I have to tread carefully whenever I write about Black Sabbath. I have quite a few friends in cyberspace who are the hardest-core Black Sabbath fanatics. Black Sabbath is to them what the Beatles are to me - it's their favorite music, and they're extremely knowledgeable about it. So with that said, here I go...
On Feb 13, 1970 [Friday the 13th!], Black
Sabbath unleashed their debut album on an unsuspecting public. The band Black Sabbath came from the remains
of two bands – Rare Breed [with Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler] and Mythology
[with Tony Iommi and Bill Ward]. When
these four guys came together, it was under the name of the Polka Tuck Blues
Band. They simplified things and changed
their named to Earth. There’s the
oft-repeated story of how they got the name Black Sabbath. Their rehearsal spaces were across the street
from a movie theatre. The movie that was
playing was Boris Karloff’s Black Sabbath. Geezer Butler noted that people would pay
money to have the crap scared out of them, so at his instigation they adopted
the name of the Karloff movie for the new name of their band. They started out as a twelve-bar blues band that was influenced by the likes of Cream and the Jimi Hendrx Experience. They just wanted to be louder so people would shut up and pay attention to the music during their shows. During their time, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were often considered "heavy," but the difference between those bands and Black Sabbath was a bass that had a dominant, leading sound. That's what Geezer Butler brought to the band, and he's one source of the "heaviness" of Black Sabbath's sound.
Tony Iommi and his riffs are the beginning and ending of all things Sabbath.. Tony Iommi’s greatness lies in the almighty
riff. Regardless of whoever else happened to be in Black Sabbath, the
bedrock of every Black Sabbath song is the riff. I can’t think of
many memorable Sabbath solos, but there are many memorable Sabbath riffs. Then there is the detuning. The last day of the last time Tony Iommi
worked a “day job” he lost parts of the fingertips on two fingers of his
fretting [right] hand in an accident on the job. He fabricated prosthetic
fingertips so he could play without pain. He used the lightest strings he
could find [banjo strings at first]. He also detuned his strings to ease
the tension on his fingers. Detuning gave Sabbath a heavier sound.
He couldn’t get that effect with standard tuning and heavy gauge strings. Lyrically, Black Sabbath was not about what many of their contemporaries
were about, namely peace, love and hippie shit. These guys [usually
Geezer Butler] wrote around more bleaker aspects of life - drugs, war,
the occult, the end of the world, and paranoia. I guess growing up in
Birmingham, England does that to people.
After they got a recording contract with Vertigo, the
band had one day to record their album. According
to Tony Iommi, it was like another gig.
They went into the studio, banged out their tunes, and then went to
Switzerland the next day to play a gig.
Ozzy’s voice sounds a bit rough because they had been gigging a lot
prior to their studio date. Also during
the recording, Tony’s main guitar [a Fender Stratocaster] had a pickup stop
working. In those days one didn’t just
replace a malfunctioning part – you had to get a new guitar. Faced with this problem Tony switched to his
backup guitar, a Gibson SG. He has been
playing Gibson SGs and custom SGs made by other luthiers ever since [SG Lou
Moritz, for one :-)]. As for the record itself, it’s a
crystal-clear sounding recording. It
doesn’t sound sludgy like Paranoid or
Master of Reality. Tony’s guitar is in one channel [right]; Geezer’s
bass the other [left], the vocals and drums are in the middle. Musically, one can hear jazz and blues
influences all over the album. It sounds
like it was recorded mostly live with minimal overdubs
Black Sabbath -
I often describe the opening chord to A
Hard Day’s Night as the “big bang of the British invasion.” Black
Sabbath, the first song from the album and the band with the same name, has
the same effect. The album starts with a
ringing church bell, and a thunderstorm followed by the three-note blast that
opens Black Sabbath - this is the “big bang of
heavy metal.” It marks the birth of a
genre. To my knowledge [I could be
wrong], popular music had stayed away from using the tritone, the diabolus in musica that had been
avoided since the Middle Ages. Tony
Iommi didn’t set out to make evil music – he just thought that combination of
notes sounded cool. The story itself
comes from Ozzy and Geezer. It’s a
cautionary tale about messing with the occult.
According to legend, Ozzy loaned Geezer a book about the occult. Geezer read it, went to sleep, and when he
awoke there was this black figure at the foot of his bed.After Ozzy’s
last scream of “No! No! Please! No!” [He really does sound like he’s scared
shitless] Tony’s wah-wah drenched guitar sounds like it’s sucking Ozzy down
into the pits of Hell.
