Forget Everything, Put On Black Sabbath's Debut

No, I didn’t watch the Grammy’s. Why would I? From what I’m hearing, the spectacle was little more than Adele blubbering, Nicki Minaj wearing a silly outfit, good guy Dave Grohl maybe sticking it to Skrillex, and then Paul McCartney strutting out the obligatory closer as subtle nod to this year’s dead pop icon, which happened to be Whitney Houston. Also, apparently LL Cool J hosted the thing.

Maybe if I knew more about any of these people, aside Grohl, that scenario would’ve made a lot more sense, or possibly even been entertaining to have sat and watched for four hours. But really, from what little I know of awards show culture, if that’s at all accurate to how the night panned out can someone please tell me why the hell the Grammy’s are still a thing?

Sorry. Not that I had any time to sit and watch the depraved act, to begin with. But as the night wore on I had far more important things to tend to, mainly keeping a hazed vigil into the wee hours to mark the birth of metal. I’m talking about offering up fruits to Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath, people, the seminal slab of groove-sludge released 42 years ago today.

Hail.

A lot of has been said and written about Black Sabbath. That it’s arguably the first proper heavy metal album. That it laid seed, among other things, for the stoner and doom metal persuasions, which for better or worse has since landed the 38-minute exercise in slow rock into the better half of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Album’s of All Time. Blah blah.

To be totally clear: I have a deep reverence for the rock cannon, but I’m also not one of these certified-classics-only dorks. I’m not here to pull out the figures to make some stupid argument that what’s left of the music industry is burning down everywhere around us (even if it sort of is), and if we could only just get back to making ‘em how they used to be we’d all be OK. And I’m definitely not here to even make a go at saying “something new” about Black Sabbath, only to say that this record is kind of all that matters and still smokes a lot of the bullshit being released today. First generation Sabbath, formerly known as Earth, was everything good about UK brethren Cream (slow rock forerunners in their own right), only bowed down 6,000 notches into the hissing bowels of Cthulhu. What made their eponymous debut work was that these slow-baked elements were placed under considerable time constraints, though axeman Tony Iommi would later go on to say that the Black Sabbath sessions actually seemed to drag on, if anything.

But apparently the band could only manage to book two days at London’s legendary Trident Studios – a day to track, a day to mix. They’d roll through six of seven tunes (the “Evil Woman” single being recorded a year earlier) live – and often in no more than a passing take – after Iommi was synched up on a tritone and Ozzy was locked into a vocal booth to lose his mind. Essentially they just ran through their live act. Black Sabbath is raw and dark. It’s howled and grooved and thick with amp worship. And yet at times it seems to clip along with a sort of pained urgency.

I’ll stop there before I start trying to say “something new” about Black Sabbath.

Quick sidenote: Proving, once again, to be far and away the gnarliest Mom in the history of everything, here’s a phone-cam shot, courtesy Mary Ann and Mark Anderson, of a pass from a Sabbath gig she worked on February 11, 1974, in Chicago. Poke around the Internet and you’ll find this show immortalized on the Love in Chicago bootleg.

Anyway, this is bummer rock. It had lots of people crying Black Magic and Satan and the Occult. It had lots more people turning it slow and loud and polluting themselves and smashing their heads into things. Of course, it’s only appropriate that Black Sabbath would go on to snag a Grammy in 2000.

The thought of new Sabbath material and a tour to boot in 2012 doesn’t sit well with me. The whole thing reeks of this ongoing reunion craze whereby broke, white, typically has-been musicians just can’t seem to let anything die, lumbering out onto stage in some piss-poor attempt to reignite the torch. Good on drummer Bill Ward for calling the whole charade “unsignable.”

That said, if it hasn’t yet been hereby declared, I hereby declare today a sort of International Day of Sabbath. On to turning it slow and loud and the pollution and the sludge and the smashing of heads.