Well, in spite of the above title, the band we've come to know, love, and worship as Black Sabbath has been around for a little more than forty years, but their official recording career commmenced this past weekend. We salute this stupendous achievement with a look back at the band that, for all intents and purposes, invented metal. They were the band that influenced many young players to pick up a guitar and play louder than loud.
Any music store clerk will attest to the fact that one of the first things any kid will learn is the opening riff to "Iron Man". Let us now take a look at the colorful history of the band that may rival even The Beatles in terms of influence, but certainly surpasses them for volume:


BLACK SABBATH.


Our story begins in the Aston district of Birmingham, England, a grimy industrialized pit full of crime, pollution, and struggling middle-class families in tract houses who eked out a pitiful existence to put food on the table for their children. John Michael Osbourne, born December 3, 1948, was one of those children, one of many with a large number of sisters and siblings who often went hungry each day in spite of his parents both holding down jobs in factories. John, nicknamed Ozzy, was a bit of a strange lad, often coming to school in rags, even having so many holes in his clothes that he would even show up in his pajamas. Teachers thought of him as a slow learner and mentally imbalanced--unaware that he suffered from severe dyslexia, a condition unheard of in the British school system in the 1950's and 60's. At home, his life was dismal: he had witnessed many domestic squabbles and was a target of physical abuse and beatings himself. He thought about taking his life one day and was beaten by his father as he attempted suicide. Everyone thought he was strange, he was even called "Ozzy Osbrain", due to his wild, unpredictable imagination.

But music and performing became John's salvation. He loved The Beatles, and wished that Paul McCartney would just come and marry his oldest sister. Their money problems would certainly be solved then! Ozzy sang for school productions and loved to perform. If he could only take his love for performing to the next level.

One song John couldn't stand was the hit "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)", by Scott MacKenzie in the mid-60's. He hated all that hippie, flower-power love garbage. "What was this s*** I'm listening to??" he ranted as the radio dribbled out the sappy ballad. For a kid in crummy Birmingham, San Francisco might as well be on Mars. That flower bit was just not reality. If he wanted to do music, it would be nothing like that fluff.

Unfortunately, as times got tougher, John became desperate to make a little money on the side in order to eat. He became a thief, one of the clumsiest ones in all of England. Not only did he wear fingerless gloves, but he also dropped a television set on his head while scaling a wall in one robbery!
He was caught, arrested and sent to prison for several months. He learned to entertain other inmates with his sense of humor which kept him from getting into too much trouble with others during his incarceration. While there, he formed a tattoo of letters on his knuckles which spelled out

O Z Z Y


Ozzy as a child; in the second photo, Ozzy is seen on the right in the light three-button jacket:

If there was an arch-nemesis in young Ozzy's life, it was none other than a young street tough named Tony Iommi. The son of Italian immigrants, his father being a sweetshop owner, the young Iommi, born February 19, 1948, was known to be a pugilist, a budding young boxer, who happened to ply his interest on the hapless Ozzy, punching him and beating him up on a regular basis. He couldn't stand the sight of Ozzy, and hated his high-pitched singing voice. He said that Ozzy "sang like a girl".

The other major interest of Tony Iommi was the guitar. Being left-handed, it was difficult to find a good one in Birmingham. He was heavily influenced by such British guitarists as Hank Marvin of The Shadows, a surf-band which at one time featured British pop idol Cliff Richard. He played blues-based rock guitar in such bands as The Rockin' Chevrolets (who didn't have some sort of name revolving around cars back in the early 60's? Corny, to be sure!), and in the mid-60's, another band called Mythology, which featured his friend Bill Ward.

Unfortunately, Tony Iommi suffered a serious setback which would have spelled the end of the career of any other young guitar player. One afternoon, as he prepared to leave for Germany to tour with one band, he quit work early from his job at a metal factory on his last day. He was not required to finish the day, so he went home for lunch. However, his mother insisted that he go back and finish his shift, so he did so. And it was there that tragedy occured: While feeding slats of metal into a machine, he stuck his fingers into an opening mouth, and mechanical teeth snipped off two of his fingertips! It was a horrible accident for the young guitarist--doctors told him to give up plans to play, he would never play again.

For weeks, Iommi sulked in his room, devastated at the loss of his ability to play. He had become enamored with guitar playing, and now his chances were shot to hell by the accident. One day a month later, his boss from work stopped by to visit, and had a present for him. He gave Tony a record album by Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Rheinhardt, a virtuoso who, as his boss explained, was a genius on guitar in spite of the fact that he had only two working fretting hand fingers. He had burned in his hand in a childhood fire in his family's caravan. This inspired Tony to pick up his guitar again. If Django could do it with only two good fingers, so could he! He was not going to let
missing fingertips, a necessity for guitarists, keep him from playing. He melted down plastic from dishwashing liquid bottles and made coverings for his two fingers missing fingertips. It was a struggle to make them work properly, often with him painfully slicing his fingers when they came off, but eventually he had mastered it. He would become frustrated and throw his guitar against the wall, but he kept on. He eventually had to use banjo strings rather than thicker guage guitar strings to ease the tensions on his fingers. His method of dealing with his disability was a total triumph over adversity.


