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  While the hierarchy of rock and roll imploded around them, spectators were overwhelmed by the intuition that Black Sabbath was beginning an entirely new musical era. “Paranoid is an anchor,” says Rob Halford, singer of Judas Priest, then a local Birmingham band. “It really secures everything about the metal movement in one record. It’s all there: the riffs, the vocal performance of Ozzy, the song titles, what the lyrics are about. It’s just a classic defining moment.”

  Soon Sabbath found squatters living in their huge sonic space. Inspired acolytes, signed to one-off record deals while playing the university student-union circuit, brought early and short-lived aftershocks to the big bang. Japan’s outlandish Flower Travelin’ Band and South Africa’s clumsy Suck went so far as to record Black Sabbath cover songs as early as 1970, when the vinyl on the original records was barely dry. Others were motivated to mimic Sabbath by the prospect of a quick buck. A 1970 album by Attila presented young Long Island crooner Billy Joel (then a rock critic and sometime psychiatric patient) dressed in Mongol warrior garb, playing a loud Hammond B3 organ to a hard rock beat, damaging ears with the songs “Amplifier Fire” and “Tear This Castle Down.”

  Before Black Sabbath, “heavy” had referred more to a feeling than a particular musical style, as in hippiespeak it described anything with potent mood. Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles often wrote songs that pointed toward a heavy break, a bridge between melodies that tried to resolve conflicting emotions and ideas. The “metal” in heavy metal put a steely resilience to that struggle, an unbreakable thematic strength that secured the tension and uninhibited emotion. As ordained by Black Sabbath, heavy metal was a complex maelstrom of neurosis and desire. Formed into an unbending force of deceptive simplicity, it had an omnivorous appetite for life.

  As for the words themselves: Beat writer William S. Burroughs named a character in his 1964 novel Nova Express “Uranium Willy, the heavy metal kid.” The critic Lester Bangs, an early and literate proponent of Black Sabbath, later applied the term to music. Before them, “heavy metal” was a nineteenth-century term used in warfare to describe firepower and in chemistry to designate newly discovered elements of high molecular density. When “Born to Be Wild” songwriter John Kay from Steppenwolf howled about “heavy metal thunder” in 1968, he was describing only the blare of motorcycles. Without Black Sabbath the phrase was an accident of poetry, the empty prophecy of a thousand monkeys hammering on typewriters in search of a Bible.

  There were scant few stons an investigator could overturn to find precedent for how completely Black Sabbath brought and embodied a revolutionary new beginning. Another suspect in the question of heavy metal paternity, Jimi Hendrix wisely denied responsibility. Questioned by a journalist just before his death, the electric guitar visionary stepped aside, proclaiming heavy metal “the music of the future.”

  During the formative years Black Sabbath shared the heavy metal limelight with two other English bands, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. All three were foreshadowed by Cream, a short-lived, distortion-frenzied

  BLACK SABBATH

  Formed in Birmingham, England, in the late 1960s, Black Sabbath is the originator of heavy metal, the first loud guitar band to step outside time and explore the moody dimensions unique to the explosive new sound. The original quartet (guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward, and singer Ozzy Osbourne) issued a slew of untouchably influential albums during the first half of the 1970s. They were two steps ahead of anyone else—louder and faster, more inventive and versatile. Above all else they had the best riffs, the huge guitar and bass lines that last a lifetime. Geezer Butler reported to Guitar Player many years afterward, “Lars Ulrich of Metallica said he’d never heard of Led Zeppelin when he was a kid. He was brought up on Black Sabbath albums.”

  Come to the Sabbath—the Essential Ozzy Albums

  Black Sabbath (1970)

  Paranoid (1970)

  Master of Reality (1971)

  Vol. 4 (1972)

  Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

  Sabotage (1975)

  Technical Ecstasy (1976)

  Never Say Die (1978)

  blues trio formed by Eric Clapton in 1966. While Black Sabbath unleashed the substance of heavy metal, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple fleshed out the edges and gave it sex appeal. As was fashionable during a time when movie stars were joining the Church of Satan, each swathed powerful music in witchcraft. While Sabbath fended off accusations of devil worship, Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page lived and held court in the former estate of hedonistic English heretic Aleister Crowley. Purple’s tempestuous guitarist Ritchie Blackmore habitually wore a pointed black witch’s hat.

  Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow

  (Roy Dressel Photography)

  As the epitome of 1970s hard rock bands, Led Zeppelin had an enormous influence on heavy metal—the band was seminal beyond the carnal sense. Zeppelin’s every gesture was grandiose, not necessarily regal but demanding kingly attention. Singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham stood a hundred feet high as stereotypes, longhaired hedonists whose tour exploits were immortalized in rock tomes like Hammer of the Gods. Fans had seen it before, mostly from the Rolling Stones, but never on such a huge scale. The thrill of it all made it metal.

  Unlike popular contemporaries Grand Funk Railroad, who were content merely to pummel, Led Zeppelin shared a sense of challenge with Black Sabbath. Yet while Black Sabbath begged for revolution, Led Zeppelin was a group of musical interpreters more than originators. Zeppelin’s winsome and slouching dream poem “Stairway to Heaven” had heavy moments but took a respectably reclining posture. Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” on the other hand, was all cataclysm—searing and deeply unsatisfied. Likewise, the suburban scene on the back of the Led Zeppelin IV record jacket was literally a civilized version of the overgrown landscape depicted on Black Sabbath. There were always more bands that sounded like Led Zeppelin, because it was easier. “Stairway” might have dominated rock radio during the 1970s, but when “War Pigs” hit the jukebox, it was always something of a ceremony.

  In contrast to the austere concepts of Sabbath and Zeppelin, Deep Purple was a tremendous rock and roll force that combined the propulsive wall of Jon Lord’s Hammond organ, Ritchie Blackmore’s moody Fender Stratocaster guitar, and Ian Gillan’s unforgettable, soaring vocal wail. The band broadcast the exhilaration of fast cars in “Highway Star” and “Space Truckin’,” credos for the first generation of affluent teens with access to interstate highways. These thunderous songs seemed designed to completely penetrate the tiny iron particles of 8-track tapes jammed into auto dashboards.

  Though Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” was a bona fide metal anthem and the first basic riff of a longhaired guitarist’s repertoire, the band did not consider itself heavy metal. “Never,” organist Jon Lord told Kerrang! magazine ten years later. “We never wore studded wristbands or posed for photos with blood pouring out of our mouths. That’s okay, that’s for people who are into a different style of music to us.” Nonetheless, Deep Purple on 1970’s In Rock and 1972’s Machine Head were state-of-the-art heaviness, elegant expressions of almost magical technological fury.

  When the Beatles launched, their tiny amplifiers could not be heard over the screaming crowds. By the early 1970s, manufacturers like Marshall, Orange, and Sunn founded an industry that pushed the tolerances of vacuum tubes, creating vast acoustic possibilities through the deafening roar of guitars. Besides Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Purple, sheer volume itself became the extra member of the wordy Canadian hard rock act Rush, the heady Long Island group Blue Oyster Cult, the excessively dramatic London band Queen, and the imposing British virtuosos King Crimson. In this newfound universe these were the gods who defined rock excess and bombastic musical wizardry. Their careers set the standard ranked not by hit singles but in long arcs of heavily labored albums. Innovative to the point of fatigue, their fierce experiments were emulated relentlessly in the deca
de ahead.

  Embracing a breadth of incomplete styles, many more bands played at decibel levels competing with those of nearby airports. Forgotten strains of protometal swelled arrogantly in the music of the Asterix, Titanic (from Norway), Lucifer’s Friend (from England and Germany), heavy Kraut rockers Guru Guru, the haunting May Blitz (also on the Vertigo label), Master’s Apprentices (from Australia), Captain Beyond (formed by members of Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly), Bang, the relatively gentle Armageddon, the morbid Texas group Bloodrock, Britain’s long-running Budgie, and the Tony Iommi— produced Necromandus. After peppering the scene with powerful moments, most recordings by these obscure bands were discontinued within a few short years, but their existence enticed small audiences with possibility.

