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.
0 kommentar(er)
