The 40th anniversary of Black Sabbath’s first album has been greeted this year with much fanfare, most of it about how the album birthed a genre. Part of the celebration stems from the fact that metal fans love anniversaries almost as much as they love quibbling about best-of lists. Knowing that putting Pantera, Iron Maiden, or Sabbath on the cover sells copies, metal magazines celebrate more anniversaries than Hallmark shops.
I’m all for celebrating the 40th anniversary of Black Sabbath. It might be the most played album in my entire collection. The album has an earthy, gritty quality missing on Sabbath’s later albums, and it is accessible to listeners that might balk if they heard “Children of the Grave” or “Symptom of the Universe.” Ozzy’s nasal, whining voice is at its best, and the rest of the band performs like this album might be its only ticket out of the Birmingham steel mills (which it was).
My problem with this anniversary is that so many have called it the birth of heavy of metal. Of course, there are elements that support this argument. But when you break down Black Sabbath, you’ll find that the forefathers of metal started their career with a blues album, separated from ’60s greats like Cream and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers only by their ominous, supernatural aesthetic. Only on later albums did they make a tangible leap from the blues idiom to an entirely new form of musical expression. Even then, the blues lingered.
The album starts with “Black Sabbath”, which nearly every critic knows for its prominent use of the diminished fifth – a musical interval forbidden in medieval times. There’s little question that this is the first heavy metal song in terms of sound, lyrical content, and execution. But as soon as Iommi’s guitar fades out, the rest of the album makes a turn back to the blues.
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“The Wizard” (live 2005)
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Ozzy’s wailing harmonica on “The Wizard” signals that the onetime Polka Tulk Blues Band was headed to more comfortable turf: the gallows-tinged, Leadbelly-infused blues they played learning their craft in German clubs and bars. Harmonica aficionados will point out that Ozzy is playing a D harmonica in second position on the track. In laymen’s terms, that means Ozzy is bending certain notes so that the harmonica is playing in a different key than intended. This is classic blues harmonica playing known as “cross harp”. The deeply bent two-draw note combination that opens “The Wizard” wouldn’t sound out of place on a Chicago blues track or the Rolling Stones blues number like “Midnight Rambler”, a song about serial killer Albert DeSalvo.
“Behind the Wall of Sleep,” reminds me of Delta blues great Charley Patton in that it’s a slightly upbeat track that somehow suggests menace, even despair. The song seems to indicate that something ominous is about to happen, much like Patton’s “Devil Sent The Rain Blues”, which mourned for a Mississippi Delta ravaged by rains and flooding.
Sabbath was forced to play “Evil Woman” by a record company eager for a hit, so it feels like more of an afterthought. “N.I.B.”, always saddled with the tag “nativity in black”, is unquestionably a blues song in delivery and intent. A somewhat emo Satan is trying to lure his prospective lover with the promises of immortality and “those things you thought unreal”. We can sense Old Scratch’s broken heart throughout.
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“N.I.B.” (live 1970)
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Bluesmen have added the devil to love songs with haunting results even before the earliest recorded music. The best example is Delta bluesman Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”, which is more pained and haunted than anything in the Sabbath canon. Robert Johnson’s affinity for the diabolical is better known: “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Road Blues” are blues staples.
“Sleeping Village” includes a prominent Jew’s harp and an almost woozy chorus before Iommi’s guitar kicks in. If you listen to the sparse lyrics you can almost imagine them being sung at a backwoods train station or in a country alley.
“Warning” is an extended blues jam originally written by British drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who later played with Frank Zappa. Sabbath played the song much more convincingly and with more authority. Iommi showed his ample blues chops on guitar, and Bill Ward adds fills that, while a bit busy for standard blues, nonetheless work well.
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“Warning” (Aynsley Dunbar original)
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Taken together, these songs might not get a crowd moving like “Got My Mojo Workin’” or “Born in Chicago.” But the music is about as bluesy as you can get, tinged with the darkness of industrial Britain.
Perhaps the most metal thing about Black Sabbath is the now classic cover and the insert with the inside upside-down cross, which was included without the band’s knowledge. And nothing in metal’s history has ever suggested the otherworldly as much as a simple shot of an unknown woman in black in front of an English steel mill. No one has ever found out who she was.
In his recent autobiography I Am Ozzy (reviewed here), Osbourne endorses the debut album as blues. In short, Ozzy said the band never set out to play heavy metal and only wanted to play a darker form of blues. So instead of celebrating the 40th birthday of metal this year, we should be celebrating yet another reimagining of blues, which is continually denied its proper place in the metal universe. Metal’s official birthday happened just a year later – when Paranoid hit the record racks.
