THE QUICKEST WAY TO YOUR HEART

WHAT IS THIS THAT STANDS BEFORE ME?


1. BOW DOWN AND ALL HAIL

How appropriate & awesome is it that 50yrs ago today, Black Sabbath released their landmark debut album which went on to change everything? Originally named 'Earth' (shortened from 'Earth Blues Company'), Sabbath has been so influential in the textbook development of heavy metal that they almost single-handedly (outside of fellow dazed n' birthing pioneers Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple & Uriah Heep) became thee defining force in the style - without realizing they practically invented the genre. Innovators, inventers & godfathers alike, the group took the murky blues-rock sludge sound of late '60s acts like Cream, Blue Cheer & Vanilla Fudge to its logical conclusion by slowing the tempo, accentuating the bass and emphasizing screaming guitar solos & singer Ozzy's howled vocals full of lyrics expressing mental anguish that incorporated macabre dreamscapes & hallucinatory fantasies further exploring ghostly netherworld themes. Their self-titled 1st release on original UK label Vertigo, featured an inner gatefold sleeve with an inverted cross & a poem written inside of it. The band's British label were allegedly responsible for adding the cross to which the band was reportedly upset upon discovery as it fuelled allegations that they were Satanists or Occultists (which they would deny for many years afterwards). In his 2010 autobiography, Ozzy stated that after the inclusion of the inverted cross, to the best of his knowledge no one raised any fuss or alarm. The album was released in the USA by American label Warner Bros. in June (without the gatefold & by which time they had returned to the studio to begin work on their anticipated 2nd album 'Paranoid'). According to guitarist Tony Iommi, the complete debut album sessions were done in a day by a marathon live set in the studio after which they played in Switzerland the next day for £20. If their predecessors clearly came out of an electrified blues tradition, Sabbath took that tradition in a whole new direction & in so doing, their essence helped give birth to a musical style that continues to attract millions of fans 5 decades later. Certainly, rock n' roll would not have been the same had Sabbath not existed - and at this point now their omission would be undeniably impossible to conceive.

2. SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY CAME

Late 1950s
John 'Ozzy' Osbourne, Anthony Frank 'Tony' Iommi, Terry 'Geezer' Butler & Bill Ward all grow up within half a mile of each other in the Birmingham, England suburb of Aston, a working class neighbourhood hit particularly hard by German bombs during WWII. This dismal rainswept industrial heartland is known for factories with smoke belching chimneys, immigrants, gangsters & delinquency. Iommi regularly bullied Ozzy when they attended the same elementary school.

Mid 1960s
After learning to play guitar, from 1964-65, Iommi played in blues rock band THE ROCKIN' CHEVROLETS which had regular bookings & when they were offered work in Germany, he decided to leave his job. He lost the tips of 3 fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident on his last day of work in a sheet metal factory. Rather than give up, he instead attempted to continue playing right-handed where he strung his guitars with lighter strings & made plastic thimble tips to extend his fingers and began playing left-handed. From 1966-67 he played in THE REST with Ward for the first time.

1968
In Jan 1968, Iommi forms MYTHOLOGY with drummer Ward joining a month later in mid-Feb. That May, police raided the group's practice flat and found cannabis resin which resulted in a £15 fine & a 2yr conditional discharge for the band. The band splits up in Jul but the 2 musicians stay together. In Aug, RARE BREED featuring diehard Beatles fan & budding petty criminal Ozzy on vocals with bassist Butler has also broken up but the 2 musicians stay together. Ozzy places an ad in a local music shop and enlists the ex-Mythology duo (Iommi is unsuspecting that it's the same Ozzy he used to beat up on the playground as a kid) along with slide guitarist Jimmy Phillips & saxophonist Alan 'Aker' Clarke. The 6piece band are named THE POLKA TULK BLUES BAND after either a cheap brand of talcum powder Ozzy saw in his mother's bathroom, or an Indian/Pakistani clothing shop. After just 2 or 3 gigs, Phillips & Clarke are booted & the name is soon shortened to Polka Tulk which is then changed to EARTH which Ozzy hated. Whittled down to a quartet, the band plays mainly covers & extended blues jams and records several demos. In Dec, Iommi abruptly left due to an offer to join Jethro Tull. His stint is very short-lived & while he appears with them on the Rolling Stones' tv special 'The Rock & Roll Circus', the program never airs.

