the last day of the Sabbath
today marks the end of an era as the originators of metal, Black Sabbath, announce their retirement with their final gig ‘Back to the Beginning’ at villa park stadium. it’s an achievement that few of their contemporaries even get around to contemplating. surely no one would have imagined the 4 original members seeing out their careers peacefully, least of all themselves, especially given the implication of rock’n’roll as a chaotic crash and burn type affair for kids with guitars?
what is almost as impressive is the lineup of acts lining up to pay homage. the roll call reads like a ‘legends’ edition of Download festival: Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Ronnie Wood (the Rolling Stones), Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), KK Downing (Judas Priest), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Sammy Hagar (Van Halen), Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), Travis Barker (Blink-182), Tobias Forge (Ghost), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Gojira, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, David Ellefson (Megadeth), Mike Bordin (Faith No More), David Draiman (Disturbed), Yungblud and Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme), Lamb of God, Halestorm, Rival Sons, Mastodon. all on one day in aston, no less. i like the idea of resident brummies bumping into the likes of Slash, Maynard James Keenan, and Phil Anselmo while doing their weekly shop. given the average age of the acts, there is every chance there were more early morning grocery store runs than late night metal mayhem. the event scheduling had a strong ‘all these acts MUST be back at the hotel with a nice hot cup of cocoa BEFORE midnight or they will LOSE THEIR SHIT’ feel about it.
Schedule for Back to the Beginning show.png
the very particular type of adulation on show proves Sabbath’s influence to be unmatched in british guitar music, possibly guitar music generally. i’ve made a claim here, one i suspect will trigger Beatles fans who insist that the Fab Four invented everything, so i’ll defend the statement.
there is a direct musical lineage between Sabbath’s seminal works and almost all metal subgenres, obvious in a way that very little else is. when James Hetfield says ‘without Black Sabbath, there would be no Metallica’, it means something quite different from Ozzy Osborne saying ‘without the Beatles, there would be no Black Sabbath.’
this is because Metallica’s entire style lives within the sonic universe of the minor / diminished key, downtuned, distorted guitar riff, an innovation that Black Sabbath metabolised in a way that the Beatles never got close to. sure, one might point to a song like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ (1969) as a precursor to Black Sabbath’s sound. but that song is solidly on the bluesy side of the rock paradigm, lacks the edge and power of the average song released by blues-rock contemporaries of the period (such the Yardbirds and Cream), and has none of the signifiers of metal as Black Sabbath coined them. the riffs of ‘Paranoid’ (1970) are more often deliberately diminished, providing an air of diabolical dissonance the Beatles could never conjure. combined with regular abrupt shifts in rhythm and tempo as well as lyrics contemplating the horrors of humanity, Sabbath cooked up a recipe for an altogether different sound from their peers. i doubt Lennon and McCartney could create the riff from the eponymous song that introduced Black Sabbath to the world, even if they’d had 1,000 years to write songs together.
the inspiration the Beatles gave Sabbath is less about music than about escaping a career of drudgery in the industrial suburbs of britain’s second city, imo. Paul McCartney’s impact on Ozzy Osborne is akin to the Make-A-Wish Foundation pitching up at his school to give him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
musically, the feeling of being stuck living in birmingham seemed to hold the greater influence on Sabbath. all visual depictions of the place from the 1960s are bleak. and guitarist Tony Iommi tried to depict that in the band’s sound: doomy (a precusor to doom metal), sludgy (sludge metal), dark (black metal), morbid (death metal), and similar adjectives represent the breadth of subgenres that Sabbath can lay claim to originating as part of their legacy.
in fact, Sabbath’s entire raison d’être might be to be the band that achieved the most from limited means. take Iommi’s guitar playing style: normalising drop tunings to compensate for losing the tips of two of his fingers in a factory sheet accident ranks as both the most influential move in electric guitar based music and by extension the single greatest unintended consequence of mid-twentieth century british industrial policy. up to that point, sounding heavy had largely been a game of who could play distorted guitar loudest. but the chug of metal was codified by Black Sabbath’s third album ‘Master of Reality’ (1971), which was mostly played with tuned down to c#. lower tunings are not only better at representing the dark side of humanity than standard tuning, but also sound way cooler. they just do, as does everything that tends towards bass frequencies. don’t ask me why, it’s the physics, i swear.