Excellent work, sir. A lot of people forget how much of early Sabbath was influenced by the exact same musicians that Zeppelin, Cream and the Stones looked up to.
The first album truly was a darker form of the blues and it changed the world. Happy 40th! \m/
I dont know if i would say zeppelin were influenced by the same people, generally influence and zeppelin meant stealing.
But still my favourite sabbath record nice write up!
Martin Popoff discusses this in his “Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal,” stating that metal was really birthed by the triumvirate of “Paranoid,” “In Rock” and “Uriah Heep” (“Very ‘Eavy…Very ‘Umble.”) A lot of splitting of hairs there, but interesting for debate nonetheless.
I’m inclined to agree. Frankly, I think that King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man might have been just as influential, what with its dissonant freak-out. As of Paranoid, Sabbath have shifted to metal. Since they both came out in the same year, the transition did not take long.
Regardless, I love this album dearly. Possibly Sabbath’s best.
I’ve always considered this to be the case as well. Paranoid I think was the first real heavy metal album because of all the bluesy songs on Black Sabbath. They touched on metal at times on the debut, but it did not fully form until the next album.
a good read,
I always knew this about metal or rock for that matter, it’s funny cuz sometimes you hear of these metal (up in coming metal fans)elitists talk about how classical music is so synonymous with blackmetal ie symphonic blackmetal, when in reality if it wasnt for blues there really wouldn’t be any rock or metal, or maybe it will sound alot different.
maybe this additude is the result of lack of knowledge, or it can be a product of eurocentrism, where say for example varg vikernes doesn’t wanna be associated with such ethnic musical roots, heres a quote of his regarding his beliefs “I am able to see the link between classical music and some metal music. – Interview with Doomish.com, 2004 “.
he clearly states in “some metal” maybe he means euorpean metal idk. but all in all this just proves my point that there are a select group out there who are hell bent on not being associated with all the rest of metal whose roots do come from the blues.
varg’s full of shit anyways.
It’s a blues-metal album. They infused the blues with the combination of elements still prominent in metal today. The heaviness, distortion, subject matter, etc. Yes, some tracks are more blues than metal, but songs like Black Sabbath and NIB created metal.
great article, that’s exactly why I love this Sabbath album the most, dark blues. why don’t more doom bands play that? that’s what I really want to hear
I completely agree with everything you are saying here. It’s pretty hard to deny the bluesiness of this record. It’s also hard to deny the influence this record had on what became HM. It’s just so damn dark, scary, and HEAVY!
I didn’t really start listening to this album until about three years ago. My interest in metal was limited to the more extreme end of the spectrum. The desire to branch out led me here. It took two or three spins to dig it. Now, I’m completely enamored with it. My spin counts for it are up there with early Napalm Death, Mayhem, Darkthrone and DsO. It’s gotten under my skin in a way later Sabbath never did… not even Paranoid (Still, nothing but love for the first 6).
Also, thanks for posting the original version of Warning. Great tune! I appreciated that version but it made me miss Ozzy’s anguished vocals.
Great article, but did we need the 2005-era Wizard in which Ozzy mimes the harmonica? God that was painful…
That’s a fairly valid point that “Paranoid” is the debut of proper metal but the moments where the blues melts away on S/T (particularly in the coda to “Black Sabbath”, my favorite moment on here) are such exciting foreshadows nonetheless.
I still wonder: beyond louder mastering volumes and higher gain devices, how far has metal really progressed from Sabbath?
Nice post. I’ve believed this for a long time–Sabb is heavy, was as heavy as anything was at the time (how about Iron Claw?) but what made them great (besides having a riff machine in Iommi) is that they fuckin SWING. That’s something alot of post Sabbath bands never learned/don’t do. That’s what gets the head banging and the hips moving. You can’t dance to shit that’s 200 BPM. Theres a million bands that dry hump the Sabb corpse but never get the feel right. I only wish I could have been a teenager back then, witnessing them play in Philly when they were mistaken for a ‘black’ band and hearing the comments from the astonished and mostly African American crowd. That would have something.
Tony – For some reason, it’s basically impossible to find a good live clip for Ozzy-lineup Black Sabbath performing “The Wizard”. Maybe that had to do with Warner Bros. expurgating YouTube of their content a while back. Ironically, there’s a good clip somewhere of the Tony Martin-Tony Iommi-bunch of other guys lineup performing the song.
“Wicked World” > “Evil Woman” In fact, I’d go so far as to say the shift here from an evil woman to an entire wicked world says a lot about the difference between the blues and metal.
