Technical Ecstasy (1976) and Never Say Die! (1978)

I’ve been spending a post per album in this series, but from here on out we’ll be combining multiple albums in one post. This doesn’t mean everything heretofore is superior to or more deserving of comment than everything else, just there’s only so much I have to say about some things. Another way of putting it: just because I gave every song a deep dive doesn’t mean that you have to. 

(1976)

The idea behind the cover is robots having a quickie on an escalator and then moving on, sort of a commentary on 70s Looking for Mr. Goodbar culture. Pretty self-explanatory, I guess. This is as close as need Sabbath to come to exploring sex of any kind. 

As Geezer said later about this and the next record: "Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive then and we felt that our time had come and gone." And you can hear that self-consciousness on both records. But I'm sympathetic. No one forms a band to just play the same songs the same way over and over again or to stop evolving with whatever scene produced them in the first place. I imagine, too, when you're Black Sabbath or Alice Cooper or any onetime-shock-to-the-status-quo/bold-new-direction, those new zeitgeist warriors are felt even more keenly.

My favorite bits of TE happen on side two: “All Moving Parts (Stand Still)” (what a cool groove) and “Rock and Roll Doctor,” which came on random shuffle once really loud and I had no idea it was Sabbath and was like “What the hell is this, this is great.” I recommend this approach with Technical Ecstasy (and Never Say Die! As well)  - pretty much every song sounds better if isolated from the rest of the album. Anyway I'm an easy mark for any such sentiments. The kid in me thinks they're really talking about rock and roll and not cocaine. Either way, though, whatever works.

Broad overtures to “rock and roll” were popular in the 70s, too, of course, and possibly this was the band pitching their efforts in such a direction. (Possibly Kiss?) I hear Greg Lake (“It’s Alright” sung by Bill Ward) later-era-sad-Ozzy (“She’s Gone”), or more prog-type arrangements (“You Won’t Change Me”) in the mix. 

(1978)

Titles with an exclamation point always crack me up. I used to use examples of how adding one changes the effect completely (“imagine if it was Forrest Gump!” was my go-to example) but literally any example will do and they're all perfect. 

The cover is… cool? Dumb? I can’t tell which. In such circumstances I default to cool.

The back cover works for me just fine, either way. Just like the composition.

They continue their experimenting with 70s sounds on this one. The title track is fine, but Ozzy’s vocals aren’t great and there’s really noting to the riff or arrangement, it’s just kind of an unembellished chord progression. “Johnny Blade” and “Shock Wave” and “Air Dance” all bounce between sort of sounding like other contemporary bands, from Kansas to Thin Lizzy, singalong bro-rock (“A Hard Road,” would’ve been perfect for a certain era of Oasis), and “Over to You” starts promising but doesn't really go anywhere.

Standout tracks:

“Junior’s Eyes” This one really gets in your head. Ozzy’s vocals aren’t great; I guess he was kinda out-to-lunch in the mid-to-late 70s. Anyway I get a mental image of a strangled muppet on Ozzy's vocals in some spots. Cool production, though, and perfectly valid track. I like that Sabbath expanded their comfort zone. 

“Breakout” This is just their filler-instrumental/ ambience track, but it’s pretty cool. Definitely would’ve been great mix-tape fodder had I known it existed back in the day.

And probably my favorite, the album closer, sung by Bill Ward, “Swinging the Chain.” At first I kind of loved this one ironically. Bill’s vocals are enthusiastic but strained, the riff and production are kind of a mess, and there’s the whole Fabulous T-Birds swagger of the ending (“You better be-liiieeeve it!”) which is fantastically ill-considered. And I still think all that, but then I just kind of grew to love the song and don’t want them to fix or change anything. 

I appreciate that the Ozzy era comes to a close with everyone in the band but Ozzy singing “You better believe it!”

~

And that’s a wrap on Sabbath mk1. Here’s how the first Ozzy era breaks down for me, pointswise * least to most favorite:

Technical Ecstasy

Never Say Die!

Vol. 4

Master of Reality

Black Sabbath

Sabotage

Sabbath, Bloody, Sabbath

Paranoid

* How the sausage is made: I assign each track a zero to five rating and add ‘em up, average ‘em out.

