Three Views from a Brummie Warhead

Three Views from a Brummie Warhead

 Reading Black Sabbath

 Of all the industrial dystopias in the world, the post-war Birmingham, England that spawned Black Sabbath was one of the bleakest. For all their borrowing from occult sources to entice, Sabbath’s true foil and inspiration was real life. The metaphorical Satan they sang of wasn’t half the boogieman that was the lifetime of smog, drudgery and decay that shadowed them. As sure as you can smell the graveyard dust in listening to Robert Johnson or Hank Williams, you can smell the factory grime in a Black Sabbath record.

 From the opening chords of the first song on their debut album in 1970 (Black Sabbath, from the album Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath), they used every tool at their musical, lyrical, and performative disposal to give the finger to the powers-whatever-be. Unlike their contemporaries and friends in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath stood for confrontation, not escape. They never spent a half-side of vinyl on granola-fed Hobbit meditation or nursing some weird citrus fetish.

 Sabbath may occasionally sing about fairies, true.

 But those little bastards wore boots.

 In Sabbath doing their thing, they dug deep into the adolescent angst that feeds us well after we act like we’ve outgrown it and created a musical form that regenerates every generation. Not unlike Charlie Parker or Chuck Berry, they created a musical vocabulary that grew exponentially and became a universal language.

 It has not always been appreciated. For the first decade of their existence, Black Sabbath was a fan favorite and a critic’s punching bag.

 For many, that initial line-up of Ozzy, Tony, Geezer, and Bill (if I must use last and real names, you should probably forego this article, read the Wikipedia entries on Crosby, Stills, & Nash and the Eagles and go on with your life as a sad motherfucker) was the only true Sabbath.

 After Ozzy left in 1979, Sabbath recorded two fine albums with Ronnie James Dio and a curiosity with former Deep Purpler Ian Gillan, then lumbered on in various permutations featuring always Tony, mostly Geezer, and sometimes Bill, fronted by a rotation of Joe Bessers and Curly Joe Deritas until, and after, their sporadic reunion tour career kicked in.

But the band’s first five albums make up a heavy metal Torah that breathes life into the listener, and anyone wishing to expand their Talmud has the perfect texts to explore: three of the four bandmates have written autobiographies.

Autobiographies are problematic. The self-centered perspective tends to be stifling, and false memory syndrome, especially when the subject is writing of a time when chemicals ran footloose in their bloodstream, is a possibility.  

The Sabbath autobios, though, are a little different. Like the music they made, the authors are so honest and unflinching that their writings reveal as they inform and entertain. There are some recollections in minor conflict, but when read as a trilogy, the different perspectives of the band, the environment they came from, and the culture they spawned are as immersive as they are hilarious, poignant, and terrifying.

I Am Ozzy

Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres

2010 - Grand Central Publishing

Ozzy’s was the first published, and the last one I read. I’m a Sabbath fan. An Ozzy fan, when divorced from his Sabbath bandmates, not so much. His solo stuff was entertaining, and I understand his influence to a generation removed from mine, but it never hit me as hard. I’ve seen him live twice, and enjoyed both times, but the only two solo albums I ever owned were promo copies of Bark at the Moon and The Ultimate Sin I was sent for review, and later turned into used-record store currency, probably spent on some snooty rock-crit trash long forgotten.

Blame it on the impressionability of youth, but I never found solo Ozzy as compelling as his former band, and I found reality-show Ozzy more annoying than anything else. I’ve read volumes about Black Sabbath, including Mick Wall’s excellent band bio Symptom of the Universe (which was published after I Am Ozzy and is recommended, as is pretty much everything Mick Wall has ever written) and the two autobiographies mentioned here. So, I said “no thanks” to spending time on a subject with which I was only passively interested.

Besides, most memoirs written by Lead Singer/Professional Rock Star Types are press releases strung together deifying said Lead Singer/Professional Rock Star Types.

 Boy, was I wrong about this one.

 Written in a conversational and easy style, with plenty of dirty words and salacious detail, it’s a self-deprecating confession, laugh-out-loud remembrance, and heartfelt declaration of love for his family, his friends, and his fans.

 Half of the book is about his upbringing and his Sabbath years. Born to working-class parents and growing up with his siblings in a two-room apartment that lacked an indoor bathroom, he drifted through adolescence as a perpetual clown and fuck-up, his insecurities fueled by dyslexia and ADHD, drifting through a stint in jail, homelessness, and addiction, working in factory jobs and a two-year foray in the abattoir services industry. Hearing the Beatles, as it did almost every other young male in England at the time, gave him the inspiration and focus; he remained a perpetual clown and fuck-up, but he now had the vehicle to escape a life of drudgery by doing so.

 He was no muso. Except for the occasional spitting into a harmonica, the only instrument he could play was his voice. But that turned out to be the missing component for a group of schoolyard acquaintances who were forming a band.

 That voice. A loud, lean, quivery thing, it became, against the wall of sound his bandmates threw up, a singular cry against the dehumanizing forces that threatened, a cry fearful but resolved, scared but standing. It was an urban blues yowl filtered through the soot and ashes from bombed ruins still standing in the neighborhoods of post-WWII England, and it was as right and true and soulful as any other bluesman ever summoned.

 “But he’s off-pitch and can’t sing” whined some, and whine still some today.

 Right. He can’t sing like Ernest Tubb couldn’t sing, or Bob Dylan couldn’t sing, or Joe Strummer couldn’t sing, or Kris Kristofferson or David Yow or Leonard Cohen.

