The second article about Vertigo Records in 1970 is dedicated to one band, the label’s most successful act that year and one who was able to top the albums chart. Welcome to ground zero of heavy metal and the doom side of rock – Black Sabbath and their first two albums.
In 1968, after a lineup change that left them as a quartet, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward named themselves Earth and started playing their own flavor of heavy blues and psychedelic rock. Bassist Geezer Butler remembers: “To me, we were always just a really heavy blues band. That’s all we were – an out-and-out twelve-bar blues band. That’s what we started as. We just took these blues roots and made them heavier, because we were into Hendrix and Cream, who were the heaviest bands around at that time. We wanted to be heavier than everybody else!”
The band toured heavily in the UK and Europe, playing to small audiences in clubs of all types. Still unknown to the world at large, the constant gigging allowed the band to find their unique style. Butler: “We used to get these gigs in Germany, where we’d have to play eight or nine 45-minute spots each day. We only knew about ten songs, so we had to make them into 40-minute songs – which is where all the jamming came from, and where the first two albums came from, because we wrote them while we were jamming.” Guitarist Tony Iommi remembers the band’s early performances: “They just stopped and stared in disbelief: ‘What IS that? We knew then we had something special. That’s what sealed our future direction, when we saw the look on their faces. We arrived at the height of the Vietnam War and on the other side of the hippie era, so there was a mood of doom and aggression.”
One of these club gigs was an experience that forced the band into looking for yet another name. Butler tells the story: “We turned up to a gig in Derby, we noticed the audience was very different to normal. The punters were all dressed up in smart clothes, like they were expecting a crooner. And after about three songs, the promoter butted in and asked us to play our ‘usual’ songs. We didn’t have a clue what he meant and continued with our set. After another couple of songs, the promoter waved his arms and told us to stop again. ‘Why aren’t you playing stuff like your single?’ he said. ‘What single?’ we replied. It turned out there was another band called Earth, who had a very poppy single out at the time. So we were booted off and made a quick exit.”
One of the best-received original songs that the band played live was titled Black Sabbath, lifted from a 1963 Boris Karloff movie of the same name. The band decided to adopt it as their name, and on 30 August 1969 debuted as Black Sabbath for the first time, playing a gig in Workington, Cumberland. After recording a number of demo songs, they auditioned for a few labels and producers, including Gus Dudgeon from David Bowie’s Space Oddity and early Elton John fame. None found the material worth recording. Things turned around when Tony Hall, who managed bands such as Tea & Symphony and Bakerloo Blues Line, financed the independent recording of the band’s debut album.
In October of 1969 the band went into Regent Sound studio in London, where the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and others had recorded. They had two days to complete the album, including recording, overdubs and mixing. Guitarist Tony Iommi recalls: “In those days, you didn’t have the luxury of being able to take a long time. To take a day in the studio was a long time for us. We thought, ‘Great! We’ve got a day to record the album.” This was the band’s first visit into a recording studio and they treated the session as a normal live performance. No multi tracks, no layering. Think The Beatles recording their debut album in 1963 in single day. Total cost of recording: £600.
Geezer Butler talked about the experience of recording Black Sabbath’s debut: “If we had more time, we would have added whatever was hip at the time, a synthesizer of something, which would have totally ruined the sound of the band. It’s just a live band in the studio.” Lacking experience in a professional recording environment, the band was hesitant to make suggestions about their sound. Tony Iommi: “The biggest problem we’ve had is explaining to the people who recorded us how we have our sound set up. My guitar and Geezer’s bass have to very much agree with each other, to make the wall of sound. All of them just see a bass as a bass, dumm-dum-dumm, clean and neat. But Geezer’s sound is more crunchy, more raw, and he sustains stuff and he bends notes the same as the guitar, to make it fatter. Some of them would try to get him to take the distortion away, and it would be like tum-tum- tum. ‘Fucking leave it! It’s a part of our sound!’”.
