TONY IOMMI: We did six weeks in Switzerland and we had a gig in England on the day we came back. We arrived at this place and there was a guy there at the front door with a bow tie and a suit. We thought, “Bloody hell, this is weird,” because most of the places we played at were certainly not like that. The guy said, “Okay, let’s get your gear in and get ready.” And as we’re getting the equipment in he said, “Oh, I really like your new record.” We said, “Oh, thanks,” but we hadn’t done a record at that time. It turned out that this guy had booked the wrong Earth. There was another band called Earth, and they were a pop band. We played the show and people stood there with their mouths open. We died right there onstage. We said, “That’s it. That’s never gonna happen again. We’re gonna find a name that nobody else has.” Hence Black Sabbath. That movie was playing at a theater across the street from where we rehearsed. We thought, “What a great name for the band.” When we went under the name Black Sabbath it opened the doorway to everything for us.
OZZY OSBOURNE: With a name like Black Sabbath, what do you expect? And the album cover wasn’t exactly about a bunch of flowers. In the beginning, we decided to write scary music because we really didn’t think life was all roses. So we decided to write horror music. Then we started to read books about the occult and we realized that it wasn’t just a thing that movies were made from. It was real. There was a thing called the occult. We never realized what exactly we were getting involved in until we started getting success and all these nutters started sending us letters. We never dealt with the occult ourselves. Different crazy people asked us to play at their black masses and other ceremonies. I just didn’t take it onboard, so it wasn’t scary. If you let it in, you’re a fucking idiot. If you play with the dark stuff, you’re gonna have some bad shit happen.
GEEZER BUTLER: The occult was interesting for me and it was very fashionable at the time. Once, somebody sent Ozzy this really old book about witchcraft. It was all in Latin and it had to be three hundred years old. I got this weird vibe off that book. I was living in this one-bedroom apartment at the time with a shared bathroom. I didn’t want this book in the same room as me, so I went out into the hall and shoved it in the bathroom cabinet where the towels were kept, and went to bed. In the middle of the night I felt this presence. I woke up and there was this black shape looming over the bottom of the bed and I couldn’t really make out what it was, but I could just see the outline of it. It frightened the pissing life out of me. When I jumped up to turn the light on there was nothing there. I thought, “It’s that pissing book.” So I went out at four in the morning to get the book to throw it in the bin and it was gone. I told Ozzy about it because it was him that gave me the book, and that incident inspired him to write the lyrics to “Black Sabbath” as a warning to people that were getting heavily involved in black magic. Of course, the lyrics got so completely misinterpreted. If you listen, they’re saying, “If you’re going to get into it, be serious about it. Otherwise, don’t dabble in it.” But everybody thinks it’s about worshipping Satan.
TOM BEAUJOUR (editor, Guitar Aficionado): At that time, messing around with the occult was part of the hipster subculture on some level. But taking that and turning it into a template for a band was such a weird and powerful thing to do.
ROBERT TRUJILLO (Metallica, ex-Ozzy Osbourne, ex-Suicidal Tendencies): When I was a kid, we’d sit there and listen to my friend’s older brother’s vinyl and play the song “Black Sabbath.” We’d look at the album cover and freak ourselves out, totally. It was like watching a horror movie. I would have to say Black Sabbath is the first heavy metal band to kick me in the ass for real, scare the living shit out of me.
LEMMY KILMISTER: Sabbath were fucking great. They seemed dangerous, and basically, you want [your rock stars to seem like] dangerous people. If you read history, you don’t read about the fucking medieval agrarian reforms. You read about Attila the bloody Hun and the Norman conquest of Britain—something with swords in it. The subject of evil is obvious for rock and roll. Look at the news every night. That’s evil. We’re all just singing about it. We’re not scared of it.
GEEZER BUTLER: The critics hated us. They totally wrote us off. We thought everybody hated us. We didn’t really believe anyone liked us until Black Sabbath reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart in [February] 1970. We were absolutely shocked. We knew we had a strong local following, but we hadn’t really made it in London. We used to have to play northern England, so we weren’t expecting the album to do anything. And we’d been turned down by three or four managers in London. Nobody wanted us. And then suddenly the album came into the charts and everybody started believing in us, especially the nutters. We were invited to the Witches’ Sabbath, which was at Stonehenge in England. We refused to go. So, apparently, the head warlock put a curse on us. Then the head white witch of England called us up and told us about this curse and that we had to start wearing crosses to keep the curse away, and that’s how we all ended up wearing crosses.