Nice article. I think I’ll put on the LP tonight while I make dinner.
Well all the 70’s proto-metal is exactly that, proto-metal. Bands from various backgrounds toying with aesthetic extremity for a song or two (like King Crimson, Led Zeppelin and others) ‘Heavy Metal’ becomes its own thing with the onset of NWOBHM in the early 80’s, Judas Priest doing the honours really by being the first (and last, they’d have hoped at the time) band to be be self-professed Heavy Metal and proud of it. It took punk ‘killing’ of the 70’s style of heavy/psychedelic rock for metalheads to strike back (ironically co-opting a lot of the scene/DIY mentality from punk rock on the way).
The first Sabbath record is phenomenal for me and it *is* the birth of the genre, it’s the birth of a couple more sub-genres in fact (stoner, doom) but I don’t love it because of what it started as much because it’s an amazing record that touches me deeply, sounds as fresh today as 40 years ago and I can never see myself grow tired of it.
And I listen to zero blues otherwise.
“Harmonica aficionados will point out that Ozzy is playing a D harmonica in second position on the track. In laymen’s terms, that means Ozzy is bending certain notes so that the harmonica is playing in a different key than intended.”
I’m confused by the last few words of this statement. Do you mean that Ozzy did not intend to play in the key which he does? Or, are you saying that he is intentionally adding dissonance? Mind clarifying?
Happy to.
Your standard 10-hole diatonic harmonica was designed to be played in one key (so a C harmonica played in C). However, this held back players who wanted the instrument to be more expressive. So players started “bending” notes, maybe by accident at first.
What happens when you bend a note is that you change the air flow in your mouth so that the pitch of a note changes because the reeds vibrate ever so slightly against each other. You can actually get four notes out of the 3 draw on a standard diatonic harp, for example. These “blue” notes are what makes a harmonica so expressive and make is sound bluesy.
The most common change is to “second position,” which incorporates the blues scale. About 95 percent of blues standards are played in what’s known as second position, which prominently uses bent draw notes.
My guess is that Ozzy didn’t intentionally try to play in second position or even know he was changing the key of his harp as he played. He probably played something that sounded cool — the harmonica riffs
on “The Wizard,” are fantastic but not complicated to learn once you understand the instrument.
Here’s a little more about “cross harp” if you are so inclined. http://www.coast2coastmusic.com/diatonic/cross_harp.shtml
Hope I answered your question.
Thanks, Justin That makes things very clear. I’m no harmonica player but I have noodled around with them and have been able to figure out how to bend a note, so I get what you are saying about “changing the air flow in your mouth”. It’s been so long that I had forgotten that harmonicas are stuck in one key. Now Cos’ sentence makes sense (and “yes, I am saying ‘duh’ to myself).
Miskatonic – Not my sentence, but Justin’s (each and every one)!
No need to say duh. Harmonicas are picked up by many and mastered by few. That’s why there is only one Little Walter.
If you wanted to noodle further I would highly recommend you check out online instruction available from David Barrett. David recently set up a site at http://www.bluesharmonica.com. Via video instructions the site walks you from beginning to advanced levels. It’s the only harmonica instruction site worth a shit on the Interhole, and very reasonably priced. End of solicitation.
Ha! There’s Justin’s name right at the bottom of the post. Whadda’ya know? Duh!
I think my harp honkin’ days are over. But I think I will give some of those videos a looksee. Thanks again!
Diminished fifth = much better as a simple chord in Voivod.
This album is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the next one where they really grab me. And I don’t care what anyone else says. “Paranoid” is the real beginning of metal.
Hmmmm, I dont understand what the point is. It appears you are saying that the first album is not metal really, but the blues in a different form. Well, thats exactly what metal is! Thats exactly what rock and roll, country and soul are too. The blues dressed up in something else. You are stating the obvious, which is ok, but to say that its more of a blues album than a metal album doesn’t mean its NOT a metal album.
If Johhny was rebellious and drank and skipped school at 17 (the blues) and then smoked pot, drank and fucked alot at 21 (rock n roll) and then did crank, acid, heroine, fucked alot and robbed liquor stores at 22 (metal)then I would say Johhny was metal all along. It was obvious the path he chose. Black Sabbath is a metal album from start to finish.
Maybe the point is that the further in time we get from the blues, the more we must be careful to remember and revere its impact. You may want to call Sabbath the “missing link” between the blues and modern metal, but Id still say it was when metal first stood upright and walked, which makes it metal all the way.
I agree. The first album was more of a rock n roll blues album. Paranoid started the riff-o-rama that would be a staple of metal twenty years later.