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

In this case COVEN predated Black Sabbath, had a song called Black Sabbath, a bass player named Oz Osbourne and instead of being "interested in the occult" was fronted by a rather attractive frontwoman who happened to be a third generation witch.

Part of the record company sales spiel for the band Black Sabbath was obviously inspired by the then obscure band COVEN.

No surprise that Iommi and the boys would rather folks not remember how at least part of their initial marketing was based on other acts. Heck, with the way bands were marketed then, they themselves were probably oblivious to what they were being built into after their blues inspired act "Earth" failed to land..

"Not to discount the metal icons or any of the mind-blowing contributions they've made to the last half-century of music, but let's give credit where credit's due: The distinction of being "the first" band to fuse occult and Satanic themes with rock music belongs to Coven"

How Coven Pioneered Occult Rock With 'Witchcraft Destroy Minds & Reaps Souls'

 

Much of this has already been covered way above in this thread:

 

Beatles -Helter Skelter takes the award~!

 

The "PROOF" is about as "conclusive" as it gets...

But it matters not... Part of the imagery that Black Sabbath claims to have invented was a marketing spiel cooked up by a record company 50 years ago and was based on a more obscure act from an affiliated label

 

So basically you're saying that proof doesn't matter, and then go on to make a statement that contains at least two unproven claims.

Where and when exactly have Sabbath claimed to have "invented" that imagery? They have always been open regarding its sources, like the 1963 movie "Black Sabbath" and the occult literature that Geezer was reading.

And again, the mere fact that Coven used similar imagery earlier does not prove that Sabbath's imagery was "based" on Coven's. Occult imagery was used by many people and groups long before any of the two bands even existed.

Besides, do you believe that Sabbath's success was mainly or essentially due to that imagery? For Sabbath, unlike Coven, that imagery never played a role on stage, nor do many Sabbath album covers (other than the first one's) look very "occult", no are their lyrics even closely as obsessed (pun intended) by that imagery as Coven's; and the way both bands do make use of occult imagery is quite different too. More importantly, the music both bands were playing was obviously rather different as well.

Round and round and round it goes
And where it stops nobody knows

 

The label stuck an upside down cross in the debut gatefold. Which could've just as easily been inspired by Rosemary's Baby. We don't know.

 

IMO, any musician that states/claims they never heard of a song tied in as a "potential" influence in someway,shape or form is a standard "protective" reply to avoid a "can of worms" to spill out legal-wise. Deny the "connection" is to keep the lid on the "can" which,is a common action we see & criticize within our society everyday,right?Yet,somehow, we tend to give our favorite musicians a "break" in this instance IMO.It may be there is only coincidence involved here as to the Coven/Black Sabbath topic addressed here. But, I wouldn't be surprised in the least that there was a knowledge of Coven and their "mission" to promote the occult as Geezer was clearly "into" that subject already as noted in previous posts.It is interesting. Provable? Don't know....

The "Pond" has never been much of a barrier for "cross-pollination" in either direction

 

Nope. If anything, this is anti-punk. It's literally an effort to monetize a movement that had already begun, using fashion and politics as its platform. That's the opposite of the punk ethos, and McLaren has admitted all of this hundreds of times. It's a fact of life.

 

Yeah, quite clearly, Tony's denial doesn't prove that Sabbath's imagery wasn't influenced by Coven's. The similarities in some respects between Sabbath's and Coven's imagery are intriguing. And I am not saying it is impossible that Sabbath's imagery was influenced by Coven's. Like you, I would hardly be surprised if it ever turns out that it was. What I am arguing against is the assumption, underlying many comments on the alleged Coven/Sabbath connection, that the similarities as such somehow prove that that was indeed a direct influence from Coven's imagery on Sabbath's. In fact, there are many examples in human history were similar inventions or events happened shortly after another without any direct influence of the first on the second - it often turns out that both inventions or events actually shared similar or the same influences, which is sometimes easily explained by a shared cultural background, social climate or technological progress. In case of Coven and Sabbath, some shared cultural background regarding an interest by many people in all things occult and magic, represented in e.g. movies, books, articles, social groups and practices and all kinds of cultural artifacts, was definitely given in the 1960ies. Which is why I think that the similarities at hand, as fascinating as they are, are much less significant than many seem to believe.

