Black Sabbath's debut album turns 50 this week. Band members, collaborators, peers, and admirers reflect on the album that launched heavy metal
“They were really very good indeed,” Simpson remembers of Earth. “We gave them more intermission spots, and they visibly built a following, right from the beginning. We gave them a headline spot, and they sold it out.”
The roots of Black Sabbath’s sound lie in their early influences. Osbourne and Butler both recall their worlds opening up the first time they heard the Beatles. “When the Beatles came along, my whole life changed,” Butler says. “I started growing my hair, wearing fashionable clothes, and finding a meaning to life outside of religion and school. It was great being in England in the 1960s because there was one great group after another.
Early Earth concerts featured a mix of songs by Elmore James, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Robert Johnson. “We played stuff like [Robert Johnson’s] ‘Dust My Broom,’ ‘Crossroads,’ [‘Big Bill’ Broonzy’s] ‘Moppers Blues,’ and [the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation’s] ‘Warning,'” Butler says.
That detachment from hippie idealism would become even more stark on the next song the group wrote. “Black Sabbath” was born early one morning during a rehearsal at the Aston Community Centre. “I was really into [classical composer Gustav Holst’s]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.
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.”
“It’s the name that led them into that style,” Simpson says. “A name like that is a statement of intent.” 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.”
As the band developed its sound, Iommi learned that in order to write “heavy,” he had to be in a dark state of mind. “I’d sit in a room and start imagining what sort of thing I wanted to play, like an actor putting himself into a part,” Iommi says. “But in the early days, it was probably hash or something that brought out our vibe. I never used to smoke it at all, but when we did start smoking, bloody hell, all sorts of things would pop out, good and bad.
“We got stoned in the dressing room and in them days the Star-Club was pretty grubby,” Iommi says, describing the origins of the song’s odd title. “So we’re in this dirty, old dressing room, smoking some dope, and one day Ozzy said to Bill, ‘Bill, your face looks like a pen nib.’ And it just stuck. We always call Bill ‘Nibby.’ Then it got into the song, ‘N.I.B.’ The title was ‘Nib,’ but we put the dots in there to make it ‘N.I.B.
That youthful verve also led the group to write much more than was necessary for an LP at the time. The Regent log sheet suggests they’d already come up with the song “Fairies Wear Boots,” which appeared on their second album“War Pigs,” other than the lyrics, at the time. Meanwhile, a lyric sheet for a song called
The pop cover that did make it to market, though, was a brassy number originally written by American hard rockers Crow calleda sort of get-away-from-me kiss-off song that had come out that year. “The song idea came from a guy who was going through a situation at the time like the one the lyrics describe, and the rest was some imagination and experience,” says David Waggoner, Crow’s singer.
“Rodger Bain was a very nice, charming, urbane man,” Simpson says. “He was very pleasant to work with, but he did nothing in the studio except to say, ‘OK, let’s try the next song,’ and press record. There were hardly any retakes on the first album.” “We had a film studio above us, where they used to shoot TV ads,” Allom says. “They did a lot of animation, which meant the camera dolly had to stay totally still while they moved the objects that they were animating. And I got a phone call going, ‘What’s going on down there, Tom?’ Geezer Butler’s bass was playing havoc with this great, heavy film dolly. It was just waltzing across the floor.
That meant, that he had to pull off all of the six-string fireworks on “Warning” on an instrument he was relatively unfamiliar with. Luckily, he had had a lot of practice on the song. “I think that all of us probably did the best we could,” Ward says. “The biggest thing for me was the fact that we’d made a record, and I couldn’t believe that. We’d“Of course, we knew nothing about mixing, so once we had used up our two days in the studio, we went on our way,” Butler says. “I am amazed that we did so much in so little time. We didn’t hear the final album until a week or so before it was released.
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.”Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage “I love the front cover,” Ward says. “I thought it was mysterious. It’s kind of like where we kind of hung our hats, to be honest with you.” But when he opened it up, the inverted cross bothered him. “That wasn’t who we were,” he says. “And nobody had talked to the band about that. I was guarded about the record company that we were with after that.”
“We rented a set of tubular bells, and we just clanged one of them,” Allom recalls. “I sort of made it fade in and out with reverb here and there, like when you’re standing in a field and a village church bell rings, as it comes and goes in the wind. It is iconic, isn’t it?” They also added some echo to Osbourne’s voice on “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” to make it sound even trippier, Bain played the jaw harp on “Sleeping Village,” and they doubled up some of the guitar solos.
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