Tónhornið: Black Sabbath

Hinn Ótrúlegi Vefheimur Stefáns

Black Sabbath - Heavy Rock/Metal
10. Nov. 2006

Now I'm going to tell you about Black Sabbath, godfather of Heavy Metal and a defining force in that genre. They took the blues-rock sound of late '60s to its logical conclusion, slowing the tempo, accentuating the bass, and emphasizing screaming guitar solos and howled vocals full of lyrics expressing mental anguish and macabre fantasies. By doing so they helped give birth to a musical style. Most of you know this band but I'm not sure you really recognize their songs, but incase you do I put many videos, most of my favorite songs, like I did with The Cure, and you can just check out the songs you don't know, if there are any. I tried to short the songs by my favorite on top but that was really hard since I love all these songs. The bio is long as well but try to enjoy this and I hop you find it enlightening. Please don't hesitate to comment, tell me what you thought, or maybe just tell me if you knew them already. Anyways, enjoy.

Black Sabbath was formed by four teenage friends from Aston (near Birmingham) in England in 1969. Tony Iommi on guitar, Bill Ward on drums, Ozzy Osbourne on vocals and Geezer Butler on Bass. They originally called their jazz-blues band Polka Tulk, later renaming themselves Earth, and they played extensively in Europe. In early 1969, they decided to change their name again, to Black Sabbath, when they found that they were being mistaken for another group called Earth. In February 1970 they released their self-titled debut album, which reached the U.K. Top Ten. It reached the American top 40 charts in August, remaining in the charts over a year, and selling a million copies. Black Sabbath quickly followed its debut album with a second album, Paranoid, in September 1970. The title track hit the Top Five in the U.K., and the album went to number one there. In the U.S., where the first album had just begun to sell, Paranoid was held up for release until January 1971. There the title track, which made the singles charts in November 1970, and the album broke into the Top Ten in March 1971 and remained in the charts over a year, eventually selling over four million copies, by far the band's best-selling effort. The next three albums, Master of Reality (August 1971), Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 (September 1972), and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (November 1973) all reached the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic and sold in over a million copies. For Sabbath Bloody Sabbath the band brought in Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman on one track, signaling a slight change in musical direction.

Their sixth album, Sabotage, reached top 20 on the U.S. charts, but did not match previous sales and so Black Sabbath's fall began. The band contemplated a more pronounced change of musical style. This brought about disagreement, with guitarist Iommi wanting to add elements to the sound, including horns, and singer Osbourne resisting any variation in the formula. Technical Ecstasy (October 1976), which adopted some of Iommi's innovations, was another good -- but not great -- seller, and Osbourne's frustration eventually led to his quitting the band in November 1977, and then returned in January 1978 and Black Sabbath recorded its eighth album, Never Say Die!

The albums success was again modest and Osbourne left Black Sabbath for a solo career, replaced in June 1979 by former Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio (b. June 10, 1949). (Also during this period, keyboardist Geoff Nichols became a regular part of the band's performing and recording efforts, though he was not officially considered a band member until later.) In 1980 drummer Bill Ward left the band due to ill health and was replaced by Vinnie Appice. Iommi and Dio got in a dispute and by 1983 Dio had left, taking Appice with him.

The group reorganized by persuading original drummer Bill Ward to return and, in a move that surprised heavy metal fans, recruiting Ian Gillan, former Deep Purple singer. Gillan remained with Black Sabbath until March 1984, when he joined a Deep Purple reunion and was replaced by singer Dave Donato, who was in the band until October without being featured on any of its recordings.

Black Sabbath reunited with Ozzy Osbourne for its set at the Live Aid concert on July 13, 1985, but soon after the performance, bassist Geezer Butler left the band, and with that the group became Tony Iommi's own personal band, clearly shown when the album Seventh Star came out and was credited to "Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi". On this release, the lineup was Iommi (guitar); another former Deep Purple singer, Glenn Hughes (vocals); Dave Spitz (bass); Geoff Nichols (keyboards); and Eric Singer (drums).The album was a modest commercial success, but the new band began to fragment immediately, with Hughes replaced by singer Ray Gillen for the promotional tour in March 1986. With Black Sabbath now consisting of Iommi and his employees, personnel changes were rapid.

Iommi was able to reunite the 1979-1983 lineup of the band -- himself, Geezer Butler, Ronnie James Dio, and Vinnie Appice -- for Dehumanizer (June 1992), which brought Black Sabbath back into the American Top 50 for the first time in nine years, while in the U.K. the album spawned "TV Crimes," their first Top 40 hit in a decade. And on November 15, 1992, Iommi, Butler, and Appice backed Ozzy Osbourne as part of what was billed as the singer's final live appearance. Shortly after, it was announced that Osbourne would be rejoining Black Sabbath. That didn't happen -- yet. Instead, Dio and Appice left again, and Iommi replaced them.

In 1997 the original band-members, Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward got back to gether and recorded a live album with a couple of new studio tracks on it. The two-CD set, Reunion was released in Oct. 1998. It charted only briefly in the U.K., but in the U.S. it just missed reaching the Top Ten and went platinum. The track "Iron Man" won Black Sabbath its first Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance. In February 2001, Black Sabbath announced that it would reunite once again to headline the sixth edition of Ozzfest. They also announced their intention to record a studio album of all-new material, the original lineup's first since 1978. By the end of the year, a failed recording session with producer Rick Rubin proved what an unreasonable idea this was, and the band laid dormant while Osbourne enjoyed scoring a hit TV series the following spring.

BTW. it takes 55 min and 43 sec to watch all the videos (58:30 with cartoon) so I doubt anybody will be doing that, at least not all at once so I advice you to pick a few, listen to a bit from each or do it in many runs.

I also forgot to mention a big factor in the sound of Black Sabbath. When Tony Iommi was 15 he lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand - which, being left-handed, he uses to fret the strings of a guitar. He thought his playing days were over but his boss paid him a visit during his recovery and encouraged him not to quit playing and played a Django Reinhardt record for him which had lost mobility in the third and fourth fingers of his fretting hand in a fire. After trying to learn to play right-handed, he instead strung his guitars with extra-light strings (which he created himself by intertwining banjo strings) and wore plastic covers that were made from bottle caps over those two fingers (which he covered with leather, so he could grip the strings properly). after some time Tony detuned his guitar from E to C# (1 and 1/2 steps down) in order to ease the tension on his fingers, making Sabbath one of the first bands to detune. This idea is now a mainstay of heavy metal music. Geezer Butler, the bass-player, also tuned his instrument down to match Iommi's.

Nativity in Black or N.I.B.live in Paris 1970