The above is just song points total. That can sometimes give a misleading score, as some albums just have more songs than others. (Typically this only becomes a problem when comparing albums from the CD era with those before it, as bands had more space to fill.) The above break down the same by average and total, except Sabotage and Black Sabbath are flipped.

My personal favorite, points or no points, will always be Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath.

I’ll take a break from Sabbath for a few posts before jumping back in with their 80s and beyond stuff. Behind the scenes I’ve already completed the big listenthrough, so now it’s the typing-up-and-sorting-out of the notes and bookmarks and revisiting a few things.

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! 

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.

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

That Ten Albums Thing

You've probably seen this thing in your internet travels:

"10 all-time favorite albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Post the cover, no need to explain, and nominate a person to do the same."

This is the sort of thing I rarely participate in when it's tag-a-friend activity, but I like to chew over on my own time. As I did so, I learned two things: (1) there are albums that have endured with me over the years - and most of them are on the list below, but (2) what was more interesting to me are the albums that - in hindsight - were the key ones in my musical/ personal development. Or the ones that helped get me through/over tough times. Problem with those last kind of albums is how often do you revisit them once you're over whatever tough time or period of growth they helped you with? It can vary and bears discussion. This made the second part of the instructions ("no need to explain") irritating; the only thing that's interesting to me about doing it is explaining it.

Oh, and (3) ten was way too few. So:

But after assembling twenty-five albums and sorting them all out, I decided that was too many. So (with apologies to Ace Frehley, Hapa, Richard Ashcroft, the Who, Sergei Prokofiev, Miles Davis, and more) without any further ado:

Honorable Mention 

aka Okay A Little More Ado:

Jimmy Buffet, Don't Stop the Carnival, 1998

I'm not much of a Jimmy Buffett fan. Outside of this album, I only ever had a couple of others, and none of them stayed with me. This one, though, is great - a commercial failure and virtually forgotten today, but a worthy attempt at a musical based on Herman Wouk's novel of the same name. (The book's pretty good, too.) More than worthy - I'd say it's inspired. Not just a collection of very agreeable tunes, but the story is rendered about as well as it would have been by Broadway professionals. Buffett's whole approach / persona was a good fit for it; too bad it didn't catch fire. (Except with me.)

First heard: Don't quite remember. I listened to it an awful lot driving back and forth to Poughkeepsie in 1998. I do remember getting the CD bounced from the stereo at the Oregon Emporium in Dayton the following year in favor of some (vastly inferior) G Love and Special Sauce. Nobody had time for my Jimmy Buffett bullshit. Same story today!

Favorite tunes: "Public Relations," "Island Fever."

15.

Beatles Anthology, 1995 - 1996

Technically, I don't really listen to the Beatles Anthology all that much anymore, something not true of the next fourteen selections. But for this to come out at arguably the peak of my Beatles hysteria in the early-to-mid 90s (thank you, Kevin Silvia) was incredibly exciting. Actually, the Beatlemania lasted with me from around 1992 through around 2000. But it never really went away - the Beatles still rule. I just ran out of their stuff to listen to. (Technically, there are always new Paul and Ringo albums, but I stopped with Working Classical and I Want to Be Santa Claus, respectively.) 

Favorite tracks: Too many to mention. The alternates for "And Your Bird Can Sing", "Ob-La-Di", and "Norwegian Wood" are pretty awesome. The deep tracks I'd been reading about for years (well, all two of them, but I read everything I could get my hands on about the Beatles in those years) were "Leave My Kitten Alone" and "What's the New Mary Jane". YouTube's kind of tough when it comes to the Fab Four, but here's the "Moonlight Bay" that's on part 1. I love that whole bit from start to finish. 

Shame on them leaving off "Some Other Guy," though. Had to get The BBC Sessions for that one, though not that one, aforelinked.

14.

Operation Ivy, Energy, 1989

Around this time (89) I started getting a ride to school in the morning with my buddy Ryan, and he's the one of the handful of people responsible for getting me out of my all-metal bubble. One of his big tapes was this Op Ivy one, which kicks so much ass, still, that it's difficult to believe it all came out of one band, let alone one album. When I want to remember what the late 80s felt like for me and my buddies in that some-of-us-had-our-license/some-of-us-didn't/we-all-liked-skateboards-and-southern-comfort-and-Metroid era, here it all is.

