is a cool little break in things. Bill Ward letting the others catch a smoke break off stage. And then things end with yet another staple of both early metal and early Sabbath, “Fairies Wear Boots.” Tell me this isn’t among the coolest so-many-seconds in metal. They should've gotten into the Hall of Fame based on that minute of music alone. Another one I never appreciated as a kid because I had very specific ideas of what fairies should look or sound like. Seems funny to me now. Apparently Ozzy meant the term in a derogatory way towards some skinheads who jumped him after a show. The past is a different - but familiar - country. 

An iconic finish to an iconic side of an iconic album – just icons all the way down.

~

And there you have it! Black Sabbath must’ve been a hell of a band to see in 1970 if this and Black Sabbath was their playlist. 

Produced by Rodger Bain.

Engineered by Tom Allom and Brian Humphries.