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.

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