1969
Unsastisfied with the direction of Tull, Iommi returns to Earth in Jan - albeit with a new attitude & appreciation for hard work. While playing shows, the band realized that another outfit was also entitled 'Earth' (who had minor success in England) & to avoid confusion with the other group, decided to rename themselves. The switch would prove to be pivotal: at one rehearsal, Butler & Iommi work out a song Butler dubbed "Black Sabbath" (taken from the 1963 Boris Karloff schlock horror movie of the same name which had been playing in a theatre across the street from the band's rehearsal space). Inspired by a nightmarish vision Butler had of a black silhouetted figure standing at the foot of his bed, the lyrics are co-writtwen by Ozzy as a warning against Satanism & reflective of the dalliances with the supernatural among the British rock underground at the time. Of the 4 members, Butler is the most taken with the ideas & the others eventually follow his lead in varying degrees. Said Butler: "All the love & peace thing had gone. The Vietnam War was happening and a lot of kids were getting into all kinds of mysticism & occultism. I was lying in my bed one night and woke up suddenly & there was this black shape... I wasn't on drugs or anything but for some reason I thought it was the Devil himself. It was almost as if this thing was saying to me - it's time to either pledge allegiance or piss off." Making use of the musical tritone known as 'The Devil's Interval', the band debuts the song before a stunned crowd in Apr. Because of his earlier accident, Iommi's playing would immensely affect the sound: by detuning his guitar (Butler did the same) from E to C# (a minor third down) in order to ease the tension on his fingers, the technique (filled with powerchord riffing & distortion which would become a highly recognizable & endless mainstay of the metal sound) mirrored perfectly with the growing ominous nature & sinister lyrics pushing the band in a darker direction -- a stark identifiable contrast to the late 1960s pop domination rife with folk, flower power & hippies. (Sabbath had nothing against the counterculture; they just didn't connect with the peace n' love vibe. The freewheeling, light & easy-going situational moods of the 60's new age youth movements further didn't apply to the band's more serious no-nonsense mentality which forged an image of being the perfect antidote to pop & an antithesis to fluff). With their new sound, in Aug they rechristened as BLACK SABBATH aiming to focus on writing similar material as a musical equivalent of horror films. In Nov, Sabbath is signed to Philips Records & is given 2 days of studio time to record their debut.
1. With their unusual, never-before heard sound, Sabbath's demo (not very different from their record) was far heavier & darker than anything rock-oriented that had come before - inundated with its blues foundations combining atmospheric drumming, jazz rhythms, innovative riffs, slowed down emphasis on bass, staggering spooky lyrics & eerie vocal melodies. Although a pivotal shift marking the beginning of the doom n' gloom sound which mushroomed through individualist tones & styles of playing, early reaction & response to the band wasn't seen as favorable or groundbreaking and thus unfairly, Sabbath proved too different & weird with their defined sinister approach. Their demo was turned down by 14(!) straight record companies who couldn't identify because of lame reasoning that there was no current hit on the charts that even remotely came close to what the band was presenting. Executive label snobs were very afraid of what was new & unsafe and just 'didn't get it' and so therefore dismissed them. Undaunted from the repeated rejection however, perserverance paid off: A&R from Vertigo (who weren't scared off by witchcraft & devil worship allegations) recognized the band clearly had something no one else at the time did & were impressed enough to sign them.