Black Sabbath was the first major metal band to break out of Birmingham, England, and gain worldwide acclaim. However, Judas Priest wasn’t far behind. The band formed in 1969 with singer Al Atkins, the same year Earth changed its name to Black Sabbath.
K.K. DOWNING (ex-Judas Priest): The Sabs got an album jumpstart on us, but that was great. It was good to see that a band relatively comparable to ourselves had some success. Everyone was playing it, and that was great news for the Priest because it made us think, “Yeah, if we stick with what we’re doing this is really going to happen.”
IAN HILL (Judas Priest): There was a nucleus of musicians in the West Bromwich area of the Midlands right outside of Birmingham who were all hungry, all proficient. And they’d form three or four bands between them. If they didn’t make it in about six months, they’d all split up. The different combinations of the same musicians would then form another three or four bands. Judas Priest [featuring Al Atkins on vocals] was one of those. They were together for about six months, didn’t get anywhere, and split up. And [guitarist] Ken [K.K. Downing] and myself and the drummer John Ellis were in another band [called Freight], and we didn’t have a singer yet.
K.K. DOWNING: Alan Atkins was down at our practice room one day with his bass player and he must have been listening outside the door.
IAN HILL: Al heard us and asked if we needed a vocalist because [his band], the original Priest, had just split. None of us had a very good voice, so we jumped at the chance. We had a couple of very long head-scratching sessions trying to come up with a name for the band, and came up with nothing. Alan said, “Do you fancy calling it Judas Priest? I’ll call the other band members and see if they mind.” Nobody did, so we took over the name.
K.K. DOWNING: The first show we ever did with Alan as a four-piece was at a workingmen’s club. There were lots of cute girls there in hot pants, and we were doing a selection of our own songs and a couple songs by an obscure band called Crater Mass. People didn’t know what to think.
IAN HILL: Al’s a good singer, but he left the band in 1973 because he needed money and we weren’t earning anything. We were living off friends and girlfriends and our families. But Al was already married with a child. So he had to leave, and that’s when Rob came along.
ROB HALFORD: I saw Priest play at a place in Birmingham, and at that time the music was a mixture of psychedelic blues and progressive rock. You could sense it was a new band that was getting its legs, but it was difficult to pinpoint what the band was about.
IAN HILL: I don’t think either [K.K.] or myself had seen him or heard him, but I was dating Rob’s sister [Sue]. And she said, “Why don’t you try Rob?” He was in a band at the time called Hiroshima. We went to Rob and Sue’s parents’ house and Rob came down the stairs doing harmonies to an Ella Fitzgerald song. I went, “Ooh God, at least the guy can do harmonies.”
ROB HALFORD: I can’t remember what song it was. It could quite well have been [Ella Fitzgerald]. I don’t know if I would have b
een thinking, “Oh, Ian’s in the house, I better start wailing.” But what’s interesting about that is it shows that as a singer I love all kinds of singing performances, no matter what genre.
IAN HILL: Rob brought this drummer John Hinch from Hiroshima. There was some discussion over whether we should use the name Hiroshima or keep the name Judas Priest, seeing as it was a halfway split. Ken and myself voted for Judas Priest and Rob and John wanted Hiroshima. But Priest had been around a year longer than Hiroshima, so we kept the name. I think we made the right choice.
ROB HALFORD: We used to go to this place called Holy Joe’s right outside of Birmingham, where we lived. It was this little room, 50-by-50 foot, and it was connected to a high school next to a church. The local parish priest, Father Joe, would rent out this room and we’d give him 5 quid [about $8] to rehearse for the day and night. And the venue itself was nicknamed the Holy Joe, which is kind of cool. Holy Joe and Judas Priest! We didn’t have any songs. We were doing a jam with some heavy blues and I would just scat some words together, but it felt so good. It felt like we were all connected, so we decided to keep going forward and write our own material. Then we got to the point where we decided we could do more with the songs if we had two guitarists.
