Black Sabbath and 50 Years of Heavy Metal

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/black-sabbath-debut-album-heavy-metal-origin-interview-949070/

Half a century has passed since Black Sabbath first scared the bejesus out of rock fans with their eponymous anthem. The song opens with the sound of a powerful thunderstorm and ominous church chimes before crashing into its lumbering, iconic riff. The guitar chords lurch seismically, each one like a gut punch before quieting down just enough for Ozzy Osbourne to paint his own vivid portrait of fear — “What is this that stands before me/Figure in black which points at me?” It’s a scene so unnerving that he eventually pleads to the heavens, “Oh, no, NO, please God help me,” before the guitar riff and church bells come around again to strike him down. “Is this the end, my friend?” he wonders aloud. The six-minute horror vignette was spooky yet thrilling, and the song, “Black Sabbath,” would serve as the prototype for a genre poised to captivate the world . . .



“Black Sabbath” was born early one morning during a rehearsal at the Aston Community Centre. “I was really into [classical composer Gustav Holst’s] The Planets around that time,” Butler recalls of the music’s inspiration, “and I was trying to play [the first movement] ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ on my bass, which I think influenced Tony to write the riff of ‘Black Sabbath.'”

That riff captured the essence of heavy metal. Its three notes were so discordant, so gloomy, so depressive that they spoke volumes on their own. Like the Holst piece, the riff revolves around a diminished fifth, a sinister sound that 18th-century music scholars referred to as diabolus in musica, or “devil in music.” Osbourne picked up on the vibe and bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?” drawing on the imagery of a nightmare Butler had told him he’d had, where he’d felt an unnerving presence in the room with him. The results sounded terrifying, and the band loved the feeling, so they played it over and over and over again to remember it, since they had no tape recorder.

“We were all so proud of ourselves when we wrote ‘Black Sabbath,'” Butler recalls. “I think it took a couple of hours to write it from top to bottom. Tony played the riff and we all just joined in. Ozzy spontaneously sang the lyrics. Then Tony topped it all by coming up with the menacing riff at the end. We knew it totally represented each one of us.” . . . The guitarist doesn’t specifically cite Holst’s “Mars” as an inspiration for the riff, but just unearthly orchestral music as a whole, the type he’d heard in the fright films that Britain’s leading studio, Hammer, made starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Frankenstein. “In them days, Geezer and myself used to be really into horror films, and we still love music that’s got a little bit of power,” he says. “In some of these horror films, the music was a bit scary and creepy to go with the film. And I looked at our songs as being a similar sort of thing, like trying to make it sort of creepy.”

The song didn’t have a poppy chorus that might provide an obvious title, so Butler also looked to film for an inspiration. “I called it ‘Black Sabbath,’ after the Mario Bava film of that title,” he says, referring to the Boris Karloff horror anthology that came out in 1963. “I always liked the sound of it.” He liked the sound of it so much that in September 1969 when Simpson insisted that they change their name to something other than Earth, because it seemed generic and there were other bands with the same name, Butler again suggested Black Sabbath . . .

When they introduced “Black Sabbath” into their set lists, they were pleased with the way people took to it — or at least the way people were unsettled by it. “The audience was small, and nobody really knew quite how to react to it,” Ward says. “But we put so much into the song onstage that everybody just started to nod to it, especially towards the endings and the very loud parts. People were just like, ‘Wow, holy cow.’ I think we were blowing them away very quietly.” . . .

Simpson also remembers the excitement of the band’s early concerts. “People would stand on the stairs just to hear the band,” he says. “People couldn’t even get in the room. But the band played loud enough. People could stay home, five miles away, and hear it out the windows.” “Sweat rolling off the walls and the smell of cigarette smoke — and a little bit of other stuff — and the smell of stale beer,” Ward says . . .

The label head sorted out the business end with Simpson and his associates and decided to capitalize on the band’s creepy mystique by putting out the album on Friday the 13th. “In England, that’s a day when you don’t go out, you don’t take any risks, you stay at home,” he says. “Terrible things can happen. Friday the 13th? Good God, no. So putting it out that day was quite deliberate.”



Shortly before its release, Simpson met the band at Birmingham’s New Street Station, where he presented them with the album art. The sleeve was a gatefold, and its eerie cover depicted what looked like a witch standing in the woods, outside a cottage. The sky is pink, and the band’s logo is written in gothic lettering . . . The design was credited to “Keef,” who was, in fact, Keith Macmillan, a young photographer . . . The artist picked up on the darkness of the music. And even though he didn’t pay too much attention to its lyrics, he liked what he heard. “To be honest, it was the first time I really enjoyed that kind of heavy rock,” he says. “But that album made me a fan for life.”

