Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Artist: Black Sabbath
Label: Vertigo Records
Released: 1970
Running time: 38:12
Rating: 4.5/5
The legendary Black Sabbath, pioneers of heavy metal, can surely boast one of the most colorful careers in rock history, one with no shortage of highs and lows. The cult quartet, who in 1969 were still a blues rock outfit called Earth, found out there was already a band with that name and renamed themselves after the infamous holiday of all real and imagined witches (or rather, after the 1963 film of the same name, a horror flick starring Boris Karloff). The band was made up of four unusually colorful characters, and the most notorious of them to this day is surely the charismatic-yet-troublesome singer John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, who later found fame with a solo career too. The band’s technical firepower, meanwhile, always lay in the hands of the great guitar innovator and oddball Tony Iommi (to this day the only member of every single Sabbath incarnation), the striking bassist and lyricist Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler, and the ‘bone-breaking’ drummer Bill Ward.
What instantly won Black Sabbath their reputation as the ‘bad boys’ in a sea of musical idealists, right after the cult self-titled debut came out, was the infamous aura of the occult and blackness that surrounded them through most of their career, and which led plenty of people to link them with Satanism. The upside-down cross on the inner sleeve of the record only fueled that belief. Ozzy and Geezer’s lyrics on »Black Sabbath« really were packed with metaphors about run-ins with apparitions and biblical demons, which is especially interesting given that Butler was raised Catholic, but every member of the band always denied any kind of Satanic worship. The lads came from a gray, hopeless Birmingham working-class environment, so they certainly had plenty of material to draw on for lyrics, and later, once he was famous and doing his own thing, Ozzy made a big business out of those supposed occult connections.
Black Sabbath weren’t the only dark band ‘chasing the devil’s tail’ or singing about post-apocalyptic visions at the time (the prog rock pioneers King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator, along with the openly occult Black Widow, had already scared people a year earlier with their prophetic predictions of a grim future and plenty of brutal sonic outbursts), but they did it most consistently and devoted the bulk of their career to it. While those prog legends swore mainly by the technical chops of individual members, Sabbath gave the central place in their sonic collage to the punch of muddy riffs draped over slow rhythms, a logical consequence of their blues roots and of Iommi’s factory accident, in which he lost the tips of two fingers on his right hand and had to tune his guitar lower because of it. In the process they accidentally invented a new genre of rock music, later recognized as heavy metal.
The title track is a cult masterpiece and pretty much the embodiment of classic Black Sabbath: a true portrait of gloom, nightmares and the occult all in one, and one they still ‘hang’ on every gig setlist to this day. One of the most evil and sinister rock compositions of all time, its lyrics and ambience mesh perfectly with the eerie album cover, which shows a mysterious woman in black standing in front of an old mill at the edge of the woods, looking like she’s getting ready for a witches’ sabbath. This ‘picture and likeness of evil’ opens with the sound of rain and a tolling church bell calling people to a ‘black mass’, until Iommi’s crushing guitar riff, sounding like thunder from a clouded sky, breaks the whole thing open. The slow, rolling tempo, built on irritated bass lines and gloomy drum fills, kneads together a distinctly depressive and spine-chilling atmosphere. Ozzy’s frightened-yet-malicious, hair-raising vocal tells of a close encounter with the lord of hell. After the slow first part, the ending brings a complex instrumental section with brutal guitar passages and a drum stampede.
By Geezer’s own account, he got the inspiration for this classic from a real event: he woke up in the middle of the night from a heavy nightmare and suddenly saw a creepy figure draped in black at the foot of his bed for a short moment. Before that bizarre incident, this born Catholic had painted the walls of his bedroom black and hung upside-down crosses and pictures of Satan on them. Before bed he’d been reading a book on witchcraft borrowed from Ozzy, and when he woke up, the apparition vanished into a glow of light after a brief standoff. And the borrowed witchcraft book vanished along with it, which was the most bizarre part of the whole thing. At the first opportunity Geezer told Ozzy about it, and Ozzy then wrote the unforgettable lyrics mentioned above.
