Sound of the Beast Read online

  “A must for all fans of an oft derided but incredibly resilient and adaptable musical form that has given us some of the best music of the last 30+ years.”—

  Maxim (U.K.)

  “Cultural savvy, deadpan sense of humor, and deft use of interview material make for a sweeping story with Scorsese-like scope.”

  — Vice magazine

  “Funny and opinionated … starts with one of the most insightful pieces ever written on Black Sabbath and gets better, providing a rousing three-dimensional account of metal and the people who made it legend.”

  —Guitar World

  “A damn good job…. The book covers every aspect of the music we love, from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal to black metal to numetal, and everything in between. Hundreds of interviews trace the history of heavy metal while exploring the context in which the genre’s various forms evolved.”

  —Revolver

  “Anyone who’s ever been interested in this much-maligned and misunderstood genre will find it difficult to put down this Beast.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Christe’s examination of not only the bands and their twin-flying- V’s aural assault, but also the broader cultural context, is eminently readable stuff.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “An amazing job here… . It’s inconceivable that any one guy on the planet could have done a better job.”

  —Martin Popoff in Record Collector

  Sound of the Beast

  THE COMPLETE HEADBANGING HISTORY OF

  HEAVY METAL

  IAN CHRISTE

  FOR THE FALLEN

  AND THE FAITHFUL

  CONTENTS

  A Brief Headbanging History of Time

  Prologue · Friday, February 13, 1970

  I The 1970s: Prelude to Heaviness

  II The New Wave of British Heavy Metal

  III 1980: The American Wasteland Awaits

  IV Heavy Metal America: Highways & Video Waves

  V Fevered Fans: Metallica & Power Metal

  VI Slayer: Kings of Black Metal Devils

  VII The PMRC’s Antimetal Panic

  VIII Rattleheads: The Mental Metal Reaction

  IX Full Speed Ahead: Thrash Metal Attacks!

  X The Hollywood Glambangers

  XI United Forces: Metal and Hardcore Punk

  XII And Platinum for “One"… Metal Matures

  XIII Transforming the 1990s: The Black Album & Beyond

  XIV Death Metal Deliverance

  XV World Metal: The Globalization of Heavy

  XVI The Teen Terrorists of Norwegian Black Metal

  XVII Satan Goes to Court: The People v. Heavy Metal

  XVIII The Antimetal Era: Haircuts & New Roots

  XIX Virtual Ozzy & Metal’s Digital Rebound

  XX Reenthroned Emperors: It’s a Headbanging World

  Epilogue · 2001: Iron Man Lives Again

  Afterword

  Appendix A: The Best 25 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time

  Appendix B: Index of Genre Boxes

  Appendix C: The Fine Print—Metal Lists

  All Hail to Thee

  Index

  Editor’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A BRIEF HEADBANGING HISTORY OF TIME

  PROLOGUE

  Friday, February 13, 1970

  In the beginning there was just a shadowy expanse of night sky and unknown. There in disquieting oblivion whirled the unanswered secrets of history, animated by forces as ancient as civilization itself— everything smoking, silvery, religious, and dark. These strong currents often lay forgotten and docile, until the opportunities of war, crisis, and anguish called forth their awful powers. They had no sound or definition of their own until trapped and subjugated by the epiphany of Black Sabbath—the wise innocents, the originators of heavy metal.

  From the start Black Sabbath voiced powerful passion from beyond the perimeters of popular opinion. They were prophets bred from the downside of English society, the unemployed—people regarded as morally suspect and of negligible social worth. The four members all were born in 1948 and 1949 in Birmingham, England, a crumbling factory town surviving an age when Europe no longer prided itself on industry. Singer John Michael Osbourne, aka Ozzy, was one of six children and a convicted thief—he worked sporadically in a slaughterhouse. Guitarist Tony Iommi, the son of a candy-shop owner, was a mischievous enigma who had lopped off two right-hand fingertips in a metal-shop accident. The band’s strange bassist, Terry Butler, aka Geezer, was known for an extravagant, green-colored, secondhand wardrobe. As indicated by the elegant disarray of his playing, drummer Bill Ward turned to music out of self-described frantic desperation. Coming of age in the years following World War II, the four were surrounded by the bombed-out rubble left by massive Nazi bombing raids. In the world they inherited, the only action worthwhile was to become professional misfits and adventurers.

