Happy 40th Birthday Black Sabbath!
What is this that stands before me?
Figure in black that points at me
Turn around quick, and start to run
Find out I'm the chosen one
Oh nooo!
It was 40 years ago today that an album was released that would change the course of music and give birth to the genre that we know as heavy metal. Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath album with its doom laden rifts was like nothing that had come before it, each song delivered with sledge hammer intensity to set heads banging across the land.
Not the folk and blues driven stuff that Zeppelin were producing, or the prog rock rifts of Purple, oh nooo, this was metal in its purist form. Sabbath did more to father heavy metal than any other group. Alice Cooper, Nirvana, Metallica and countless 80's thrash metal bands took their inspiration from this band of Brummies.
Sabbath were originally called Earth, but, thankfully had to change their name due to another band having the same name and getting tired of being confused with them. The name Black Sabbath was taken from the name of a Borris Karloff film they saw on a poster. With Tony Iommi on guitar, Terry "Geezer" Butler on bass, Bill Ward on drums and the irrepressible Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Sabbath delivered their satanic brand to the masses, provoking controversy and outcry with their source material and lyrics that encompassed everything from madness, and drug abuse to nuclear war and the end of the world.
December of '69 saw the release of their first single, Evil Woman, with the remaining 7 tracks of their first album being recorded and mixed in two days in January of 1970 with it being released in the UK the next month on Friday 13th.
The figure in black in the lyrics of the opening track, relates to a mysterious figure that Geezer saw after waking from a nightmare. Lucifer come to add his pennies worth to the album? or too much sweet leaf? who knows.
N.I.B. a song written from the perspective of satan, did not, as was popularly thought at the time, stand for "Nativity In Black" but was a reference to the pointed goatee beard sported by the drummer which, mightier than the sword, resembled the nib of a pen.
Like Zeppelin, Sabbath took inspiration from Tolkien and magical character strolling the land in The Wizard is Gandalf.
Behind The Wall Of Sleep is a play on the title of H.P. Lovecraft's 1919 short story Beyond The Walls Of Sleep. Dark forces indeed. A film adaptation of this story was released in 2006, which is quite impressive as the original was only four pages long.
The album's cover is a picture of Mapledurham Watermill on the Thames in Oxfordshire with a figure in Black occupying the foreground. The mill appears in the Doomsday Book, which is ironic considering the flood of doom metal that followed its image being used by a band who ground out the genre.
2009 the Deluxe Edition
- Black Sabbath
- The Wizard
- Behind the Wall of Sleep
- N.I.B.
- Evil Woman
- Sleeping Village
- Warning
- Wicked World
- Black Sabbath" (outtake)
- Black Sabbath" (instrumental)
- The Wizard (outtake)
- Behind the Wall of Sleep" (outtake)
- N.I.B. (instrumental)
- Evil Woman (alternative version)
- Sleeping Village (intro alternative version)
- Warning Part 1 (outtake)
In 2009 the album was released as a deluxe edition with a second disk of out takes and instrumental versions doing full justice to this classic album. Also given the deluxe treatment were the albums Paranoid and Master Of Reality. Volume 4 through Never Say Die were also re-released as a single disk with no significant extras, but re-mastered. The series will next move on to Dio era Sabbath, with Heaven & Hell, Mob Rules and Live Evil in the deluxe multi-disk pipeline.
So break out a copy of the album, eat a cake made Mapledurham Mill flour and wish many happy returns to a great album. Ozzy you are the chosen one!
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