BLACK SABBATH: PROLETARIAN METAL TO OZZY AND BEYOND

From the first oafish gothic crash of “Black Sabbath” it was clear this band was dumb. Really intensely dumb. Even in that first hearing there was something in Ozzy’s hammy Jack Bruce-and-beyond larynx, in the stonefaced simplicity of Tony Iommi’s lost chords, in Geezer’s globular lines and Bill Ward’s sub-Bonham stomp. Something that spelled sublime idiocy. This wasn’t the Black Sabbath of Mario Bava and Boris Karloff, it was drive-in Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Black Sabbath were the absolute prototype gothic heavies. Heavy was Black Sabbath. Their playing was so neanderthal there was never an instant where you thought they might be joking. Sabbath oouldn’t even pull off their horror show, far less believe in it. How anyone could seriously have imagined them to be sidekicks of Lucifer after seeing Iommi’s moustache or Geezer’s robes or Ozzy’s flab I’ll never know.

Not that there wasn’t any menace about them. Sabbath crawled into the light of day at that precise moment in the evolution of rock when the ’60s party, so to speak, was terminating. Emerging from psychedelia as a no-frills working-class rock ’n’ roll band, they were pale and greasy and ugly and suspicious in a combination only the English Midlands could produce. They were reared in the birthplace of heavy metal—it’s only here, where the meadow meets the factory and the cows drink industrial sewage, here and in the American midwest, that heavy metal really makes sense. Growing up in a tough, grimy suburb of Birmingham, John and Bill and Terry and Tony saw the r’n’b boom phased through flower-power. They saw psychedelia commercialized and peace become another redundant slogan. And they saw the Bluesbreakers’ and Yardbirds’ blues-prints come out the other end of the acid tunnel as Ten Years After, Steamhammer, and Spooky Tooth (who also sang of the “Evil Woman”). Alongside folk protest and May ’68 and “Sympathy For The Devil,” it was a stodgy and neolithic sound transformed by one pivotal album: Led Zeppelin.

The four down-to-earth brummies couldn’t boast such credentials as Jimmy Page carried from his long stint in the Yardbirds. The course of rock music might have been something quite different if it had been Tony lommi playing the guitar solo on “You Really Got Me.” There was a tentative connection with Aleister Crowley, but while the nation’s Claptonites were memorizing every lick and twang on “Crossroads” and “Come On In My Kitchen,” Tony lommi was weightlifting. Legend hints that his highest ambition at the time was to become a professional bouncer, a career training he put to use a decade later when, taking exception to a critic’s description of him as “a gypsy violinist in an Earl’s Court pizza parlour,” he knocked him out cold at the Glasgow Apollo (dedicated fans expressed wholehearted approval).

Drummer Bill Ward was meanwhile banging his inimitable way through an outfit known obscurely as Mythology, bassist Terry Butler groped his strings in a similar collection of drongoes called Rare Breed, and John Osbourne, smarting from rejection by the army, was probably just downing vats of pale ale.

Fate, or some such catalyst, chose to bring ’em together. Plumping solidly for the appellation Earth, the miracle quartet was soon hawking its standard bluesy wares around the notorious German club circuit, a rock gauntlet that served the purpose of sorting out the Iron Men from the Tin Boys.

Exactly how Earth hit on the model of sound and image which would be Black Sabbath will probably remain a matter for long-term speculation. It was as if the current of the new “underground” dragged them into a focal position where their astonishing mantra-like mindlessness was perceived as a kind of ethnic purity. The imagery and motifs were almost incidental. Sabbath were neither irresponsible satanists nor self-preening hedonists greedy for fame. Their music wasn’t raw, or lewd, or savage, or nihilistic, it wasn’t even primal. It was just a dark, dumb power. The dorkiness was overpowering, the sound so simple, so imbecilic, so crass it was scary. In terms of the global “white noise” boom, Sabbath were at an opposite polarity to, say, the MC5. Unlike the 5, they didn’t decimate the hangover of flower-power as white panthers, they merely plodded over it in fuzzbox platform heels. America never had a Mick Jagger but England never had an Iggy Stooge: she was fostering a new kind of giant rock band. Zep, Yes, Purple, Floyd. And Sabbath.

For what it was worth, Sabbath knew the Summer of Love had turned into a bummer. Ozzy said: “A bunch of people got an innocent, beautiful thing going and the big machine made money out of it, made it filthy dirty and horrible and destroyed it. Then, when we came in—at the end of that disaster—we got ’em going again. We were telling them the truth, what was happening, and if you’ve been stoned on acid for five years, you need something to hold on to.” While Deep Purple sang of the child in time, Black Sabbath sang of War Pigs. To this day, their first three albums remain the three straightest metal albums in rock.

When Black Sabbath appeared in 1970, it came as if out of nowhere—the lost provincial suburbs. It seemed completely removed from the Hendrix-ClaptonZeppelin line of descent. Well, almost completely. In fact, the album’s one non-original, “Warning,” was a long bluesy jam with threadbare roots in Cream. “Bom Under A Bad Sign” lurked within and, ill-concealing his shallow virtuosity, lommi even managed a ham-figured salute to Clapton. Recorded in two days for a total cost of 600 pounds, Black Sabbath was instantly denounced as moronic and equally instantly purchased in vast quantities by the new breed of purist spawned by post-hippie disenchantment. The Gothic claptrap notwithstanding, Black Sabbath rapidly became the sound of proletarian rock. Even today, with metal so much faster and glossier, it remains (in England at least) one of the only exclusively working class art forms.