  Under the name Polka Tulk, nicked from a Birmingham rug merchant, Ozzy and company followed the path blazed by bands like the Yardbirds, Ten Years After, and Cream, jamming endlessly and loudly on standards written by American blues artists. The mournful sound was reshaped drastically in the journey from Birmingham, Alabama, to Birmingham, England, where disarming blue notes were grotesquely warped by factory-strength amplification and the late-1960s bohemian drug scene. After switching their name to Earth, the quartet achieved greater notoriety through their blinding volume and stage show.

  Then came the breakthrough—the spontaneous creation of the song “Black Sabbath.” It was a pivotal new beginning for the band and fundamental to all heavy metal forever after. Here was a song based on only three tones, two of them D notes. Recounting the crisis of judgment day with fearsome suspense its narrator gasped: “What is this, that stands before me? Figure in black, which points at me… .” Floating on feedback drones, the dimensions of the song’s horror grew and galloped into life at the climax, as doomsday ultimately consumed the unwilling protagonist. It was a grim tale worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, told through the new raven’s quills of guitars, drum, and crackling microphone.

  “Black Sabbath” inspired immediate awe and captivated audiences completely. The song also had an irreversible effect on the band—who in the midst of drug-tinged innocence suddenly felt their hands being drawn toward brilliance by an unseen force. Thus inspired, the ensemble soon broke free of its surroundings, departing from rock and roll to further explore the recent musical liberations of genre breakers like Miles Davis. Along with the doomy “Warning,” a jam inherited from the hip blues group Aynsly Dunbar’s Retaliation, “Black Sabbath” became the centerpiece of a new sound, a locus of auditory mortal dread that required the band rechristen itself Black Sabbath.

  Departing from the world around him, Tony Iommi took music from the past with little concern for tradition, blazing through blues scales with his own timing and finesse. In order for him to bend guitar strings expressively without experiencing pain in his cropped fingers, the group tuned to a lower key signature. Prolonged by the timeless sustain of Iommi’s masterful notes, the results brought an inspired deepness to Black Sabbath. Thus, almost by accident, from sacrifice came a devastating sound. So from his deformity came a strange beauty—and a bond to three-fingered Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, one of Iommi’s many unusual inspirations.

  Behind Iommi’s versatile guitar, Black Sabbath’s rhythm section propelled its endless stream of mighty riffs with frantic breakbeats and galvanic accents. Bill Ward claimed that Black Sabbath never played “in time” but maintained unity by massive empathy—a sixth sense that encouraged the gravity of the music and drew the spectator inward. The wall of sound thus created was overpowering yet frenzied: Old
films show Ward and Geezer Butler bobbing like hyperanimated marionettes in the hands of God.

  Glee-stricken young ringmaster Ozzy Osbourne eased audiences into the new paradigm by clapping his hands, dancing, and nodding in charismatic contrast to the music’s stony visage. Decadent and out of it, but not yet bloated or drug-addled, Ozzy pierced the heaviness behind him with his pissed-off wail. His schizophrenic vocal technique came from doubled vocals—one high and one low—spaced an octave apart. As the band tuned lower, Ozzy sang higher. Whatever rock-star swagger Ozzy possessed was swallowed by the intense purpose of the band, balanced with the too-real personal delirium of Butler’s lyrics: “I tell you to enjoy life / I wish I could but it’s too late.”

  As Black Sabbath ascended, the band trained on the same European club circuit as did the Beatles. Sabbath broke the Liverpool band’s residency record at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, playing seven forty-five-minute spots nightly to expatriates and go-go girls in the fabled Reeperbahn red-light district. Through this grueling regimen, the quartet practiced to the brink of perfection—and became exhausted to the point of further inspiration and innovation.