  Already tucking a million album sales under its leather belt, Black Sabbath remained a daring and original entity, soon releasing two swaying party albums for catatonic souls. Master of Reality kicked off 1971 with the epic, unending cough of “Sweet Leaf,” a love song to marijuana. Anchored in some of Tony Iommi’s most concrete riffs, Sabbath drove their peace needle into the hopeful netherworld of “Children of the Grave,” accelerating into the lost space mission of “Into the Void.” Despite their morbidity, these were compassionate songs with gentleness as well as strength. On the ultrafragile and desolate “Solitude,” Iommi even dared to reintroduce the flute—he had abandoned it years earlier for fear Sabbath would be compared to Jethro Tull.

  Black Sabbath circa 1973

  (Warner Bros.)

  The aptly titled Vol. 4, released in 1972, beamed with the light of nice acoustic melodies. Both the cocaine cry of “Snow-blind” and the Santana-ish instrumental “Laguna Sunrise” reflected the breezy influence of time spent touring America and visiting California. Yet “Wheels of Confusion” and “Supernaut” were as preoccupied with insanity as anything on Paranoid. Geezer Butler continued giving lyrics to Ozzy that delved deep into the psyche, and the tone of the music remained intensely heavy. Extending Sabbath’s popularity streak, Vol. 4 followed Master of Reality into the Billboard Top 20 in America. The band reveled in its success, indulging in the first-time gratification of emerging rock stardom: new homes, luxury cars, girls, and drugs—judging by Ozzy’s increasingly bizarre antics, not always in that order of priority.

  The great rock and roll explosion volleyed small shards of heavy metal across America in the early 1970s, slipping from Woodstock, blazing from Monterey Pop, and bleeding from Altamont into giant festivals like Cal Jam—where a very stoned Black Sabbath arrived by helicopter to face 450,000 fans in 1974. It was an age of relative media scarcity, and concerts were the only way to personally experience heavy music. In this trailblazing era, being into hard rock meant putting everything into concert events—ditching school, taking the day off work, and driving as far as was necessary to experience catharsis firsthand in a live setting.

  Jetting from city to city, superstar bands like Led Zeppelin brought the sound of overdriven guitars from smaller music theaters into sports stadiums. Instead of spending weeks in residency at a series of little clubs, musicians could travel across America and play for half the teen population in a few months. This meant they were constantly dislocated. Touring rock stars learned how to survive and enjoy themselves during lives spent in dressing rooms and road motels, presiding over the acid-laced creation of concert culture on a grand scale. Doing their part, fans camped out overnight for tickets, smuggled contraband pot and liquor into venues, and negotiated access to wild backstage paradise.

  The power of Deep Purple dimmed in 1975, as Ritchie Black-more quit to form the mythology-inspired band Rainbow. From Elf he recruited young singer Ronnie James Dio, who jumped into the decadence of the period. He had been a teen idol in upstate New York with Ronnie Dio and the Prophets during the 1960s, but the new brew was a long way from “Love Potion #9.” “Being quite young in Rainbow,

  HARD ROCK

  Dozens of early contemporaries of Black Sabbath contributed to the development of what would later be considered heavy metal. Some were blues-based, like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. Others, like King Crimson, Queen, and Rush, attempted to introduce elements of classical music. Blue Cheer and the Stooges just turned their amps to full bake and burned everything to a crisp. All were longhaired and loud, bell-bottomed and bold. Their goal was to blast ten times louder than the rock and roll explosion of the 1960s. Even after their music was forgotten, heavy metal remained indebted to the large-scale displays of bravado made during this pioneering age.

  Freakography

  Alice Cooper, Killer (1971)

  Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptum (1967)

  Blue Oyster Cult, Tyranny and Mutation (1973)

  Cream, Disraeli Gears (1967)

  Deep Purple, Machine Head (1972)

  Flower Travelin’ Band, Satori (1972)

  Hawkwind, Hall of the Mountain Grill (1974)

  Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland (1968)

  King Crimson, Starless and Bible Black (1974)

  Led Zeppelin, IV (1971)

  Queen, A Night at the Opera (1975)

  Rush, 2112 (1976)

  The Stooges, Raw Power (1973)

  MC5, Kick Out the Jams (1969)

  when I had my first real chance to taste success, I saw it all for the first time,” Dio says. “In the early days it was time for throwing TVs out the window. We were like, ‘We can do this? Okay!’ It’s stupid, really, if you think about it. You were supposed to be that rock star, that’s what you did. You screwed everybody all night long, and sex was wonderful. There was no AIDS—the worst that could happen is we’d catch the clap. We lived the lifestyle that Zeppelin lived, and that Sabbath lived, and that Purple lived before us.”

