Black Sabbath's debut album is one of the only I can think of that started a new genre.

Well, I’m the outlier because every month or so when this comes up for debate around here I post Clear Light - Street Singer.

 

I suppose Sabbath did point the way to what heavy metal would eventually become, especially with the perfection of 'sludge' built on riffs that could be completely devoid of any melodic content!

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was an awesomely heavy riff, but there was a melody in it...

 

I don't recall ever hearing the term 'heavy metal' during the early days of Sabbath. Nor the term 'classic rock' or, for that matter "prog" (except to a very limited extent and certainly not applied to a band like Jethro Tull). All these labels came after the fact, for programming and/or marketing reasons, no?
I think of Sabbath and other early dwellers as proto or precursor bands to a later, broader popularization of the sound. When everyone was carrying on a few months ago about Greta Van Fleet being nothing more than a clone band, I kept wondering why no one referenced Leaf Hound, another early act whose greatest fame today may be the cost of an original UK pressing of their album.

 

It's all a bit relative, though. In the late '60s/dawn of the '70s, Black Sabbath, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, etc. were all labelled 'heavy rock' (the terms hardrock or heavy metal were hardly used yet). But Sabbath's sound is closest to what later became proper heavy metal, so yeah, they can be considered the ultimate metal pioneers, although that was decided with the benefit of hindsight, years after Black Sabbath's heyday. I personally never heard in the early '70s someone claiming "Ahh, Led Zeppelin is hardrock, but Black Sabbath is heavy metal".
It's a bit similar to people saying The Stooges are the first punk band, while nobody in '69/'70 said "Hey, have you heard that latest punk rock record by The Stooges?'

 

Exactly

 

Biker Rock

 

Sabbath get the credit, but Blue Cheer got there first.

 

King Crimson's debut had more impact. After that album a million prog bands formed

It took a long time after Black Sabbath's debut for the Metal genre to form. Up until the mid eighties, metal bands sounded more influenced by Deep Purple than Black Sabbath too.

 

Wrong.
The Beatles invented everything

 

Nevermind the Bollocks is an interesting choice, because it likely simultaneously launched the idea of punk to the masses while killing punk to the underground. Please Kill Me (the oral history of punk) is a real eye opener. Malcolm McLaren (former manager of the New York Dolls) was an opportunist who wanted to bring the look and style of Richard Hell back to England and put his own political spin on it. Punk was individualism and just playing instruments even if you didn't know how. It was Just Do It before Nike. The Pistols turned it into violence and safety pins through the nose.

It's kind of impossible to name the punk album that launched that genre. VU and Nico if you're going way back. Maybe the Stooges debut even more so. Who knows.

 

Don't you know? Sabbath is the only band ever that came along in a vacuum.

The revisionism started sometime after 1980. They went from being one-of-three to the one-and-only.

 

Yea, it bewilders me to be honest ... I wasn't there at the time, my music listening only really started in 1980, but even then it was the big three ... then later all of a sudden there was this particular mentality i read here

 

Well, I say they were.

 

If 85% of the people vote against gravity, can I float?

 

It's hard to listen to the White Light White Heat album and not hear some serious punk attitudes. Even on the debut they had some of that going on.
I guess folks don't like to think of them in a punk light due to there being gentle songs on the debut also .... idk?

 

I don’t know where some people get this idea, but I assume they didn’t read rock magazines in the seventies.

Sabbath were called Heavy Metal ALL THE FREAKING TIME. The term was more loosely thrown around and being used in the rags of the day about Sabbath, Zeppelin, Purple, Grand Funk, Mountain and others.

By ‘72 Sabbath were being called the kings of the genre by critic “Metal” Mike Saunders. By the mid seventies they were literally rejecting the Heavy Metal musical classification. They didn’t like it. When they did Jim Ladd’s ’Innerview’ in ‘76 there was a whole segment devoted to how they rejected the term to describe their music. They basically felt it was the press trying to “brand” what they did so they could put them in a specific bag.

They have since come to accept it more as they realize how important they are to what became a field of music with legions of participants, but even to this day Ozzy in particular is not really comfortable with it.

 

I think the case can be made -

 

There are certainly a number of roots leading to the Country Rock tree -

But I think Uncle Tupelo was the catalyst that started a new genre inspired in part by it: Alt.Country

 

‘Everybody has sung about all the good things' – a classic Black Sabbath interview from the vaults

Following our latest visit to the archives of Rock's Backpages – the world's leading collection of vintage music journalism – we bring you a classic interview with Black Sabbath. Originally titled A Dorito and 7-Up Picnic with Black Sabbath, the piece first appeared in Circular in September 1972

'Want a cheeseburger?' ... Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath. Photograph: Fin Costello/Redferns


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

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 ****ing 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' pretence 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 street fights 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.

Epilogue/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.

'Everybody has sung about all the good things' – a classic Black Sabbath interview from the vaults

 

The critics hated Sabbath on both sides of the Atlantic. They hated all heavy metal.

Black Sabbath – Rolling Stone

 

None of those acts besides Sabbath are heavy metal.

So? The progenitors of a genre usually aren't referred to by that genre at first.

Agreed! His performance on the studio version is great, but live he was even nastier. He even did a blast beat!

The metal community disagrees. So many metal bands have cited Sabbath as being the godfathers of heavy metal.

You Really Got Me is one of the first commercially successful hard rock songs in my opinion. It still gets airplay today.

 

Here's one of the best examples of a critic getting it completely wrong...

Jazz – Rolling Stone

 

lc1995, help me out here. Have you never heard of Purple, Sabbath, and Zeppelin being referred to as the Holy (or the Unholy) Trinity?

 

Sabbath was so too ahead of their time, the heavy metal culture had not really formed yet.

Blue Cheer was not metal. They rocked pretty hard with songs like Summertime Blues, but the lyrical content and mood of the song was not metal. Although years later they did become a metal band, in the 00s.

Interesting. Even if they don't identify as heavy metal to this day, they clearly associate with the scene very much. I think Judas Priest was the first band to identify as heavy metal.

 

Not by any metal fans. Some consider Deep Purple to be in the metal family tree (probably because Dio was in Rainbow and Ritchie Blackmore was in Deep Purple), but I never hear any metalheads claim that Zeppelin is metal.

And yes I hold the metal community's opinion to hold most weight. Same as hip hop and country.