Favorite tracks: "Sound System," "Gonna Find You," "Smiling," "Vulnerability," "Bankshot," "Bombshell." They're all great.   

Could've also chosen: Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Devil's Night Out, Black Flag - The First Four Years, The Circle Jerks - Wonderful. Or the Ramones greatest hits tape Ryan had. Same impact, same love/ nostalgia for them now. But, of them, the only one I still listen to semi-regularly is Energy.

13.

The Doors soundtrack, 1991

I decided to use this as my Doors stand-in because when I did that one post on the Doors, I realized this does quite a good job of capturing the essential sides of the Doors. Less a soundtrack, more a primer. Of the many soundtracks that came into my life at key junctures (moving from one place to another, graduating from one thing to another, break-ups, new loves, memorable vacations, etc.) this one still casts a pretty long shadow. It was the siren call from the paths I'd been walking into the more beatnik-y realms. 

First Heard It / Favorite Tracks / Reverie: (from that post) "If you ever rode in my car 1990-1992, you'd have found one cassette that never left rotation: The Doors soundtrack, which had among other things, "O Fortuna!" Ten years later, it was in everything from Doritos commercials to movie trailers (especially movie trailers), but back then, I was the only guy in town who had it, and cranking it as I pulled into any parking lot announced me as a singular and fascinating fellow. At least in the adolescent fever of my imagining."

12.

1986

I'm not here to tell you this is the best metal album of the 80s, but it's my vote for the most underrated, maybe not just the 80s but of all time. I say this not really knowing what may or may not be an underrated metal album post 1992 or so, but FFS this one rules. I knew it when I first heard it, I knew it eight years later when I knew "hipper" music, I knew it in 1997 and in 2000 when I went through two of my periodic metal renaissances, and I've known it every year since, right down to a couple of months ago where listening to it put me in a good (and ridiculous) mood for days. Magical alchemy here - still works. 

Favorite tracks: Every last one. But possible favorites: "Call Out the Warning," "Cry Out the Fools," or "Shout It Out." ("Let me touch your soul I'll take you awaaaaaay....!") Holy frakking hell, friends - if that doesn't make you feel like a shirtless and deranged demigod lurking over a pit of lava at the end of all epochs, we're just reading from different playbooks. 

11.

First performed 1853. Maria Callas recording 1958.

I've really been into opera lately, so the importance of this one in my life has only recently revealed itself to me. Back in the late 90s, on the advice of my then-girlfriend's housemate I ended up buying this and making a sincere effort to learn the story. It was easy to listen to - there's a reason La Traviata has been continually performed around the world for over 160 years - but I wasn't ready. I liked it, but I just didn't understand opera. It laid, however, a foundation for the opera house I only began to build in 2017 and am still building now. 

One of these days I'll blog something up about all the opera I've been taking to the brain over the past six months. It's been wonderful. It's like I trained my entire life for it without even realizing. Of that training, the most essential was performed in the 1999-2001 era, and it was listening to this CD and getting an idea of what the genre was and getting the melodies in my head.

Favorite tunes: Here's the Violetta-Germont duet (and more) from the same run of performances captured on the EMI release - not sure if this is the exact same as the one on the CD but worth it just the same.

10.

1995

In 2000 and 2001, I was putting myself back together or perhaps fully-together for the first time in my burgeoning adult life after the relationship I had throughout the 90s ended. In retrospect, it was amazing it lasted as long as it did. More on this in a few entries. Music, as it often does, played a role in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Not just this album, but this one got an awful lot of airplay while driving around Rhode Island during this time. 

Since I first started hearing such things - let's say 1994 or 1995 - I was a fan of the "techno remix" genre. It kind of all reached a head in the late 90s and finally started petering out in the early years of the 21st century, but this techno remix of Blondie tunes scored twice with me: once as just a fun collection of remixed tunes ("Atomic," "Union City Blue," "Sunday Girl," * "Heart of Glass," "Dreaming" - are you kidding me? Blondie's tunes were made for this treatment) and twice as an evocation of all the Blondie I heard growing up, particularly when my Mom would enlist my help in cleaning the house on weekends and she'd play their Greatest Hits cassette.