The bluesy evergreen »The Wizard« is laced with the mischievous sound of Ozzy’s harmonica and Iommi’s choppy, ready-for-battle guitar riff. The cheeky harmonica is kept company by grooving bass lines and cowbells. You hardly have to guess that this classic was made under the influence of intoxicating substances while reading about Gandalf’s adventures in Middle-earth. Ozzy sings about the exploits and travels of the famous literary wizard. Tolkien’s works were hugely popular among countless rock bands, especially around the turn of the sixties into the seventies. It’s also the only track on the album that doesn’t revolve around dark, depressing themes or the occult, and it has a positive outlook. »Behind the Wall of Sleep« is another standard steeped in mythological themes, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s story »Beyond the Wall of Sleep«. The tempo is slow here too, with a red-hot guitar riff slicing through the air while Ozzy’s ‘wailing’ echoes like a person lost in the middle of a post-apocalyptic desert. Iommi’s guitar finesse, led by the solo, is still a real feast for the ears today, and Geezer’s closing bass solo is no less spectacular.
That flows straight into the classic »N.I.B.«, which features one of Iommi’s most characteristic guitar riffs. With its punch, it helped establish numerous heavy metal standards for generations to come. The mood is once again gloomy and shattering, with Ozzy’s tormented vocal. Most fans long thought »N.I.B.« stood for »Nativity in Black«, since the lyrics tell of the world through the eyes of the fairy-tale lord of hell, but many years later Ozzy said in an interview that it refers to drummer Bill Ward’s ‘goatee’. The band members liked to set it on fire with a lighter as childish pranks, which once nearly ended in tragedy.
»Evil Woman«, a cover of the obscure American blues rock band Crow, has a much looser vibe than most of the album and, as its title suggests, is about heartbreak. Ozzy complains here about the pain in his heart, but if he’d known what awaited him in the not-so-distant future, or what kind of witch he’d end up marrying, he’d have realized how prophetic his singing sounds. A simple bluesy structure with a slightly drunken rhythm and a muddy main riff finds its release in a vengeful chorus.
The gloomier »Sleeping Village« is steeped in enigmatic-sounding acoustic guitar chords and bass effects in between, until the somber atmosphere is dispelled by the intrusion of a rowdy guitar riff and an unexpected drum assault. Sudden time changes with improvisations soon completely wreck the central structure of this unusual composition and show the band as great rhythmic adventurers. The closing experimental treat »Warning« is yet another cover of a blues rock standard, originally by Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation, led by the famous all-round drummer Aynsley Dunbar, best known for his work with Frank Zappa and later Journey. Ozzy’s wounded vocal, deliberately ‘drunken’ bluesy guitar riffs, a rattling bass line and aptly timed drum transitions create a classic smoke-filled blues atmosphere. It’s something of a half-prog-rock, half-hard-rock hybrid with plenty of psychedelic and bluesy elements, mostly thanks to all the improvisation. What starts out as a classic blues rock confession, with Ozzy pouring out his disappointment over an unhappy love, soon morphs into an instrumental section with drawn-out improvisational excursions. Black Sabbath always carried enormous potential for improvisational experiments within them, but never really made use of it, since they’d rather become the first heavy metal band in history than just one of many prog rock groups. Iommi undoubtedly learned a lot from his short, one-week stint with Jethro Tull, where he didn’t want to play second fiddle to Ian Anderson, but he did pick up his first hugely important professional experience.
With their self-titled debut, Black Sabbath pulled off a bona fide revolution: while fooling around with the blues, they stumbled onto a whole new form of rock music that critics of the day dubbed heavy metal, which makes this one of the most important albums in the history of the genre. Right from the start they managed to make up for their beginners’ naivety and technical shortcomings with sonic uniqueness, innovation and the individual members’ remarkable talent for ‘drama’, creating one of the best debuts by any heavy rock band. And the dark iconography that surrounds this cult achievement with every listen has become the yardstick for a whole host of future heavy rock and metal bands.
Lineup
Ozzy Osbourne – vocals, harmonica on “The Wizard”
Tony Iommi – guitar, slide guitar on “The Wizard”
Geezer Butler – bass
Bill Ward – drums
Production
Rodger Bain
Tracklist
1. Black Sabbath
2. The Wizard
3. Behind the Wall of Sleep
4. N.I.B.
5. Evil Woman
6. Sleeping Village
7. Warning