He decided that Mapledurham Watermill, a 15th-century structure in Oxfordshire that he’d scouted for potential shoots, looked run-down and bizarre enough to match the vibe of the music. He hired model Louisa Livingstone partially because she was five feet tall — so everything else would look big — and had her pose a variety of ways until he found one that looked right. “She wasn’t wearing any clothes under that cloak because we were doing things that were slightly more risqué, but we decided none of that worked,” he says. “Any kind of sexuality took away from the more foreboding mood. But she was a terrific model. She had amazing courage and understanding of what I was trying to do.”

“I remember it was freezing cold,” says Livingstone, who was 18 or 19 at the time of the shoot and later appeared in art for records by Fair Weather and Queen. “I had to get up at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Keith was rushing around with dry ice, throwing it into the water. It didn’t seem to be working very well, so he ended up using a smoke machine. It was just, ‘Stand there and do that.’ I’m sure he said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don’t know if that meant anything much to me at the time.” (When she heard Black Sabbath later, she decided it wasn’t her kind of music. She now records electronic music under the name Indreba.)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHJwppJKX1wGiSwHkBL1aWg

A short article about the band with some interesting details:
https://unherd.com/2020/02/how-birmingham-gave-birth-to-heavy-metal/?=refinnar


The first photo of Black Sabbath taken by manager Jim Simpson in 1968 near Portland Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham

"It was not just the sound of the surroundings that created heavy metal, but the dangers of the physical creation of metal and dirt. As a 17-year-old, Iommi had lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand in an accident at his final shift at a sheet-metal factory in Lozells, after returning from a European tour with one of his first bands. He almost bled to death in hospital, where the tips of his fingers were returned in a matchbox by a colleague. Had the accident not happened, Iommi would have been just another guitarist with a passion for the blues. But, cauterising the plastic from a washing up bottle onto the tips of his fingers, and inspired by the jazz guitarist Django Rheinhardt, whose hands had been badly burned, Iommi detuned his guitar, filed down its frets and the ultimate riff maker was born."

https://www.loudersound.com/features/black-sabbaths-geezer-butler-my-life-story  Quoting:


Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler: My Life Story
The man behind Black Sabbath's game-changing lyrics reveals all about his life and times

You were born Terence Michael Joseph Butler on July 17, 1949. What was ‘Brum’ like in the 50s?
“Birmingham got heavily bombed during WWII, so in the early 50s it was still full of a lot of bombed-out buildings. We had rationing – you could only get a government allowance of food, but I didn’t know anything different, so I had a very adventurous childhood. I had air raid shelters and destroyed buildings to play in. It was great for the imagination.”

You clearly have a strong command of language…
“I was always good at English. When we had to do composition or literature I was always good at that. And I always loved reading; I’ve never gone a day without a book. I was brought up a strict Catholic… I was really interested in the spiritual world so I used to read a lot about that.”

What, The Bible?
“No, I’d have that drummed into me at school and at church so I wanted to read about the other side. I’d always hear about Satan, so I wanted to find out what that was about, so I started reading up on astral planes, all that kind of stuff. I used to have weird experiences when I was a kid; orbs appearing to me…It sounds like I’m nuts. When I was four, I felt a presence in the room and I saw this orb hovering above my head and I could see the future in it and it just disappeared into the fireplace. I used to have these dreams… I’d wake up and it would happen the next day. A lot disappeared when I got to my teen years.”

So can we thank Catholicism for Sabbath?
“Catholic priests used to scare me more than Satan! We used to get visits from these missionaries back from Africa to get money; they’d have these long robes and they scared the hell out of me. They’d be shouting at me, ‘The Devil’s gonna get ya!’ It seemed their robes were blowing in the wind and they used to scare the hell out of me. They looked like Batman.”

Cream’s Jack Bruce inspired you to play bass, right?
“Yeah, and The Beatles. I had three brothers who were into Elvis and Buddy Holly. My sisters were into Cliff. I didn’t have something that was my own and then The Beatles came along. I was like, ‘Yes, thank you!’ My hero was John Lennon so I learned rhythm guitar, but then Cream came along and Jack Bruce’s style of bass playing blew me away.”

You were the first person to play with Ozzy, in Rare Breed, before Sabbath…
“Yeah, me and Ozzy were together first. I was 13 or 14 and playing other people’s stuff but we were getting heavier and heavier and then the singer left. I was always hanging out at guitar shops. I saw this advert, ‘Ozzy Zig wants a Gig’ with the magic words: ‘has own PA’. It didn’t matter what he sounded like. It had his address and I went down there, and the next day Tony and Bill Ward went round. Ozzy had been to school with Tony, and they hated each other. Tony had bullied him at school, so it was me one day, Tony the next day, so Ozzy decided he’d go with me because he didn’t want to play with Tony. That’s how we started. We did like two shows together in Rare Breed. Then I got fired from work and wanted to go into music full time, so we went round to Tony’s house to see if he knew any drummers. Bill was there at Tony’s house. He said, ‘I’ll join the band if Tony does’ and there we went, first as Earth, then as Sabbath.”