GLENN TIPTON (Judas Priest): My old band, the Flying Hat Band, was with the same agency in Birmingham as Judas Priest. We were on the verge of breaking up when Priest asked me to join. They’d seen me play and perform. As soon as we got together we realized pretty immediately that there was something special there, especially in terms of writing.
While Judas Priest was still finding its feet, Black Sabbath was finishing its self-titled debut, which was recorded live and mixed over two days. Then the band seized the moment, touring Europe and leaving audiences bewildered by their fiercely loud, improvisational, and dramatic sets.
GEEZER BUTLER: We went to Switzerland and Germany for six weeks, and we were literally playing for eight hours a day. We were on tour constantly. But it was good because we got really tight musically. We sort of knew what each other was going to play before we even played it. So we became a really good rhythm section. I loved the way Bill [Ward] always got that kind of swing in his playing. It’s great for a bass player to play along with. But since we were playing so much, we only had enough material from the first album, which lasted for about an hour. So we had to make stuff up for the next seven hours. We jammed about onstage and gradually came up with most of the Paranoid album. By the time the first album was out, we’d already had 90 percent of the second one written.
TONY IOMMI: The second album wasn’t even going to be called Paranoid. We hadn’t gotten enough songs to fill the album. So we were asked to come up with another song. I sat there during a lunch break and came up with “Paranoid.” When the other guys came back, I played it to them. They thought it was good, so we recorded that as a filler. And the bloody thing became the most popular track. The album was originally going to be called War Pigs. But that title was banned because of the word pigs. We got all sorts of shit from the record company. So they named the album Paranoid, which didn’t go with the cover at all. There’s a guy standing there with a shield and a sword. What’s that have to do with being paranoid?
GEEZER BUTLER: The cover didn’t have anything to do with “war pigs,” either, really. That’s like the cheapest album cover the record company could come up with, I think. It’s horrible and we hated it, but we didn’t have any say in the matter, so we were stuck with it. Also, War Pigs wasn’t originally called “War Pigs.” It was “Walpurgis.” It’s sort of like the Satanic Christmas. I was writing Generals gathered in the masses because that’s what Satan is. War was the big Satan, not somebody who lives in the clouds. I was making an analogy, and Warner Bros. didn’t like the title because it was too Satanic, so we turned it into War Pigs, which is a better title anyway. In the end, they thought “Paranoid” was the standout track, so that’s what they called the album, and in England it was the number two single.
MARTIN POPOFF: Paranoid is so much more of a trouncing heavy metal album than the first Black Sabbath album, but there are certain things that are done really well with Black Sabbath, and that’s scary lyrics, a scary album cover, the devil’s tritone, and big, bulldozing riffs, but the actual Black Sabbath album doesn’t do that nearly as well as Paranoid or Master of Reality do.
GEEZER BUTLER: We didn’t want Paranoid to have one sound or one tempo all the way through like a lot of bands did back then. “Hand of Doom” was quite a long song. The lyrics came from when we played a couple of American bases in Germany and England. I got to speak to some of the soldiers there, and they had just come back from Vietnam. They told me about the amount of soldiers there that were addicted to heroin because Vietnam was a horrible experience. They had to do drugs just to get through it. You never saw that side of it on TV.
LESLIE WEST: Frank Barcelona was our agent at Premiere Talent. It was Black Sabbath’s first tour, and our agent said, “I have a great opening act for you.” I said, “What’s their name?” He said, “Black Sabbath.” I said, “What are they, an R&B group?” I didn’t know anything about them, but we became great friends with Ozzy.
OZZY OSBOURNE: Mountain was the first band we played with in America. We used to sit on the side and just watch them. They were amazing, absolutely brilliant. People forget that originally Sabbath was based on a blues-jazz band. Mountain reminded me very much of an American Cream.