Black Sabbath
The Wizard – It
starts out with Ozzy’s harmonica, then the crushing riff from Tony Iommi. The Wizard isn’t an evil guy. Everybody is happy when The Wizard is nearby [“He
turns tears into joy/Everyone’s
happy when the wizard walks by…”], he makes clouds go
away, and he makes demons and their evil power go the other way whenever he’s
nearby. He’s a benevolent Gandalf-like
character.
Wasp/Beyond the
Wall of Sleep/Bassically/N.I.B. – Sabbath was in the habit of giving the
introductions to their songs [and the codas as well] their own names. So it is with Wasp. On the American version of the album [my copy is part of the
“Black Box”] the songs here are bound together as one song that’s almost
10-minutes long. After 38 seconds of Wasp, Tony starts the riff for Beyond the Wall of Sleep. The lyrics are supposedly based on the H.P.
Lovecraft story of the same name. In
that story, a hick from the Catskills is locked away in an insane asylum. While he’s sleeping he’s attacked by nightly
visions of “otherworldly” things. This
is not your usual pop song fare. At 2:30
the Wasp theme picks up again until
2:47, when Ozzy starts singing again about the Wall of Sleep. The song fades out with just Bill Ward’s
drums, and then segues into Bassically.
Bassically is a Geezer Butler bass
solo that links Beyond the Wall of Sleep
and N.I.B. Apparently Geezer doesn’t like bass solos,
and yet here he is playing one. It’s a
short solo, one that ends with Geezer playing the N.I.B. riff, a skull crushing riff if there ever was one. Contrary to what I thought in the early
1980s, N.I.B. is not an acronym for
‘Nativity in Black’ or ‘Nuns in Black.’
The title refers to Bill Ward’s beard, which was in the shape of a fountain
pen’s nib. The name is a Sabbath inside
joke. Of course, the name has nothing to
do with the song. N.I.B. is a satanic love song, by which I mean Lucifer fell in love
for the first time and tried his best to persuade the object of his affections
to come with him [“My name is Lucifer,
please take my hand…”]. But did
Lucifer get the girl? [“Now I have you
with me under my power/Our love grows stronger now with every hour…”]
Wasp/Beyond the
Wall of Sleep/Bassically/N.I.B.
Wicked World – A
short song by Sabbath standards, Wicked
World is a bit of social commentary.
The lyrics say it all – the world is a bad place [“The world today is such a wicked place…”]. People are fighting wars, just barely getting
enough to eat with the jobs they work, and they’re dying of lots of diseases
despite Man’s ability to land on the moon.
Of note, this is the only song Tony recorded with his Stratocaster
before the pickup on the guitar crapped out.
The intro sounds like a jazz record [thanks to Bill Ward’s hi-hat swing
intro], but after close to a minute Tony picks up the riff which Geezer
doubles.
A Bit
of Finger/Sleeping Village/Warning – As with Wasp/Beyond the Wall of Sleep/Bassically/N.I.B.,
these songs are all bound together as one. This
group of songs starts with an acoustic guitar and a Jew’s harp [A Bit of Finger], then at 0:54 the
electric guitar kicks in the Sleeping
Village riff. The Sleeping Village instrumental continues
until 3:46, where Geezer starts playing a doomy bass riff to start Warning.
At 7:08, Tony starts to solo…and solo…and solo. He kept up the soloing until 12:48, where he
starts another riff when Geezer and Bill Ward join him. Except for the opening riff, there’s nothing
doomy or scary here – it’s got a jazzy feel.
Ozzy starts singing again at 13:26 to the accompaniment of the opening
riff. Warning is not a Sabbath original. It came from Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation,
but it’s a good cover. If memory serves,
this would be the last time a cover would appear on a Black Sabbath album.
A Bit
of Finger/Sleeping Village/Warning
Evil
Woman – This was Black Sabbath’s first single. It’s a cover first done by an American band
named Crow. Nothing to see here…move
along.
When Black Sabbath
was new in 1970, critics hated it – now it’s a classic. When they started, Black Sabbath was a
blues/jazz-based band, and you can still hear a lot of that feel in most of
these songs. The next two Black Sabbath albums [Paranoid and Master of
Reality] is where the blues and the jazz make way for the heaviness and the
sludge. IMHO, the only “scary” song out of this collection is the title track,
but the band established the heavy metal template here. The influence of this album is immeasurable –
heavy metal was born here. Black Sabbath is a dark, gloomy, loud masterpiece that forever altered the musical landscape.
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