another example of outdoing the limitations of your powers resides in the shrill voice of frontman Ozzy Osborne, where Sabbath’s legacy on the history of metal is weakest. with a boyish treble similar in tone to the likes of Peter Gabriel, Jon Anderson, and even Suzi Quatro, it bears no relation to the range of extended techniques employed by metal vocalists today. Ozzy was never a pig squealer. instead, the lyrics he sang held more promise for the likes of Metallica’s Hetfield: the blatant embrace of a thematic palette ranging from suicide to occultist fantasies to biblical visions of hell to fatal disasters induced by political hypocrisies are all entry level requirements of your average metal band nowadays. blatant is the key word; Sabbath weren’t the first act to explore these topics, but the directness of Osborne’s delivery, paired with the band’s sonic palette, turned out to be a perfect match for doing so.
according to Iommi, he and bassist Geezer Butler wanted to capture the feeling of being frightened as per the horror films they enjoyed as kids. and they nailed that sound over the course of the first three albums, tapping into a heaviness in their brand of hard rock that none of their contemporaries could match. it is incredible that an entire universe of music started with the notion that four lads from aston could make a lifelong career from portraying the paranoid-schizoid state of mind in the most horrid sense.
and it turned out to have been a remarkably prescient move. not that they knew it at the time. judging from the rest of Sabbath’s 1970s output, it quickly becomes clear that their central dilemma is: once you’ve distilled the essence of heavy, where do you go next? journalists struggled to accurately describe the band’s sound several years after ‘Paranoid’: it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that they settled on heavy metal (derogatory) as the descriptor. by then, Sabbath were too invested in proving their musical dexterity in the rock (and even pop) space to notice what they’d unintentionally unleashed in a new generation of acts both at home with the new wave of british heavy metal and abroad. they were teething off peak Sabbath, such as ‘Into the Void’ from ‘Master of Reality’ (1971).
the song starts with a riff that creeps chromatically up and down the c# minor scale, supported by a rhythm section that provides a head-nodding stoner groove. that plays as an instrumental intro, before we get to the tonal nucleus of the song, centred around that c# power chord, which Iommi briefly alternates with a b power chord and the higher flattened fifth note (g) bent upwards from f#, the diablo interval itself. you can’t get more evil than that.
underneath, the rhythm section of Butler and Ward play a danceable mid-tempo funk groove. my personal theory (which i swear i heard Phil Collins confirm on a tv show once upon a time) is that many a rock drummer of the period copied the styles of their favourite american r’n’b drummers to produce their grooves, which to me explains why so many passages in these sorts of songs are absolutely sampleable for hiphop purposes.
over the top, Osborne delivers a percussive patter about flying away from a desolate and hopeless planet whose end is nigh. written with an eye on international conflicts such as the vietnam war, Ozzy and the lads imagine escaping humanity’s fate, but they cannot help but dwell on describing the ‘misery and woe’ that they are leaving behind. that is, until a bridge section marked by sudden uptick in tempo that brings in a third riff. musically, the song now motors along where it had previously chugged at a steady andante, but the chords remain in the same key and focused on the same tritone dynamic. while the lyrics remain the same in tone and even metre, there is a pivot in focus towards the act of leaving earth as opposed to the act of pontificating on the miserable state of things there.
the bridge delivers us to the final passage which Osborne sings the same way as before. musically, normal service resumes, but lyrically we’re in ‘a world unknown, where the sons of freedom make their home’. then Iommi solos his way into the final riff, which inhabits another winning groove, a break, some more soloing, and an outro that is more straightforwardly pentatonic, but because we have been circling the same c# power chord for 5 minutes up to this point, it never feels like a drastic departure. the liberal arts teacher in me ought to say something like ‘is this move a deliberate ambuigity, meant to signify something about the futility of escaping your problems for something new’? but i don’t believe Black Sabbath thought it was. they probably just jammed out a bunch of winning guitar riffs. and that’s the long and short of it. on a fundamental level, Iommi knew that heavy guitar music is simply a case of playing a succession of winning riffs, supported by a rhythm section that know what, where, when, and how to fit around them.
strangely enough, the media coverage of Sabbath’s farewell, dubbed ‘the heavy metal Live Aid’, paled in comparison to the build up to the Oasis tour, which began the same weekend. the occasion crept up on me; i heard almost nothing about it until after the event, unlike the endless advertising of the Gallagher brothers’ reunion. i find this emblematic of the relationship metal has had with the mainstream music press all along: an underappreciated and eternally slighted guitar genre, as opposed to a wildly overrated but basic one (such as indie rock). however, time has shown that there is a sizeable cross-generational working class audience for metal and its many subgenres, in a way that makes it most worthy of the ‘best of british’ label. what Black Sabbath produced from this sceptred isle is as good an export as builders tea, queuing, a pint at a pub, cricket on the village green, and genteel landlordism. i don’t see Oasis having quite the same impact, somehow.