* It's criminal there is no link to this, and even worse that there is a YouTube version listed as this remix but which is actually the remix from the same album as "Atomic." 

It's this latter memory that lingers with me now: this - as was discovering reruns of TNG on Saturday afternoons in the same period - was one of the first things to trigger nostalgia-time-travel in me as an adult, mainly because I was approaching thirty and had finally accumulated enough years to actually feel nostalgia for bygone ages and the lingering musical/TV ghosts they left in my psyche. 

9.

1990

On a short list of most influential/ life-changing folks in my life is Jello Biafra, former frontman (and main maestro) for the Dead Kennedys. A huge influence on my politics in the late 80s/ early 90s. Throughout the 90s, actually. And although we've drifted in political alignment somewhat over the years his musical legacy in my life - as well as his music's widening of my little suburban cable-TV world - is still celebrated. No moreso than this masterpiece he did with Al Jourgensen from Ministry infamy, which I still listen to fairly regularly. Just fantastic. How tracks like "Mate Spawn and Die" and "Drug Raid at 4 am" never became staples of any kind amazes me. "Drug Raid" especially is the best opening to a Cops spin-off that never happened.

"You can't throw me to the lions - I'm Charlton Heston! 

You can't throw me to the lions - I'M CHARLTON HESTON!"

Could've been: Jello and DOA - Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors. Similar impact, similar awesomeness, similar longevity in my life (right down to last week when I was singing "Full Metal Jackoff"'s ending refrain in response to the news that Ollie North was now the NRA President.) But Last Temptation of Reid gets the nod by a hair.

8.

1995

Ahh, Different Class. Absolute classic. And it doesn't even even have my favorite Pulp song on it ("The Trees"). During the 90s I learned hard truths about America's homegrown caste system via the relationship I was in for almost that whole decade. "Common People" isn't quite an on-the-nose-from-afar description of said relationship/ learning curve, but it's one of those songs that is specific/universal enough to touch a lot of people. It gave me some perspective I needed at the time and makes even more sense in the rearview. That Shatner recorded his own version the year I moved to Chicago seemed at the time like vindication, perhaps even destiny. But beyond McBiography, it's just a kick-ass anthem and an all-time classic. 

The other classic from this one (although every track in the album is great) is "Disco 2000," which was kinda cool to be into when the year 2000 still loomed in the future as some Galactic Barrier of some kind. What a tune, though, regardless.

Could've been: Britpop hit me pretty hard in the mid-to-late-90s. As far as impactful albums go, I could've listed Oasis' "Wonderwall" import UK single (with those killer B-sides), the Stone Roses first album (which was new to me at the time), or Creation Records seminal (and harder to find these days - wish I hadn't have traded it in to Gem City Records for beer money back in the day!) collection International Guardians of Rock and Roll. 

I considered putting in some kind of New Order/ 24 Hour Party People entry, as Madchester-music really took over my life for a year or two, but in retrospect, it was more an outgrowth of this earlier Britpop experience. So in terms of impact, it'd be Different Class over those, even if I arguably loved those more intensely. 

7.

1996

First heard it: When it was in constant rotation in the early days of the coffee shop (aka Java-storm at the Oregon Emporium, Dayton, OH) 1997. I couldn't believe my age were listening to country. There was a country station in RI when I was growing up, and my Dad and the other guys at the VFW were the only ones who listened to it. This changed over the course of the 90s - many theories abound and many more learned than myself have mapped the migratory patterns of listeners and demographics. All I know is: until I finally stopped resisting this album - and it was easy to stop, with its improbable cover versions of Soundgarden, Beck, and Tom Petty - the last country song I liked was "Queen of Hearts" by Juice Newton. (And I'm old enough where having to add "by Juice Newton" pisses me off; who the hell else sings "Queen of Hearts?" Juice Newton owns that.) 