Still, Black Sabbath was only a lurch in the direction of Paranoid. Riff-wise, “The Wizard” and “Evil Woman” were merely sketches towards the draining minimalism of “Electric Funeral” and “Iron Man.” Paranoid (Jan. 71) is unquestionably Sabbath’s masterwork. How daringly, radically monotonous it sounds today! What groaning splendour! It’s still hard to believe how phenomenally slow it is. It’s like 45 rpm hardcore slowed to 16, a barbiturated blur that induces not frantic headbanging but effortless nodding out.

Paranoid made it nigh impossible to distinguish aggression from depression. Its mind-numbing minor chords churned out in endless repeating drones were like a nightmare of fatalism—but never glorified, never postulated as rock ’n’ roll death-orglory: Sabbath were pioneers but they were never “progressive.” A nurse killed herself to a soundtrack of Paranoid, and when they found her the record was still going round on the turntable.

Actually the mystical-satanic element in Sabbath was the flimsiest mask or pretext for their real worth. Really they were singing about very real things—war, pollution, drugs. Destruction—personal, political, environmental. And how much more dumb can you get than that? Yes folks, they were ranting about the real world, and as each chord was dragged out with inexorable swamp-like monotony, Ozzy had no choice but to declaim every last apocalyptic syllable as though the destiny ,of the Western world depended upon it. There was no hiding, no camouflage in this sound. It was sparse, terminal, a rock absolute. To this day, Ozzy’s voice on Paranoid and Master Of Reality remains unique. Exhortatory without ever being pompous, it carries an operatic conviction that no subsequent metal larynx (certainly none of today’s cock-rockers) has come close to matching.

By “Into The Void” on Master Of Reality, Osbourne was inveighing against all and sundry with a doom-laden resignation worthy of Crass and their cohorts: “Back on earth the flame of life burns low/Everywhere is misery and woe/ Pollution kills the air, the land, the sea/Man prepares to meet his destiny.”

But suddenly Sabbath were there—in the middle of the game called rock ’n’ roll. “Paranoid" the single became a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and next thing Sabbath were in the Arena league. Nonetheless, though Ozzy never professed to being a “messiah of slum people,” neither was he a megalomaniac frontman. There was always a comic element to his performance that he recognized. He was just too dumbly honest, too honestly dumb. “All 1 am is a ham,” he confessed. Still the rock life in the heyday of the giant future dinosaurs quickly told on the group’s health and spirits.

The classic Sabb riffs of “Sweet Leaf’ and “War Pigs” had them labeled as an ¶ English Grand Funk, while the extraneous | symbols of the black mass in their stage c show became an increasingly hollow ritual. t The American tour of 1972 brought home \ the realization that repetition could be a ° kind of pain in itself, and this pain in turn caused a certain loss of faith, of the essential mindlessness. Furthermore, when they came to the Record Plant for Black Sabbath Volume Four (a title surely indicative of their imminent slough), they were exchanging the vital economy of Rodger Bain’s production in London for the enhanced, rounded-out gloss of Patrick Meehan in L.A. New demons of drugs and “High Livin’ ” were seeping into the music. “Snowblind” was purportedly an anti-drug song, yet the inner sleeve’s final credit goes to the (ho ho) “COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles.” As for “Laguna Sunrise,” didn’t we already have Steve Howe and Greg Lake for that kind of florid wimpiness?

Even the by now standard anthemic blowouts like “Supernaut” bore a ne*w air of slickness. All of a sudden Tony lommi was entranced by the idea of 24 tracks. Strings and keyboards began to appear, and nothing after Master Of Reality really possessed the kind of density the group had patented as its raison d’etre. For chrissakes, “Sabbra Cadabra” on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath even featured Rick Wakeman!

The 1974 tour had even nastier side effects than 1972. Geezer Butler went down with hepatitus, Ozzy was on the point of a nervous breakdown, and one night at the Hollywood Bowl (“of all places”) Tony lommi all but OD’d. Sabbath were in a rut: they called it “Killing Yourself To Live.”

Finally, after a string of increasingly overproduced albums (Technical Ecstacy could be described as Iommi’s overdub baby) Ozzy called it a day, citing the group’s “totally ridiculous attitude” as a ' reason for departure. While he formed Blizzard Of Oz, with ex-U. Heep Lee Kerslake on drums, ex-Rainbow Bob Daisley on bass, and the late lamented Randy Rhoads (Quiet Riot) on guitar, “Black Sabbath” replaced the irreplaceable with the godawful Ronny James Dio (also ex-Rainbow) whose stupefying conventional vocal style is yet further evidence that heavy-metal, in the face and onslaught of punk and noowave, has softened up to become a kind of glistening, streamlined “power” machine. Ozzy called them “Blackmore Sabbath.”

Their astonishing mantra-like mindlessness was perceived as a kind of ethnic purity.

Sabbath called him “jealous” and a weasel. Osbourne’s proclivity for promotional slight-of-hand—bat and dove heads notwithstanding—finds fertile new ground. In what has to be considered the most perverted joke of recent times, the current double-live LP now on the racks sports four sides of hardcore Black Sab covers (“Children Of The Grave,” “Sweet Leaf,” etc.)! With virtually all of the songwriting royalities pointed Iommi-ward (Oz penned few of the classics), one can only speculate as to the ramifications of this vinyl jukebox of anthems-past package.

When metal becomes a responsible form of entertainment and rejects its own princes of darkness, when power chords are just melodic excuses for FM rock mundanity, then truly can it be said that the mob rules, that the children of the graves are greeting the atomic dawn with hollow, dreamless eyes.