The birth of Heavy Metal

The birth of Heavy Metal – The history of Heavy Metal’s first song

Black Sabbath is a song by the band Black Sabbath released on their self-titled debut album in late 1969.
It is widely regarded as the first pure heavy metal song to be written and published.

Today it is a certified classic, but it had a difficult road.
We will take a look at how different musical and cultural inspirations can give birth to a fresh new genre,

and examine its initial and lasting impact.

Black Sabbath was an English Hard Rock/Heavy Metal band formed in Birmingham in 1968.

The original and most prolific lineup of the band were guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, bassist Geezer Butler, and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne.
They played together from 1968 to 1979 and had a few reunions later.

They began playing as a Blues-Rock band under the names “The Polka Tulk Blues Band” and “Earth”.

In December 1968, guitarist Iommi abruptly left Earth to join Jethro Tull for a short stint. Unsatisfied with the band’s folk-rock direction and non-democratic nature, he returned to Earth.

Some of the folk-rock influences were presenting future Black Sabbath ballads, but certainly not in their eponymous track.

Iommi with white guitar and hat.

After discovering that another band named “Earth” is also playing on the English rock circuit, they decided to change their name.

A cinema across the street from the band’s rehearsal room was showing the 1963 horror film Black Sabbath starring Boris Karloff and directed by Mario Bava.
It immediately influenced the band the change their musical direction to try and create the musical equivalent of horror films. “Black Sabbath” became the name of the band, their first album, and the first song on their first album.

The melody base of the song is the tritone – “Diabolus in musica”.

In music theory, the tritone is defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones (six semitones).

As its Latin moniker suggests, it’s an evil-sounding combination of notes that are designed to create a chilling or foreboding atmosphere.

The interval was given a sinister name since listeners originally found it unpleasant and surprising. Before the tritone became a common tool in rock, listeners expected artists to play chords and patterns that were pleasing to the ear.

Although Iommi was untrained in music theory, he devised the three-note passage after listening to a piece of classical music he and bassist Geezer Butler enjoyed by Gustav Holst called “Mars, The Bringer of War” from the suite The Planets.

The composition included a triad, and when Iommi imitated the sound on guitar he liked the unsettling feeling it created. He experimented with the passage and slowed it down to a crawl.

We already heard the folk-rock and classical influences in the heavy metal genre.

But the most important and direct inspiration for most 1970s pioneering metal bands was the wave of hard, psychedelic, and acid rock artists of the late 60s.

Notable songs are The Who’s rebellious “My Generation”, Cream’s slow “White Room”, and Blue Cheer’s cover of blues standard “Summertime Blues”.

The spiritual father to the song “Black Sabbath” is Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”.
It uses heavy distortion and the mentioned tritone to create a heavy guitar sound.

The biggest difference between the flower rock of the 60s and its dark and ugly offspring is the pessimist lyrical content.

The ongoing war in Vietnam, the failure of the “Summer of Love” and the Rolling Stones’ “Altamont free concert” catastrophe have changed the public mood, and music changed with it.

The lyrics of Black Sabbath are a testament to the mentioned cultural change.

Geezer Butler, the band bassist, although being a Christian was obsessed with the occult at the time.
Singer Ozzy Osbourne gave Butler a black occult book, written in Latin and decorated with numerous pictures of Satan. Butler read the book and then placed it on a shelf beside his bed before going to sleep. When he woke up, he claims he saw a large black figure standing at the end of his bed, staring at him.

Ozzy wrote the lyrics to the song based on Butler’s experience.

The song starts with the lyrics:

What is this that stands before me?
Figure in black which points at me.

The guitar sound of Black Sabbath is a result of Iommi’s distinctive playing style.

He developed his unique playing style after an accident at a sheet metal factory where he was working at the age of 17 in which the tips of the middle fingers of his fretting hand were severed.

Iommi created a pair of false fingertips using plastic from a dish detergent bottle and detuned the strings on his guitar to make it easier for him to bend the strings, creating a massive, heavy sound. “I’d play a load of chords and I’d have to play fifths because I couldn’t play fourths because of my fingers,” Iommi explained.

The group’s debut album was recorded in a single twelve-hour session on 16 October 1969.

Aside from the bells, thunder, and rain sound effects added to the beginning of the opening track and the double-tracked guitar solos on “N.I.B” and “Sleeping Village”, there were virtually no overdubs added to the album.

Released on Friday the 13th of February 1970 by Vertigo Records, Black Sabbath reached number eight on the UK Albums Charts.

Black Sabbath received generally negative reviews from contemporary critics.

Robert Christgau, writing for The Village Voice, panned the album as “bullshit necromancy.” He later described it as a reflection of “the worst of the counterculture,” including “drug-impaired reaction time” and “long solos.”

The influence and legacy of the album and song are still felt today.

The song has been covered by a variety of artists, including Vader, Widespread Panic, Dance or Die, Flower Travellin’ Band, Amber Assylum, Jello Biafra (with Ice T), Acheron, Mistress, and Cryptal Darkness.

In 2002, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Phil Collins, and Pino Palladino of The Who played Paranoid at Buckingham Palace in celebration of the Queen’s fiftieth year on the throne. Princes Harry and William asked Iommi why the group hadn’t played “Black Sabbath.”

Most importantly, this song is the spark that ignited the band’s musical career.

They are the most important metal band of all time.
By combining influences from various areas of culture, future bands were able to build upon their music to form a vast array of sub-genres. from the satanic black metal to the classical-inspired symphonic metal and even the charts-topping nu metal, glam metal, and grunge.

It all started with 3 notes and a “Figure in black which points at me.“