Later (2021)

"Sometimes growing up means facing your demons."

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

Longer and spoiler-ier: 

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

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

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

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

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

Needle scratch!

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

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

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

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

Except hold it, wait one,

That whole story is fiction."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any day of the fucking week."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

Master of Reality (1971)

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

(1971)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

Paranoid (1970)

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

(1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

Produced by Rodger Bain.

Engineered by Tom Allom and Brian Humphries.

Black Sabbath (1970)

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

(1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Black Sabbath” 

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

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

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

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

“The Wizard”

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

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

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

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

“Behind the Wall of Sleep”

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

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

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

“N.I.B.”

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

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

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

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

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

Some great damn metal right here, friends.

“Evil Woman”

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

“Sleeping Village”

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

“Warning”

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

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

~

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

Black Sabbath (1970)

Produced by Roger Bain 

Engineered by Tom Allom and Barry Sheffield

Tour of Duty (1987 to 1990)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stan Foster as Marvin Johnson (SP4/Sgt)

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

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

Johnny McKay (1st Lt)

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

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

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

L. Travis Clark

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