But it’s on the second song they wrote, “Black Sabbath,” where they consecrated their approach. The first original song they they remember writing was “Wicked World,” a skittery blues number about what an abomination the planet was in 1969 with poor people dying in the gutter. The secret to Black Sabbath’s sound in the beginning was that they wanted to be big. When they formed Black Sabbath (né Earth, smartly né the Polka Tulk Blues Band) in 1968, they all were avowed fans of the blues and heavy rock like Jimi Hendrix and Cream but as Butler once said, “We just took it one step heavier.”īlack Sabbath on Sixties Origins: 'We Were Rejected Again and Again'
And Ward had a humble upbringing where his parents encouraged his drumming. Butler grew up in an Irish-Catholic household but suffered from undiagnosed depression causing him to feel like an outcast. Osbourne came from a big family and worked as a car-horn tuner and in a slaughterhouse before spending time in jail for burglary eventually his dad bought him a PA, setting him on the road to music making. Iommi accidentally lopped off the fingertips of his fretting hand, forcing him to relearn the guitar and draw inspiration from Gypsy-jazz virtuoso Django Reinhardt. The band members have each made much of their working-class backgrounds, growing up in post-War Birmingham, England. The reason the music was so game-changing - and so excellent - was because it was a reflection of who these four men were offstage. You can hear the breakneck thrashing of Metallica and Slayer in “Children of the Grave” and “Symptom of the Universe,” the manic riffs of the Sex Pistols and Ramones are steeped in “Paranoid,” and the downer-rock groundwork of grunge reverberates through songs like “War Pigs” and “Into the Void.” Although Black Sabbath went on to record brilliant albums with Ronnie James Dio and Ian Gillan in the Eighties, the group’s original lineup sowed the seeds for a whole musical culture in the previous decade on their first eight LPs. On an album like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the band transitions from the blunt-force riff pugilism of the frightening title cut (dig that almost Black Flaggy breakdown, “Nowhere to run to … “) to the intricate, contemplative “Sabbra Cadabra” within a few minutes - and it makes perfect sense.īut it’s the music that remains most powerful. The band’s first eight albums, the ones made by Osbourne, Iommi, Butler, and Ward, are still vital, enigmatic, and inspiring. Over the next eight years, they used that song as a prototype for new sounds - speeding it up, funking it up, stretching it out, wringing the blues out of it, inverting it into lucious folk music - essentially creating the Rosetta Stone for metal with their early discography.
They wanted to feel scared and they wanted you to feel scared. The song “Black Sabbath,” the first track on their first album, begins with eerie sound effects of rain and church bells (a brilliantly gothic detail that foreshadowed the darkness to come) before exploding with guitarist Tony Iommi’s lumbering, Godzilla stomp of a riff and Osbourne pleading to heaven to deliver him from Satan - lyrics he based on a nightmare bassist Geezer Butler had had. Many bands can claim responsibility for the genre’s bludgeoning guitar lines and intensely intense vocals (Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are obvious go-to’s, and critic Lester Bangs once curiously cited the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat as a starting point), but the group most responsible for metal as the world knows it today is Black Sabbath. The group had nicked its name from a 1963 Boris Karloff horror movie, and both its name and fright-flick lyrics sparked confusion and new mythologies nearly everywhere they went. Their self-titled debut album sported a witchy woman on its cover, their eponymous song detailed an ill-fated dalliance with a demon (“Please God help me!”), and, in the U.K., their label took things one hooved step further by printing an inverted cross on the inside sleeve with a passage about a dead, black swan floating upside down in a lake as a preamble for what was inside. had already publicly flirted with satanism, Black Sabbath - whose members all wore crosses to ward off evil - were much too scary for the United States. They thought we were going to put a spell on you.”Īlthough Mick Jagger and Sammy Davis, Jr. “We had to face the mayor of town,” drummer Bill Ward once recalled. When Black Sabbath first attempted to tour America in 1970, they had a Hell of a time.
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