Black Sabbath’s debut opens appropriately with their namesake song. If the beginning of the song sends shivers down your spine, you are not alone. Feel safe to crawl back from under the bed. Iommi remembers the recording of the song: “When I first played the riff to ‘Black Sabbath’, that set the standard for the rest of the album. When you heard those doomy guitar notes behind Ozzy, the hairs on your arms prickled. We knew it was good and different. The special effects like the chiming bell and the thunderstorm were put afterwards. I think it was Rodger’s idea.” Producer Rodger Bain worked with the band on their first three albums, and later continued to work with hard rock bands including Budgie and Judas Priest.
Drummer Bill Ward talked about his role on the title track: “Upon hearing Tony’s first licks, the absolute natural place to go in support of the track was to my tom-tom fills around Ozzy and Geezer – it’s an obvious place to go to. In hindsight, it’s idiotic to imagine straight fours across the guitar riff and bass riffs of Black Sabath.”
And if the music was not enough to put listeners in a mood of doom and gloom, the lyrics brought it all home. Geezer Butler, main lyricist for the band, talked about the subject matter: “I’d sort of dabbled in black magic, not practicing it, but I was interested in it. All these horrible things kept happening to me – a lot of my aunts and uncles started dying, and I was seeing all these bloody things visiting me during the night. I was lying in bed one night and I woke up suddenly, and there was this black shape at the foot of my bed. I wasn’t on drugs, and I didn’t drink in those days, and it frightened the bloody life out of me. I thought it was the Devil himself. It was as if he was saying, ‘It’s time to either pledge allegiance or piss off!’” After he shared his feelings with Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer penned the lyrics to Black Sabbath.
How did Black Sabbath sign up with Vertigo? Like the rest of their early history – serendipity. Olav Wyper ended up one night in Birmingham, arriving a day too early for a meeting. Always on the lookout for new talent, he asked a hotel worker for a recommendation. Later that night he ended up in a local pub watching a band he never heard of. He was impressed. Well, more than impressed: “I took them and their manager Jim Simpson out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant three doors down from the venue. And we ended up signing a head of agreement on the tablecloth.”
Similar to many other early albums on the Vertigo label, Black Sabbath’s debut was essentially a recording of the band’s live set, completed in a single day. Olav Wyper on the label’s recording technique: “The reason these records sound good is because these bands didn’t need to do much overdubbing. They could all play in the studio as they played ‘live.’ So that’s the reason it sounds less processed and more lifelike. One of the criteria my joint heads of A&R (Mike Everett and Dick Leahy) and I had for signing bands was they had to be able to play their music live.”
And what about the eerie album cover? As you may have noticed from the album covers for Colosseum’s Valentyne Suite and Black Sabbath’s debut, the striking photographs are very unique and bear similar artistic style. This is the work of a young photographer whom Olav Wyper met at a photo shoot: “I got talking to the young guy who was the focus puller, and he’d told me that he was studying photography at the Royal College of Art. He invited me down to an exhibition he was mounting there at the end of term. It was stunning. His work and ideas were just incredible. So, I hired him on the spot. His name was Keith MacMillan, who did a lot of those early Vertigo covers under the name of Keef; that helped us to have an identity.”
Keith MacMillan, also known as Marcus Keef, used infra-red film when shooting these photographs. It gave the effect of false colors, a technique that was developed in World War II to detect military presence under camouflage. The film renders leaves and grass as magenta while blood and human skin becomes green.
The photo shoot for Sabbath’s debut took place at Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, England. McMillan recalls that they were initially going for less doom and more smut, with the model being nude under the black cloak, but “We decided none of that worked. Any kind of sexuality took away from the more foreboding mood.”
Black Sabbath’s debut album was released on Friday the 13th (what else?) in Feb 1970. It climbed to no.8 in UK albums chart, and stayed in the chart for no less than 42 weeks. Not bad for a debut effort by an unknown band with no single to accompany it.
Tony Iommi – guitar
Geezer Butler – bass
Bill Ward – drums
Ozzy Osbourne – vocals
The band toured heavily after the release of their debut album, during which they came up with a new crop of songs. Their long jams kept paying off, allowing them to develop the material and test it on live audiences. When they were ready to record their sophomore album, they were given more than twice the amount of time in the studio compared to their debut: five days instead of two. The album, planned to be titled War Pigs, was nearly completed when Tony Iommi was left alone in the studio, his mates going on a lunch Break. He remembers: “I started fiddling about on the guitar, and came up with this riff.” This riff became the band’s defining song. When the rest of the band came back, they knew that their guitar player came up with something special. Bill Ward completes the story: “Geezer plugged in his bass, I sat behind the drum kit, we automatically grooved with him and Ozzy started singing. We didn’t say a word to each other, we just came in the room and started playing. I think it was about one-thirty in the afternoon. Tony had the riff, and by two o’clock we had ‘Paranoid’ exactly as you hear it on the record.”
