The second half of the debut Black Sabbath album featured much of Tony Iommi's guitar playing. The album continued with "Wicked World", which starts out as a fast, jazzy piece before resuming the dark, somber riff of the main lyric. The song describes such grim circumstances in today's society as pollution, war, and fatherlessness. This stood in stark contrast to the happy-hippie utopia promised during the flower power era where peace would prevail and love and sunshine would reign. Yet the members of Black Sabbath saw things much differently.
Halfway through the song, Tony Iommi's guitar goes through two extremes, an eerie, haunting "clean" tone before erupting into a louder-than-loud distorted guitar solo fill.
The next song cycle, "A Bit Of Finger", "Sleeping Village", and "Warning", demonstrates Tony Iommi's guitar textures. The first two songs are performed on what appears to be an acoustic (and also note the jaw harp which sounds as if it is saying "beer bong"), a soft piece before launching into the album's lengthy closer, "Warning". The song moves through various passages and tempos before entering the main lyrics about an omen of broken love. A manic guitar solo ensues before resuming the jump-blues motif, which is followed by the loudest guitar solos ever captured on record. A tasteful bluesy clean-tone intermission breaks in briefly before the high volume solo returns. Iommi appears to be influenced by the Cream song "Spoonful" for the bluesy parts.
The performance by the band on this album resulted in the record's producer demanding that the band turn down the volume so the guitar would not be picked up by the drum mics. To which Ozzy replied, "We don't turn down, man. We turn up."
The album was the closing release of the British electric blues scene at the end of the 60's where bands had gotten louder and heavier such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Jeff Beck Group, the aforementioned Cream and many others, but this new band Black Sabbath took heaviness to the next level. In fact, critics then hated this new band of longhairs playing this dark, loud music. This "fad" would end, they wouldn't last. But fans understood the band, they got the music, and the album hit the British charts at #23.
The band's music was simple and effective, and their inadequacies worked in their favor. Tony Iommi suffered a workplace injury where a cutting machine severed two of his fingertips, where he compensated for this by constructing plastic thimbles to enable him to play guitar. He was told initially that he would have to give up playing, but after being told that Gypsy jazz guitar virtuoso Django Rheinhardt played in spite of losing the use of several fingers in a caravan fire, this encouraged the guitarist to keep playing. It accounts also for the jazzy approach. Classical music entered the picture as well on the album's title track, Holst's "The Planets" with "Mars: Bringer Of War".
The band's record label also tried to enhance the appeal of the band on their debut album by using an upside-down cross image and a gruesome poem on the British version of the album. The band was not happy that the label was promoting them as "satanists", which drew occultist types out of the woodwork. But the band's radical approach was its real selling point. The album was so influential that one critic described that it as "the album that eats hippies for breakfast."
Black Sabbath 1970:
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