  Approached by Phillips Records in 1969, Sabbath recorded its landmark first album for six hundred pounds in a continuous two-day session. The tapes were mixed the next day by a studio producer who did not allow the band to interfere with his workmanship. Even given the rush job (typical recording conditions for rock bands at the time), work was completed with scant room to spare. The producer clipped an eighteen-minute guitar solo by Tony Iommi from “Warning” without consulting the band. At the urging of the record label, Sabbath cut a new version of “Evil Woman” for its first single—the song had recently been a hit for the band Crow, and the company hoped to nab a little secondhand success.

  On Friday the thirteenth, February 1970, Black Sabbath was released by Phillips’s new experimental subsidiary, Vertigo Records. The first complete heavy metal work by the first heavy metal artists, Black Sabbath was an addictive musical suspension of time, informed by an ominous presence that crushed the bouncy rhythms of popular rock. Along with “Black Sabbath,” “Warning,” and “Evil Woman,” the original songs “N.I.B.” and “Wicked World” floated down-tempo on immense volume and sustained feedback. Tempering the unclassifiable record, these cataclysmic events were balanced by the dreamlike tenderness of “Sleeping Village” and “Behind the Wall of Sleep.”

  Recalling Children of the Damned and other low-budget English psychological horror films, the front cover of Black Sabbath depicted a dilapidated English cottage overgrown with barren brush, partially obscuring the image of a pale green enchantress. The interior of the album’s gatefold sleeve contained few details beyond a grim gothic poem inscribed in a giant inverted crucifix.

  Still falls the rain, the veils of darkness shroud the blackened trees, which contorted by some unseen violence, shed their tired leaves, and bend their boughs toward a grey earth of severed bird wings. Among the grasses, poppies bleed before a gesticulating death, and young rabbits, born dead in traps, stand motionless, as though guarding the silence that surrounds and threatens to engulf all those that would listen… .

  Themselves strung with matching silver crosses, the members of Sabbath cultivated a creepy image—one swathed in the popular witchcraft and mysticism of the day. This won the band notoriety from self-styled Satanists and a small amount of public protest from church crusaders. Previous rock stars had enchanted pop consciousness with flowers, parades, and promises to change the world. Black Sabbath strode at the end of that procession, still preaching the need for love but warning stragglers there was no return to a naïve state of grace. While most popular contemporaries stuck to “girl bites man” territory, Sabbath sang of fatherless children and the wickedness of the world. Bill Ward later described the band’s noble outsider perspective as “healthy anger.”

  A resonating echo from a distance of long ago, the music dramatized the conflicts of humans on earth not as current-event news stories but as mythic struggles. The entire ceremony sounded a death knell for the music known as rock and roll, which would forever after be merely the domesticated relative of heavy metal. “Black Sabbath has influenced every single band out there,” says Peter Steele of Type O Negative, a band freshly inspired by Sabbath thirty years later. “They were the heaviest thing to me, and they still are. You can’t get any heavier than that. I love that slow, droning, dinosaur-footsteps-through-the-woods type of sound.”

  Emerging like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a contemporaneous influence, Black Sabbath was as irreducible as the bottomless sea, the everlasting sky, and the mortal soul. There was no precedent—and no literal explanation of their power was needed. Their gloomy tones were a captivating siren call to a deep unsatisfied void within modern consciousness. The rumbling sludge of heavy metal was inevitable, lying in long wait to be introduced by Black Sabbath in 1970 and adored by the massive human sprawl.

  Over the thirty years that followed, 100 million listeners sought refuge in the resounding cultural boom, finding a purity unmitigated by petty doubts or distractions. From Sabbath came heavy metal, which doubled in intensity and became power metal, then twisted into thrash metal. From there the music crossed paths with other forms to spawn black metal, create the unbelievable refinements of death metal, and fuse with every other sort of music, finding itself perpetually reborn. Enduring three decades of Marshall amps, guitar holocaust, and drum destruction, Black Sabbath remains the bedrock— the heavy stone slab from which all heavy metal eternally rises.