1970
The band released their first single 'Evil Woman' through subsidiary Fontana Records in Jan. The self-titled debut is released on Friday Feb 13 as a collection of all the finished songs they had at the time. Few critics knew what to make of it but the band's growing audience of dope fiends & other fringe dwellers snatched it up as the real deal. The week it went onto the charts it sold 5200 copies & from that moment on, the band knew immediately it was in the big leagues. Confounding critics even more was the album's immediate success in America where is stayed on the charts for 18 months when it reached 23 on the Billboard 200. While the album was a commercial success, it was widely panned with the noted Lester Bangs dismissing it in a terrible Rolling Stone review as "Just like Cream! But worse... discordant jams with bass & guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other's musical perimeters, yet never quite finding synch... a shuck - despite the murky song titles & some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés." With the passage of time, reviews became more positive & with continued selling in substantial numbers (giving the band their first mainstream exposure), the launchpad debut is now deservingly lauded as a classic as well as perhaps the first true heavy metal album.
2. Iommi would later say the band saw themselves as 'hard rock' or 'heavy rock' and that the first time he heard the term "heavy metal" to describe Sabbath's sound, it was in a context not musically whatsoever but infact from a disagreeable critic using a derogatory example in a negative review. The writer compared them to "a load of clanking heavy metal being dropped, producing a godawful racket of nothing but pure noise."

3. AND THE REST AS THEY SAY...

Just prior to recording the album, Sabbath did an extended run at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany. To get through the rigorous demands of playing the several hours 6 nights a week, Ozzy pulled several stunts - the most memorable being painting his entire body purple one night. The band also created sketches for many new songs based on riffs that Iommi & Butler came up with. These provided the backbone for their 2nd album 'Paranoid', ultimately helping more to cement the heavy metal aesthetic and the title track (their shortest to that point which was completed from top to bottom in as little as 20-25min.) becomes an anthem after reaching the Top 10 in the U.S. (becoming the band's only top 10 hit). They continued to be a lightning rod for controversy when their first American tour coincided with the sensational Manson Family trial & complaining accusations that the last line of the Paranoid track advocated suicide. When asked about it, Ozzy said: "I don't know what people were hearing. I've always said 'enjoy' life not 'end' your life." As the Sabbath name picked up steam, Butler said: "We knew we'd made it when we played a gig in Nottingham and we got taken in a car instead of a van & we found an ounce of hash waiting for us in the dressing room. It was like, yes! This is the life!" Posited as the metal kings of the '70s, the band expanded their song range with compositions dealing with social instability, political corruption, the dangers of drug abuse (ironic considering their own intake) & the often frightening apocalyptic prophesies of war (providing a sometimes controversial foundation to this day that depending on the listener's point of view either hails or condemns current global evils). As their career progressed and multiple platinum records piled up in the USA & UK, the 4 arguably succumbed more n' more to the subject matter of their music & their substance abuse amongst peers became legendary. Ozzy's incessant binging on alcohol & cocaine was the most to get out of control and in Apr 1979 he was fired from the band after which he began a very successful solo career selling more than 55 million albums & as would happen many times, his artistic intentions would be roundly misinterpreted or derided as schtick & gimmick.

Not surprisingly, the burden to live up to the Sabbath image most often fell on frontman Ozzy & through his sheer ability to survive relatively unscathed (a true miracle considering the same demons would have killed a lesser man long ago), he's managed to easily introduce the Sabbath legacy to several new generations of fans with his present position as one of the most recognized pop culture figures on the planet. The band went on to experience multiple line-up changes, with Iommi the only constant presence in the group through the years. A total of no less than 30 musicians have at one time been members, with 7 different singers after Ozzy's departure. The self-titled debut album has since been credited with spawning stoner rock, doom metal & goth and in 1989, Kerrang! magazine listed it 31 among the 100 greatest heavy metal albums of all time. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it 241 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. MTV ranked them the greatest metal band of all time & they placed 2nd in VH1's 100 greatest artists of hard rock behind Zeppelin. Having reformed with Ozzy at the helm to often headline metal-fests, to date, Black Sabbath have sold over 100 million records worldwide. In 2006, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & were later included among Rolling Stone's list of 100 greatest artists of all time. Their merchandising is a guaranteed bonafide self-sufficient industry for years to come. With their sheen on practically every band from Black Flag to Nirvana, their resonating pure power is evidently here to stay. And that's a great thing. Not bad at all for a band whom despite its fame, hype, popularity, adulation, worship, superstardom & of course respect, Ozzy had once viewed in a humble manner: "To us, being in a successful group seemed the quickest way out of the fucking slums." Indeed.