This opened up the whole genre to me, although truthfully is was a brief affair. I discovered I only really enjoyed old country, and in small doses. But (a) the exception is Johnny Cash, whose entire career I love, and (b) it led me to Elvis. So, this one album is responsible for a good 20% of what I listen to, still, every year. 

Favorites tracks: "I've Been Everywhere," which everyone knows thanks to the car commercial or whatever it was, but for awhile was kind of off the beaten track, "Mean Eyed Cat," and "Sea of Heartbreak." 

6.

1984

I often wonder if I'd be as into symphonic music and classical composers had I not spent those 5 childhood years in Germany. Who can tell, but field trips to Salzburg and Vienna certainly left a deep impression. I'd say equal to them was the timely release of Amadeus when I was 10 years old. I loved this movie - still do, but for some reason it captured my imagination completely when I was in 6th grade. (It came out in '84, but I didn't obsess over it until the fall of the following year.) 

Was this the 2nd soundtrack I ever bought? (The 1st was Back to the Future, I know that.) It was not the first classical music I ever bought; that was a Deutsche Grammophone cassette of Beethoven's 5th and 6th symphonies, which still sounded flawless for at least 20 years after. (Easily the best constructed cassette I ever owned). But it was Amadeus that opened up pretty much all symphonic music for me, and it's an affection that has grown deeper within each year since. 

Favorite tracks: Look, friends, you can't get go wrong with Mozart. His music is the epitome of the enlightenment ideal, and it still looks and sounds pristine and heavenly and like nothing else ever created centuries later. I won't get into whether the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (conducted by Sir Neville Marriner) is the best representation of the material, only that since this is what I first learned Mozart from, it is under Sir Neville's baton and as interpreted by that Academy that the material sounds right to me. There is considerable disagreement about who "gets" Mozart the best, conducting-wise, so I mention it only to note my own bias. 

Anyway, they're all favorites. If you like metal, then the "1st Movement of Symphony #25" is probably your jam. Also very metal: "Act 2, Scene 24" from Don Giovanni. But this is an excellent selection of Mozart, here, spread out over 2 discs. Whenever I see anyone with a "Best of" Cd, I wonder why they didn't just get this one.

Or, you know, everything. It's Mozart! FFS.

5.

1991

If I had to pick a single Sinatra record to represent the man's music, I'd pick his first one for Reprise Records, Ring-a-Ding-Ding (1961). To paraphrase Michael Cera's character from the criminally underrated Youth in Revolt, the world would be a better place if radio stations added this to its daily rotation. 

But it was this CD that had the actual impact (and led me to Ring-a-Ding-Ding, years later.) I don't listen to this CD very much anymore. It was the compilation disc of a Sinatra Reprise box from around the same time. Both were completely off my radar until I got to college and my buddy Andy down the hall introduced my to Sinatra. As with Amadeus and so many more of these selections, it opened up an entire genre to me (old time crooney and big band stuff) that seems to become more and more of a favorite with each passing year. 

Andy, by the way, used to drive this convertible Saturn that was a pretty sweet ride. He was one of those guys who played his car music at ear-splitting, punishing volume. I went to visit him in New Jersey once and he took me into New York City for the first time. As we crossed over the George Washington Bridge and descended into the skyscrapers, he cued up "Theme from New York, New York." Top ten moments of my youth, right there. 

Years Later: I've never listened to every Frank Sinatra record, but I once made an attempt. It gets a little squirrelly as you get into the late 60s and 70s (altho this disco remix of "All or Nothing at All" is pretty great) but I'm still a huge fan. I listen to his entire Capital Records era in order at least once every few years, and I've got my own mixes of his Reprise and Columbia years in even more frequent rotation than that. 

4.

1988

The message and ideology of Mindcrime has only grown more prescient in the 30 years since its release. But beyond its dystopian fatalism and the (considerable) artfulness of the story, it's just such a killer collection of music. Heavy metal opera at its finest. Side 1 is pound for pound (performance, Viking axe assault, intensity of message, theatricality, etc.) probably the greatest side of heavy metal ever created. (Wikipedia lists side 2 beginning with "Suite Sister Mary," but that's crazy: my copy and everyone else's I knew had side 2 starting with "The Needle Lies.") 