GEEZER BUTLER: When we got to America we started seeing some of our success. Once we started getting paid for gigs, it was really rewarding. But you know, you’d end up in hotels with nothing to do after the show except loads of groupies and loads of things to shove up your nose. Then, before you know it, your money’s gone. But it was mainly out of boredom, really. There was no television on. There were, like, three channels back then. It was so different when we went to the States than it was in Europe. You meet the real groupies in America. The ones who know how to party. These people were made for partying, whereas in Europe everybody was miserable. So we loved it. It was a completely new lifestyle to us.
TONY IOMMI: We had our day with [groupies] when we first went to the States, and LA in particular. God, we had all sorts of women. One of the guys that worked with us at the time happened to catch bloody syphilis. That sort of dampened the whole thing.
While U.S. audiences were immediately responsive to Sabbath’s foreboding atmospheres, blaring guitars, and trudging rhythms, they were also captivated by the hysteria the musicians engendered, and sometimes took their occult-inspired themes too literally.
MICK WALL: Black Sabbath understood that people were reacting to them in this bizarre way because their music has clearly conveyed that image and message, but they themselves were utterly freaked out at this suggestion. When [Church of Satan founder] Anton LaVey had the Black Sabbath parade in San Francisco when they first came to America, they were watching it on TV and went, “What the fuck is this?” There’d be gigs where witches would show up in black cloaks and Sabbath would play stupid, thicko boy tricks on them. The occultists were being very serious about it, and Sabbath weren’t.
TONY IOMMI: You open a can of worms sometimes that you can’t control. One time, we were playing at the Hollywood Bowl. We arrived at the gig and on the dressing room door was a red cross. We thought, “Oh, that’s odd.” As we’re doing the show, I was in a really bad mood. I was pissed off because my gear was acting up. I kicked my amp over and went to walk off. As I’m walking off this guy comes behind me with a dagger, and he was about to stab me. He got past security and I just heard this big scuffle on the floor. That’s how close I came to being stabbed.
MICK WALL: In those days, they were doing so much coke it was like, “Oh, someone went to stab me, wow! Give us a line then? Cool! Wow! Shit.” Going to America was such a foreign concept for them. You might as well have been going to the moon. It’s like going from black-and-white TV to color. Anything could happen. “Jesus, of course so
meone tried to stab me. It’s America. It’s Hollywood!”
TONY IOMMI: It’s funny, because some people think those first two albums were recorded in a haze of drugs, but we didn’t have time when we did the first two albums. We were in the studio one day, recorded the first album. And then Paranoid was only a couple days and then we were out. There wasn’t time to indulge in anything.
GEEZER BUTLER: We couldn’t afford anything. When we first started we’d have, like, one joint between us all. We couldn’t afford booze either, so none of us drank. The first time I tried acid was unknowingly when somebody spiked me. It was before we went to America. We did this outdoor concert and somebody gave me this pill and said it was speed, and it was actually three doses of acid in one tablet. I got back to where I was living and I used to have all these pictures of Satan and occult pictures on the wall, and all this stuff came to life. There were all these snakes trying to bite me. It was horrendous. I was in my bedroom, but the bedroom turned into the middle of the desert. Then I was a Roman soldier. It was absolutely mental. We had a gig the next day in the middle of this park. And as we were driving through the park, all the flowers were trying to get into the car to strangle me. Later, when we got to America, I tried acid again in California, but that turned bad as well, so I couldn’t do it. You can’t control yourself. It just turned into a nightmare. For some reason with me, it always went bad.
As with the British Invasion in the sixties, England lit the first heavy metal flames with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. By 1970, a New York band called Wicked Lester—which, three years later, changed its name to KISS—entered the fray. Although the group was never as definitively metal as Sabbath or Priest, it nonetheless altered the face of stadium rock and influenced everyone from Mötley Crüe to Pantera (whose guitarist, Dimebag Darrell Abbott, was buried in a KISS Kasket, the branded casket by the band KISS). Wicked Lester was comprised of bassist Gene Klein (born Chaim Witz, later known as Gene Simmons); his childhood friend, guitarist Stephen Coronel; keyboardist Brooke Ostrander; and drummer Tony Zarrella. At the suggestion of Coronel, they hired Stanley Eisen (later known as Paul Stanley) on rhythm guitar.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 5
