A horror film across the street renamed a blues band forever
In Birmingham, a cinema opposite the rehearsal room was packing lines for Mario Bava's Black Sabbath. Bassist Geezer Butler wondered why people paid to be scared—then he and Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song using the tritone, the so-called Devil's Interval. In August 1969 the band once called Earth took the film's name and aimed to sound like horror on record.
Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler, and Ozzy Osbourne formed in Birmingham in 1968 after earlier groups Mythology and Rare Breed. They tried Polka Tulk Blues Band, then Earth, briefly losing Iommi to Jethro Tull in December 1968 before he returned with a tougher work ethic. Confusion with another English band called Earth forced a rename. The new song "Black Sabbath," drawing on Dennis Wheatley and a silhouette Butler claimed to see at his bed's foot, pushed them away from late-sixties flower-power cheer. Judas Priest's Rob Halford later ranked that opener near the darkest rock song he knew.
First show under the new name: August 30, 1969, in Workington. Two days of Regent Sounds studio time that November, recorded largely live with Rodger Bain, yielded the debut album, released Friday the 13th of February 1970. Critics hated it—Lester Bangs mocked its discord in Rolling Stone—yet it reached number eight in the UK and number twenty-three on the Billboard 200, later certified platinum and widely treated as the first heavy metal album. Paranoid followed months later; much of it grew from marathon Zurich club sets of seven forty-five-minute shows a day. The title track was finished in about twenty-five minutes when they needed another song, hit number four in the UK, and pushed the album to number one.
Down-tuned guitars, occult imagery, and commercial punch on Black Sabbath, Paranoid, and Master of Reality set a template. Later lineups rotated through Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan, Tony Martin, and others; the original foursome reunited for stretches from 1997 onward. By 2013 they had sold over seventy million records. MTV ranked them the greatest metal band; they entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. Whatever followed, the Birmingham quartet's early records remain the origin myth of heavy metal's dread.
Source: Black Sabbath