War Pigs, Children Of The Grave… many of your songs comment on war…
“My uncle was shot in the war and my dad had been loosely in the IRA. He’d tell me about fighting the British in Ireland. My brother collected Nazi stuff – he was Hitler-obsessed. War and religion were all around me. When I started writing lyrics I was rebelling against everything I grew up with.”

Pacifism in the 60s inspired a lot of music, but your outlook was far darker…
“Yeah, there were a lot of American bands, like Bob Dylan, talking of protest, but they were living in style and I was still stuck in Aston with no money, so I was writing from the heart. Our lyrics were about what we were going through at the time and we never thought we were going to get out of there.”

What were your first shows like?
“When we were Earth we were a 12-bar blues band; we played whatever blues clubs we could find. When we started Sabbath, they loved it. At the time everyone was into Motown and soul; that’s all they wanted to hear around Birmingham so there were literally two clubs you could play in, and people got fed up seeing us every week, so we had to go to Germany and Switzerland to get residencies… horrible little places where nobody turned up. It was good for us.”

When did you know you were becoming infamous?
“We didn’t think anything of it until the first American tour and the first album. There was some black magic organisation that wanted us to play at a stone circle… We said no – we were sort of against Satan as opposed to promoting it – so they allegedly cursed us. The head of the white witches called our management and said he knew we had a curse put on us, and we should wear crosses and he’d do a ritual thing. It all sounds so hokey.”

Did you believe him?
“Yeah, that’s why we started wearing crosses! Ozzy’s father made them for us. He used to work at a metal factory making car parts, so he made us these great big crosses out of spare metal.”

Didn’t people confuse you with Black Widow, who were infamous for doing black masses on stage?
“Yeah, absolutely – sacrifices and all that crap. We weren’t into it, it was too corny for us. A lot of people used to get us mixed up with them and black magic, but they put one album out and I never heard of them again.”

How’d you handle the rocketing success?
“We took it in our stride because we stuck so close together. It was years before we saw any money. We were idiots – we didn’t have any sense whatsoever about business, so it didn’t change our lives monetarily.”

Did you suspect Sabbath would inspire metal?
“We didn’t think we were that different. Cream and Hendrix were the two heaviest bands around – we went heavier because that’s what we were into. Led Zeppelin had just come out and so we wanted to get heavier than that, but we didn’t think it was earth-shattering. The press slagged our first album to death. They said we couldn’t play our instruments, the songs weren’t songs, the lyrics were crap, the riffs were awful, Tony was just an Eric Clapton clone… We were like, ‘F**k it, who cares?’”

Clearly, your success changed you as a band.
“Yeah, we could sense it happening. We were stuck together for six or seven years non-stop. We hadn’t had any social life, and it just wears thin. We were all into drugs and booze and you never get time away from it. I was the first victim. They fired me first, for about two months, and I was glad. It was like, ‘Thank f**k! Freedom!’ Then they asked me back. It’s just the change… something had to go. There was a lot of bickering. A lot of things that should’ve been said were not being said. I came back, and Ozzy was stoned and drunk all the time and wasn’t doing anything, so he left and we started doing Never Say Die [1977], and Ozzy came back after we’d written half that album so he wouldn’t sing any of the things we’d written and we had to start it again.”

Had you met Ronnie James Dio at that point?
“That didn’t happen until Ozzy had gone. Tony was thinking about just working with Ronnie regardless of Sabbath. Tony had met Ronnie, had liked what he heard, had liked him as a person and was going to write an album anyway. When we parted ways with Ozzy, Ronnie came and chatted with us and it just worked.”

So Sabbath has experienced two rebirths with Ronnie, once in 1979 and with Heaven & Hell’s formation in 2006.
“Everyone’s different. Ronnie fitted in straight away and immediately came up with vocals. We were like, ‘Thank God!’ because we had all these riffs with no vocals. We were panicking.”

Was it frustrating that you couldn’t call yourselves Sabbath?
“I wanted a different name when Ozzy left but the record company held us to the name Black Sabbath. This time, I felt because the original band had gotten together for the last few years of Ozzfest, that people would associate it with that line-up, so it was the time to change the name.”

The opening riff to Symptom Of The Universe was possibly one of the fiercest, most seminal metal riffs ever, but the lyrics are unclear – what is the symptom of the universe?
“It’s love.”