Tony Iommi talked about how Geezer Butler added lyrics to Black Sabbath songs: “Geezer would do the lyrics before we started recording or, in some cases, even in the studio. And then it would be up to Ozzy to get it right. He would come up with the melody, and he’d follow the riff in a lot of cases. I don’t know how Geezer came up with the idea for the ‘Paranoid’ lyrics, but he had quite a wide imagination. He would sit and listen to the music for a bit, and sometimes he’d want it to be quiet. He’d write a few things down, cross some out and write something else. And then he’d give it to Ozzy, and of course Ozzy would go: ‘What the fuck does this mean, Geez!’”
The sound of Iommi’s guitar and the heavy bass playing of Butler are the trademark of Black Sabbath. Butler discussed the uniqueness of that deadly combination: “I usually played the same riff that Tony was doing, as well as filling in between his riffs and his solos, making up for the absence of a rhythm guitar. That gave us a heavy, uninterrupted wall of sound. If Tony hadn’t lost the tips of those fingers, and I’d learned to play bass at college, we probably would have sounded much more conventional, and nowhere near as heavy.”
Producer Rodger Bain realized that the strength of the band’s sound was best if left untouched, exactly as it sounded in the recording room. He explains: “The secret to that was it was straightforward. If you put compressors on something, EQ it over the top, you lose that power. It just weakens the whole sound. The original way we worked was to keep it really raw.” The band, never intentionally trying to create a commercial song, had a single on their hand with Paranoid. Ozzy Osbourne remembers: “I went home with the tapes, and I said to my then-wife, ‘I think we’ve written a single.’ She said, ‘But you don’t write singles.’ I said, ‘I know, but this has been driving me nuts on the train all the way back.’” The single peaked at no. 4 and earned the band a curious appearance at Top of the Pops. Tony Iommi remembers: “It was like – oh no – we don’t really want this. We are not a pop group – We’re heavy underground. We were on the same show as Cliff Richard and Engelbert Humperdinck and must have stuck out like a sore thumb.”
Black Sabbath’s second album was released in September 1970 and climbed all the way to the top, dislodging the top album of that year, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. The album also scored the band two more hits with War Pigs and Iron Man.
My favorite song on the album is one that features no heavy guitar riffs, no satanic messages and no pounding bass and drums. Ozzy Osbourne’s voice is fed into a rotating Leslie speaker in this atmospheric track called Planet Caravan. Bassist Geezer Butler: “We didn’t want to come up with the usual love crap, so it is about floating through the universe with your loved one.” And about that jazzy guitar solo: “Tony, he used to love Django Reinhardt, Joe pass, and he used to play that a lot which didn’t really fit in with the heavier stuff. But it gave him a chance to show where his roots were.” In his book Into the Void, Butler talked about the jazz influences in Black Sabbath, an interesting part of their music that perhaps goes unnoticed with many of their listeners: “Bill was a big fan of Gene Krupa, Max Roach and Buddy Rich, which is why Black Sabbath were probably the only heavy metal band that swung. I never played with another rock drummer who played in that style; it was totally unique to Bill. Meanwhile, Tony was influenced by Joe Pass and Django Reinhardt. Like Tony, Django had lost the use of two fingers and would make up his own chords. When Tony thought he couldn’t play anymore, his boss at work gave him a Django album and said, ‘This guy can’t use two of his fingers, but listen to what he can do.’”
Ozzy Osbourne – vocals
Tony Iommi – guitar, flute on “Planet Caravan”
Geezer Butler – bass guitar
Bill Ward – drums, congas on “Planet Caravan”
Sources:
Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell with Black Sabbath, by Tony Iommi
Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath―And Beyond Hardcover, by Geezer Butler
Black Sabbath debut, 2009 CD booklet by David Wells
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