 

Sabbath doesn’t claim to have invented the “imagery.” Arthur Brown has already done that.

Sabbath or their management probably looked in to what was out there to get ideas for visuals right when they changed their name, but musically they had their thing dialed in and Coven was about as influential on their musical approach as Englebert Humperdinck.

 

It is interesting that Coven's 1969 debut did not have a UK release, however there was a Canadian( sometimes shared UK and/or US distribution lines depending on company) and German (many bands went there for work) release, so it could have gotten to the UK. And a bunch of working class kids from Birmingham UK may have thought nothing of borrowing. They may have figured it was rare and obscure to them, so it must be for others, so who would know(e.g group think). Information, books, records were not as ubiquitous as they are in our present internet days. They may have figure nobody would care/know, after all they didn't know what they had. They could have easily plonked right back into the obscurity from which they came. Plus the occult interest was not in a vacuum, in the late 60s the UK had Pesky Gee/Black Widow, Comus, Third Ear Band, etc., who all played with occult imagery. In the end none of the other bands sounded like Sabbath.

 

I consider Zeppelin to be hard rock but the fact remains that in the band's early years, the term heavy metal was frequently used to describe them by fans and media. I would suggest that as Zeppelin's sound became more diverse, while metal was simultaneously developing a more fully-formed and very different identity, the descriptive fell out of favor as far as Zep goes.

Zeppelin is clearly proto-metal, in my very professional opinion. Just close your eyes for a second and imagine "Dazed and Confused" as a track on "Black Sabbath," which came out more than a year after the first Zeppelin album. That track is metal.

 

Maybe not metal, but heavy metal yes. To which reams of newspaper, magazine articles from their time attest.

 

Before hearing Sabbath, I was listening to Cream, Ten Years After, Mountain, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, etc. Much of that was called hard rock but hearing Black Sabbath for the first time was striking - I didn't like it at all, but it struck me as a new and different style.

 

I think it's silly to claim any one album began a genre. Everything builds off what has come before it; it just didn't suddenly happen.

 

"The world is spinning round and round and round..."

 

Riiiight...because the few punk records that came out before Bollocks had no intention of "monetizing" the musical movement. I mean, it's not like they were FOR SALE or anything

Bollocks launched punk from obscurity to the level of, well, guys arguing about it 40 years later. It's a fact of life.

 

True, to a certain extent - but I think it's valid to discuss albums where you think one particular album elevated the status of a genre or style, from being nonexistent or largely underground to becoming popular and trendy and thereby spawning many others. That's why I mentioned the Moody Blues album, and I think the debut albums by Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin also fall into that category.

 

...and any discussion about the facts of life must inevitably mention bollocks.

 

The PBS's Grammy Salute to Music Legends 2019 interview of Black Sabbath members contradicts their name origin as being inspired by Coven's "Black Sabbath" song in that the band Black Sabbath took their name from the Boris Karloff B picture horror movie trilogy.



I'll grant you the occult aspect created by Coven as a concept for the mojo and driving force of a rock band may have similarities to the Black Sabbath band, but I believe most of Black Sabbath songs going by the lyrics aren't primarily based in the occult. Can you name one Black Sabbath song that directly mentions active and deliberate participation in the occult, not just be suggestive or indirectly with third person references to someone who dabbled in the occult?

 

Same here, I didn't like Black Sabbath when I first heard their music in high school, but that was mainly from the low quality recordings where it just sounded like a train wreck of mushy, loud noise with someone screaming through all of it just to be barely heard.

 

Definitely some elements there but also still sounds quite a bit like Cream to me.

The title track of the debut Sabbath album is ground zero to my ears, but they would obviously even further define this approach on Paranoid and Master Of Reality; by which time comparisons to anything else in rock were pretty much futile.

 

Jimmy Page refuses to have anything to do with the term Metal. But I don't suppose it's for him to say.

 

It was a dynamic time with much genre melding going on and in the end to him and everyone else it was ALL rock ‘n’ roll.

 

Indeed. I personally don't think of Zep, or even Purple as Metal bands, but some of their tracks could easily fit on a Metal compilation.