  Ronnie James Dio

  (Roy Dressel Photography)

  Outside the inner sanctums the public watched the energy unleashed within rock concerts spill over into the surrounding communities and erupt into miniriots. Future heavy metal musicians, still wide-eyed grade-schoolers, filed away memories of a rumbling in the streets. Thomas Fischer, aka Tom Warrior, who later founded Celtic Frost, was a preadolescent in Switzerland. “I remember seeing Deep Purple in the early seventies,” he recalls, “and seeing on the news that the concert hall was totally thrashed afterward. I remember how the parents went insane when their kids listened to that.”

  As the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s relaxed into a liberal attitude toward drugs, sex, and bacchanalian glory, America in the 1970s embraced easy living—a balm for the social changes of the recent past. Rock music, always a bastion of youthful rebellion, was fast becoming the desired lifestyle, and the conservative middle class did not know how to cope. Newspaper advice columnist Ann Landers counseled a distraught mother not to forsake a runaway daughter who left home to live on a tour bus with longhaired rockers. She advised suffering the shame of wayward youth, if only for the sake of the inevitable wave of bastard children—a dire perspective on young freedom.

  While teens celebrating sex and drugs were scary to adults everywhere, the occult aspects of heavy rock particularly frightened the Bible Belt. “Going to Miami, going down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, trying to get into Corpus Christi, Texas, in the seventies was not an easy task,” says Sabbath drummer Bill Ward. “We had to face the mayor of the town. We were banned all the time. They were afraid of us. They really thought we were going to put a spell on you. We’d have to confront forty or fifty cops or something.”

  The most garish rockers responded to civic outrage by pushing the boundaries of taste and upping the fear factor. Following in the high-heeled footsteps of the 1960s act the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the delightfully gruesome Alice Cooper developed a gory stage show based on the French Grand Guignol street theater of the 1800s, complete with costumed dwarfs and buckets of blood. By 1975, Cooper was faking his own suicide onstage nightly. “It seemed like he was not really a human being,” says masked metaller Kim Bendix Peterson, aka King Diamond. “If you touched him, he would
probably disappear into thin air or something. It just came across so strong.”

  Intensifying the efforts of Alice Cooper, an opportunistic group of New Yorkers called Kiss took their over-the-top image to the doorstep of average America. The band’s silver makeup, glittery costumes, and custom-shaped guitars infused the space-age power of NASA into the hairy, leathery broth of rock, distilling two great events of the 1960s—the moon landing and the advent of loud guitars—into one spectacular escape. Released in the twelve-month period leading up to April 1975, each of the first three Kiss albums— Kiss, Hotter Than Hell, and Dressed to Kill—struggled to sell. This led to the bloody Alive! double live album, also released in 1975, which went gold rapidly on the strength of loud, catchy ditties like “Deuce” and “Cold Gin.” It was heavy-metal-coated rock candy, a Black Sabbath flavor of bubblegum.

  Kiss went after an audience too young to understand Vietnam— its comic book-inspired stage show littered with Egyptian cat statues, crystal formations, and crumbling stone walls. It was a financial risk, taken for the sake of an unforgettable event. “When we started out, people just were baffled,” says guitarist Stanley Eisen, aka Paul Stanley. “We were wearing platform boots. Our makeup was absurd. The biggest act in America at that point was John Denver. We were not cool, but we had conviction. It was a kamikaze mission. We gave ourselves no choice but to succeed. The downside could have been horrendous.”

  The Destroyer tour in 1976 was the cusp between young and hungry and larger-than-life. Despite its flamboyantly plastic presence, Kiss was still trudging through manure—an El Paso, Texas, show put the group before 10,000 border-town roughnecks in a cattle hall used regularly for livestock auctions. Across America that summer, Kiss fought the volume wars, roaring over opening acts Bob Seger and Ted Nugent, then paying a double-size electric bill for its blinding backboard of bright lights. In an age before TicketMaster, professional security squads, and metal detectors, Kiss encountered disorganized bedlam. They emerged as superstars, helping to create the professional tour circuit that would become the lifeline for heavy metal.