Being a slightly unreal and slightly real account of a meeting between the foreboding Four and their Number One Fan, rock critic Mike Saunders, on the eve of the release of Black Sabbath, Vol.4, the lads’ new album.

Some people might want to meet Bob Dylan. Others, if asked which rock idols they’d most like to rub elbows with, might spout off names like John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Keith Richard, Ray Davies. Feh.

Me, I was whizzing over to Griffith Park in my 1966 Chevy II to say hi to the greatest rock group in the world, the true keepers of the faith, the absolute Number One group of the ’70s so far. You know who I’m talking about as well as I do: Black Sabbath.

A Flashback: Jan. 12, 1972

How it all came about was, I won the recent What Black Sabbath Means to Me Contest. This, as I later found out, was a special offer included in but 500 lucky copies of Master of Reality pressed during December 1971.

Fate as it were, upon acquiring my fifth new copy of Master of Reality, the aforementioned contest blank popped out. The instructions were a model of conciseness: “In 10 words or less, explain why you love Black Sabbath’s music.” So, as the strains of ‘Into the Void’ rumbled on, I strained my faculties for some glimmer of imagination.

I scratched my chin, looked up at my poster of lggy Stooge, hummed a few Kinks’ tunes, even tried conjuring up the beloved Ferocious Flintlings (better known to the world as Grand Funk) for inspiration.

Then my brother Kevin, age 16, looked up from his copy of Teenage Wasteland Gazette and said: “Black Sabbath have discovered the secret of sound.”

That was it.

The Myth of Downer Rock Exploded

So anyway, as I made my way to Black Sabbath’s picnic table, it was obvious that these guys were not what they were cracked up to be. There were no sacrificial victims on the table. No black cats either. Only two of the group were wearing their silver crosses. Not a single member had fangs. I mentioned this to Ozzy Osbourne.

“Well, you know, people describe us sometimes as if we ran around fields with pitchforks in our hands. I think they expected flames to shoot out of the cover of our second album. Want some Doritos?”

This isn’t the only respect in which Black Sabbath have been misinterpreted. Their first album, which for a long time gave the group the stigma of a Black Magic tag, consisted largely of tracks that were a warning against black magic – “old business tycoons going to black magic rituals to get themselves involved with young chicks…things like that, they’re sick.”

Likewise the deplorable misinterpretations of “Hand of Doom,” which in actuality is a grisly anti-heroin song:

Take your little dose

You join the other fools

Turn to something new

Now it’s killing you…

Stick the needle in.

Humble Beginnings

Black Sabbath’s first LP was recorded in two days, an amazing fact in these days of $500,000 Stones albums. The second, Paranoid, took all of a week, with the title cut written in the studio in five minutes. Tony Iommi’s description of Sabbath’s music is just as concise:

“We play it mainly because we like it, you know. We like what we’re doing – the heavy thing. We found it was exciting and really got into it and that was it. We’re pretty quick at writing; I think of a riff or melody, and the others write around it usually.”

The reason for the short studio time allotted Sabbath’s first album was that no one gives an unknown group much money to make an album with. And they were pretty unknown, as far as the media were concerned. With naïve innocence, Black Sabbath all rushed out to buy the English trade papers the week their debut was released, only to find that it had been savagely attacked by all the critics.

“It really threw us,” remembers Tony. “What had gone wrong? Were we really as bad as they said? One review of our first album must have been the worst rating ever, and we thought, ‘Oh, Christ. This is it.’ We were worried if everyone else would think the same.”

Then, the group’s spirits at their lowest, the album made its surprise appearance on the charts. The rest of the Sabbath story is history, and the group hasn’t paid much attention to reviews since.

7-Up and Doritos with the Dark Princes of Heavy Metal

Back to the business at hand, the beer was ok, Doritos a bit stale. Ozzy delighted in mugging with a 7-Up can for photographs, all in the line of maintaining his image as the face of the group.

One thing people have rarely picked up on is just where Black Sabbath’s music comes from; the group is often seen as a faceless four-piece entity. Such is hardly the case. Tony Iommi is a former school bully, these days reformed, with the result that the aggro, as the English would call it, comes out in his guitar work (power chords at their ultimate) and songwriting. The words, on the other hand, come from bassist Geezer Butler, as Tony emphasizes:

“Geezer writes most of the lyrics. Some of them are very doomy, but they vary from that to drugs and the bad things that happen sometimes with the band.”

I asked Geezer for comment on this…

“People feel evil things, but nobody ever sings about what’s frightening and evil. I mean the world is a right fucking shambles. Anyway, everybody has sung about all the good things.”

So there’s an element of catharsis in your music?

“Yes. We try to relieve all the tension in the people who listen to us. To get everything out of their bodies –all the evil and everything.”

Trivia Time

One fact I wanted to check on was Tony Iommi’s short-lived alliance with Jethro Tull in early 1969. What happened?

“I only stayed with Jethro Tull for three weeks. It was just like doing a 9 to 5 job. The group would meet, play a gig and then split. Whereas with our group we are all good friends; we not only work as a group, but we all lived together for a long time.”

Of Demons, Wizards, Iron Men and War Pigs

As my talk with reigning kings of Heavy Metal rock continued, the whole moral here became quite clear; Black Sabbath are just a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll kids who happen to make music that, along with Grand Funk, is louder than anything ever created, and which, not incidentally, sends our older brothers off into shrieks of anguish and condescension concerning that viperous noise we’ve got on the record player.

Ironic, too, that people could glorify the Stones’ pretense at being “street fighting men,” only to cringe when the real article came along in Black Sabbath – a group from the factory job rat-race world of fists and streetfights known as Birmingham, England.

But it’s all about raw, musical energy, and if Sabbath’s music happens also to be a shade more vengeful and violent than any previous rock, it’s because they mean what they say about releasing the tension in their audiences. With few of the trappings and affectations common to all too many groups, Black Sabbath deliver.

“Want a cheeseburger?” asked Geezer, in an unconscious mimic of the Beach Boys’ “Bull Session with the Big Daddy” classic. That about summed it all up.

Epilog/Aftermath

My mind began to dizzy from all this. Visions dancing in my head as I drove home, ‘Surfin’ Bird’ came on the radio to heighten the hallucinatory state even further. Around the corner of Pass and Verdugo in Burbank, I think I saw God… When I got home I frenziedly began to play all the records I’d ever liked because they had the Beat – Beatles VI, The Kink Kontroversy, Out of Our Head, E Pluribus Funk, The Who Sings My Generation, Funhouse, all Summer Long, Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade, The Crystals’ Greatest Hits, Paranoid, Kick out the Jams, Beatles for Sale, Dion’s More Greatest Hits, Back in the USA, Back Door Men, Here Are the Sonics, Master of Reality, Beach Boys Party, The Beatles’ Second Album, The Live Kinks, Demons and Wizards, Teenage Head…

*

After dancing the Locomotion for 36 consecutive hours, Mr. Saunders collapsed from a case of what the doctors termed “second-degree prostate delirium” and is currently recuperating at his bedside in the Burbank Municipal Hospital. He will be released at the end of September, in time to finish his senior year at the University of Texas in a wheelchair.

© Metal Mike Saunders, 1972