  I

  The 1970s:

  Prelude to Heaviness

  February 13, 1970: Black Sabbath’s debut album released

  June 4, 1971: Black Sabbath goes gold in America

  December 1975: Judas Priest records Sad Wings of Destiny

  October 28, 1978: Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park airs on NBC

  December 11, 1978: Last date of Ozzy Osbourne’s final tour with Black Sabbath

  Heavy metal came into being just as the previous generation’s salvation, rock and roll, was in the midst of horrific disintegration. Four deaths at a free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway in December 1969 had shaken the rock community and left the youth culture disillusioned with pacifist ideals. Then, while Black Sabbath was marking the pop charts in April 1970, Paul McCartney effectively announced the breakup of the Beatles. Instead of comforting their audience in an uncertain world, rock giants Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison all were dead of drug overdoses within a year.

  Shortly after JFK, RFK, and MLK fell to the bullets of assassins, so, too, were the originators of rock and roll falling to naïve excess. Jaded and frustrated, the Love Generation that had created counterculture left the cities in droves, returning to their homelands, heading to the hills—anything to exorcise the communal nightmares of utopia gone awry. It was the end of the 1960s and of all they represented. As the nonviolent flower children gave way to the militant Black Panther party, Kent State campus massacres, and increasingly violent street revolts by frustrated students in Paris, Berlin, and Italy, it was out with the old hopes everywhere and in with the new pragmatism.

  Black Sabbath seemed to thrive on such adversity, never pretending to offer answers beyond the occasional exhortation to love thy neighbor. Though legend likes to portray the band as scraggly underdogs, the band’s debut soon took to the British Top 10 and stayed there for months. The band’s maiden American tour, planned for summer 1970, was canceled in light of the Manson Family murder trial. There was an extremely inhospitable climate in the United States toward dangerous hippies. Still, the debut record charted high in America and sold more than a half million copies within its first year.

  Vertigo Records scrambled to get more material from its dire and mysterious conscripts, interrupting Sabbath’s nonstop touring for another recording session in September 1970. Hotly rehearsed as ever, and with intensified creative purpose, the
band emerged after two days with the mighty Paranoid, its bestselling album and home of signature Sabbath songs “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” and “Iron Man.”

  Black Sabbath’s Evil Woman picture sleeve

  While Paranoid retained the haunting spirit of Black Sabbath, the themes of the second album were less mystical and more tangible. Obsessed with damage and loss of control, Ozzy Osbourne in plaintive voice bemoans the ills of drug addiction in “Hand of Doom,” nuclear war in “Electric Funeral,” and battle shock in “Iron Man.” Like the mesmerizing title track of Black Sabbath, the soul of Paranoid still grew from an occult-oriented number, “Walpurgis,” whose imagery powerfully summons “witches at black masses” and “sorcerers of death’s construction.” When recorded for Paranoid, however, the song was slightly rewritten as “War Pigs,” a cataclysmic antiwar anthem indicting politicians for sending young and poor men off to do the bloody work of banks and nations.

  Now Sabbath was becoming experienced not just as musicians but as generational spokesmen. If change was to be brought by music, Sabbath lyricist Geezer Butler saw that he would have to fight ugliness on the front lines. The new Black Sabbath songs sought peace and love—not in the flower patches of Donovan and Jefferson Airplane but in the grim reality of battlefields and human ovens. Ozzy Osbourne delivered these lyrics as if in a trance, reading messages of truth written in the sky.

  Billboard magazine blithely wrote that Paranoid “promises to be as big as their first,” and indeed the songs “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” both came close to cracking the U.S. Top 40 singles chart. It seemed that all the musical changes of the 1960s had existed solely to ease audiences into Sabbath’s hard prophecies. Written allegedly in less time than it took to play, the frantic three-minute single “Paranoid” sent Sabbath’s second album to number one on the British charts and number eight in America.