By the way, what happened with Mythology? Well, it seems that they were arrested and fined for cannibis resin. The gigs stopped coming for the band, and broke up after one last show in July of 1968. It was time for the guitarist to find a new band.

In the first photo with The Rockin' Chevrolets, Tony Iommi is the second top one from the right; in the lower photo with Mythology from 1968, he is at the top center of the lineup:

One of the members of Mythology who left with Tony Iommi was Bill Ward, born May 5, 1948 the skinsman who briefly replaced their original drummer Terry Sims. While Ozzy and Tony both disparaged their native home of Aston, Birmingham, as a depressing dump (with Tony even referring to it as a "s***hole"), Ward actually had fond recollections of the neighborhood, enjoying the sound to chugging trains and clanking factory noises there in his childhood.

As a toddler, Ward was always interested in drumming. He began performing
professionally at the age of 15, playing in bands before eventually joining Mythology where he began a friendship with Iommi. Bill Ward's drumming style was very loose, playing behind the beat, not quite so structured as perhaps other drummers. Once behind the kit, he would become quite maniacal.

One day, as Bill and Tony wandered through a local mall, they found an ad on a kiosk which read, "Ozzy Zig needs gig". Could it be that Ozzy Tony knew and beat up regularly? They decided to stop by and check out the address. Sure enough, it was! Tony said, "Forget it! Forget it!" But Bill wanted to stay and chat.

After they visited Ozzy, Tony turned to Bill and told him, "Forget it, Bill. I know him." Tony wasn't too sure about playing in a band with singer with an effeminate voice and reputation of being quite the loony. Regardless, Bill was interested in discussing it further, and amazingly, the three were able to put aside their differences and start a band. All they needed was a bassist.

Ozzy knew a bass player from one band he fronted earlier, Rare Breed, who was a very short-lived group. The bassist, Terence, or Terry, Michael Joseph "Geezer" Butler, born July 17, 1949, was turned on to bass from guitar after wanting to emulate his hero, Jack Bruce of Cream. At an early age, Geezer (his name meaning in British parlance, "crazy", as opposed to the common American usage as a crotchety old man) made a life-changing decision to stop eating meat. While at dinner, at the age of eight, he cut a piece of meat and saw blood oozing from it. Shocked by this, he asked his mother where meat came from. When she replied that it came from animals, he swore off eating meat for good and became a life-long vegetarian and a vegan.

One interest of Butler's was in religion. He said that he was completely in love with God and attended church frequently. He went to a Catholic church every Sunday and even thought about becoming a priest. Unfortunately, as he grew his hair long and dressed like a street punk, other parishioners were put off by this an criticized his appearance. This tapered off his interest in the church, and while he still believed in God, his spiritual pursuits began to drift elsewhere.

Like many other young people, Geezer began to explore the occult and other religious paths, out of a natural curiosity. He even relates a story as to when a shadowy, ghostlike figure stood at the foot of his bed! Was there something going on his house? Something was happening, such as when he noticed that a book of the dark, arcane arts suddenly went missing and could not be found. Some connection to "the other side" could not be denied. The encounter with the spirit world would inspire his opening lyric to the band's first signature song.

Geezer agreed to join Ozzy's new band, who looked to him as the band's songwriter, as they did not particularly like to write lyrics. Geezer had quite a hand in it, and he would go on to pen many of the band's songs--in spite of the common misconception that Ozzy wrote the lyrics, due to his being the frontman, it was in fact Geezer who did so. Ozzy was severely dyslexic, so his writing song lyrics remained unlikely. Now that the band was complete, it was time to take on the Birmingham music scene. All right, all you Brummies, get ready for the groovy sounds of:

POLKA TULK!!!!

The band's new name, Polka Tulk, or more accurately, the Polka Tulk Blues Company, was goofy, nonsensical, and, as was the case with many British electric blues bands dominating the scene in the late 60's, not entirely inspiring. Good, but not especially noteworthy. The blues scene was pretty much on its last legs and was badly in need of something new.

Strangely, for a time, the foursome acquired a number of other musicians looking to jam, and it got to be a little too complicated and cluttered. The band had to break up in order to return to being a four-piece. After shortening their name to Polka Tulk, they decided to go by a new name, this time, they were known as Earth.

Unfortunately, they found they had competition with another band of the same name: They arrived at a gig where everyone was dressed in fine outfits and dapper appearance, and there they were in jeans and long hair, their normal scruffy look. They found out they were not the "Earth" that the
crowd was looking for, another prim and proper band of the same name was scheduled to perform. It was time for yet another name change.

It was during this time that Tony Iommi had grown dissatisfied with the band and decided to join his old friends in Jethro Tull. He was there briefly, even
playing "Song For George" with the band in the Rolling Stones' 'Rock and Roll Circus' film in 1969. Unfortunately, Tony did not like the idea that he did not have more control in the band, it was strange that their frontman Ian Anderson would become too much of the central figure--he would dominate interviews and photo sessions while the rest of the band was forced to sit idly by. Tony was not happy with this arrangement and left to return to Earth. He would still remain friends to this day with Anderson, though his return to Earth would mark a profound beginning for the band. It was time for a new name, one that was sure to attract attention.