"I used to trust the media

To tell me the truth, tell us the truth

But now I've seen the payoffs

Everywhere I look

Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?"

Favorite tracks: "Speak," "The Mission," and "Spreading the Disease."

3.

1973

From the moment a young me (7 or 8 ish) heard the opening crunch to the title track, it was over: metal for life. Well, life-ish: for me, metal more or less ends in the early 90s. But the metal-lest of them all is Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. 

My brother had this on one side of a cassette, and Saxon's Crusader was on the other. Crusader also could be listed (along with Judas Priest's Sin After Sin) in this spot, for all the same reasons. But Sabbath has been one of those all-purpose albums for me that we all have that gets picked when you can't really figure out what else you want to hear; it fits pretty much any mood or situation I need it for. (Well, most.) It's great for road trips as well as quiet nights at home. It defines metal for me so precisely that I feel silly saying anything more; just crank it.

Favorite tracks: "Sabbra Cadabra" all the way; Ozzy's voice coming in when and how it does around the fifty-two second mark is a contender for coolest moment of the 20th century. 

2.

1978

Around the same time as I was listening to my brother's walkman copies of the above, I was listening to one he made for me of his double vinyl of this progressive rock masterpiece. This was my entrypoint into HG Wells and all the countless worlds beyond and for that alone it would be high up on this list, but not this high. Here it is at the penultimate spot for two reasons: 

(1) I spent a lot of time in the Germany years looking out the window of buses or cars at a landscape so utterly unlike the Pawtucket, Rhode Island one I'd known in the late 70s. I listened to this musical so much during those years that burned over my montage of Euro-memories is this riff, this sound, and this sound. I remain profoundly grateful for (and rather bewildered by) this. 

And (2) it became, through no planning for this on my part, my Thanksgiving album. When I cook or clean up or any part of it. Usually fits the time spent having to do any of that quite well, and I've come to look forward to it year to year.

The art that came with it was the equal of the production.

And finally:

1.

2004

It's impossible for me to describe the impact of this album on my life during the spring and summer of 2005. I will, of course, try.

The year before had seen me at a very low point. I'd arrived in Chicago the way shipwrecks wash up on the reef and was crashing on a couch, then finally got a job and could afford an air mattress and room of my own, and so forth up the long ladder back to normalcy. I turned 30 during this time and was working at the since-closed Virgin Megastore at Ohio and Michigan. It was there I first heard SMiLE, at a promotional release event of some kind, although mainly I just remember hearing something weird over the speakers and trying to figure out what it was. When it really clicked with me was months later on a hungover train ride home one Sunday morning - on a discman, no less - when a lack of sleep, hydration, rest, and somewhat random choice of musical accompaniment made it the backdrop of a deep epiphany: I was only getting more and more depressed and something had to change. It was a Larry Underwood Pays the Bills kind of moment.

Which he/ I did - but that's a story for another time. Brian Wilson's SMiLE * proved uniquely healing for me; it seems almost designed to piece back together a shattered ego in a more productive and sensitive direction. Whether or not this is all just my projection on it, who knows, but the music itself is undeniable. It's abstract, multi-layered, a masterclass of sequencing, innocent yet tortured, a sonata gone mad, and just a fun, fun record. 

And it fucking ends with "Good Vibrations!" My friends, if you're going to go crazy and then come back to reality - and here I refer to the work's author and not myself; nothing I've done equals the drama of Mr. Wilson's life - this is the wormhole you want to do it with.

* And it really could be called Darian Sahanaja's and Brian Wilson's SMiLE, so instrumental is Darian's contribution to the project.

A beautiful record that blows away any description of it I could give. The way it weaves in and out of sadness from "Our Prayer" on its hard-earned way to "Good Vibrations" can only be experienced. Favorite tracks: "Good Vibrations," obviously, but also "Wonderful," "Surf's Up," "Vege-tables," and "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow."

Quick p.s. Original post had a lot more about acid and my enduring love of the original Beach Boys famously unfinished Smiley Smile Sessions, particularly "Whistle In" and "Can't Wait Too Long." (Especially that last one.) But I wanted to keep the focus on Brian Wilson's specific 2004 version, bless it to fractals.

~