 Singing the blues, even the factory-driven kind, with an Earl Grey rasp and a Brummie accent, doesn’t demand pitch or range or a quiver of throat gymnastics. It demands believability.

 Ozzy delivered, and his book is as much about the art of being oneself as it is a collection of cocaine- and pill-fueled stories.

 Not that there’s any shortage of those. Ozzy doesn’t tart up his past or deny it. He throws it out for whatever reaction it gets, be it unrestrained laughter or sadness or even outright cringe. The details are real and often of the “damn, I don’t know if I woulda told that” variety, but the honesty that comes through his musical endeavors, and why he is admired by not just heavy metal musicians but hip-hop, country, and mainstream pop artists, comes through in this memoir, whether talking about avoiding stank-dick when playing groupie roulette or snorting up a line of black ants when partying with Motley Crue. He was too drunk to remember inhaling the ants but happily admits it sounds like something he would do and readily cops to it.

 But when he talks about his affection for his wife and family, and relives the mistakes in his relationships, you feel the remorse in his words. Same for the enduring sadness he carries over the death of his young post-Sabbath guitarist Randy Rhoades, or the burdens and joys of just being alive.

 Ozzy was a virtuoso at being Ozzy, and that alone is worth the price of the book.

 But the mental image conjured as Ozzy tells us about he and his donkey on the couch in the living room watching Match of the Day on BBC every day? Eternal value for your time and money.[i]

Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath

Tony Iommi

2012 - Da Capo Press

 A more academic account is found in Tony Iommi’s, the first of the three I read, more objective in dispensing the facts as they were and focused on a serious detail of the band’s history.

 Both Ozzy and Geezer state clearly in their books that Iommi was the unquestioned alpha of the Sabbath pack, an impressive feat considering the strong personalities of the other three members. He is the acknowledged musical foundation of the band, the primary architect of their sound. His singular approach, with a liberal deployment of minor chords and dark, tri-tone progressions, was a product of his gothic harmonic and melodic sensibilities, but also a style defined by limitations; a sheet metal accident sliced off the tips of two fingers on his right hand. He’s left-handed, and after a brief consideration of learning to play with right-handed, he was given a record of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Reinhardt’s left hand was disfigured in a fire, leaving him with two workable digits, and he developed a two-finger chordal and soloing technique that to this day leaves most ten-fingered guitarists in a pile of dust-covered awe.

 Iommi’s solution was partly a feat of technical ingenuity: he simply took a plastic bottle, melted it to form caps for his missing fingertips, and filed them down to precision contact artificial fingertips capable of allowing him to press the guitar strings properly.

 It worked. Only Pete Townshend and Dave Davies rival him as a power chord savant.

 As befits a man who speaks less with words than through his guitar, his memoir is somewhat less expressive than the other two, but entertaining and informative in a wholly different way, a sprawling narrative with an eye for detail. There is personal reminiscence here, but the primary focus is as a historian and keeper of a musical legacy.

 He takes us from the early days as the Polka Tulk Blues Band through every version of Black sabbath, with a behind-the-scenes look into the machinations driving the band’s musical evolution. As the only constant in every line-up, his recollections provide a history that no one else can tell.

 That may sound dry or uninteresting, but it’s far from it. It’s a fascinating story, and Iommi’s insight into both the music and those involved in the making of it are insightful. That said, this book, with its focus, will appeal more to a Sabbath or music fan than the general reader.

 Also, written as it is with the stiff upper lip of an English Gentleman, reading this book in Christopher Lee’s voice will reward.

Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath-and Beyond

Geezer Butler

2023 - Dey Street Books

 One would expect Sabbath’s primary lyricist to have a flow and stylistic tilt to his prose, and Geezer provides, but it’s less a stilted recitation than a relaxed discussion with an old friend; some fond memories, a few surprises, and a lot of laughs.

 Geezer’s musical contributions cannot be overstated. His playing veers from straight unison with Iommi’s playing, creating that fertile slab of sound, to deft counterpoint that underscores the melodic structures underneath the surface. Through it all, the groove never wavers, with he and drummer Bill Ward providing a swing and fluidity that keeps Sabbath from ever becoming rigid or angular.

 He also provided the band’s most enduring thematic hook, being an avid reader, in his adolescent flower-child days, of trippy books grounded in occult theory. He never really walked on the dark side, but it certainly entertained and informed him.

 Geezer goes deeper into his own childhood and adolescence than do the other two, describing a “loving, happy childhood” despite an upbringing as impoverished as Ozzy.  An empathetic sort, he tends to look deeper into the minds of others, giving us a well-rounded perspective of his early environment. He does this throughout the book, fleshing out the characters the other two tend to draw in broad strokes, and doing so with a lyricist’s economy. He also looks into himself with a kind of bemused detachment, giving his book has an introspective warmth the other two lack.

 The sex-and-drug stories are there, of course, but they’re less entertaining than his travails of being a vegetarian on tour, or his tales of being a passionate Aston Villa FC fan and the joy and despair it engenders, or his reluctance to use profanity even when others are dropping “fucks” like commas.

 If Ozzy’s book provides more entertainment, and Tony gives us the basics and a lot of them, Geezer delivers color and depth. In retrospect, I’d read Ozzy’s book first, then Tony’s, then Geezer’s, for a well-rounded look at the band’s journey and a better understanding of three of the men who made it.

[i] As of the date of this writing, Ozzy has been dead for a month, and a follow-up to I Am Ozzy, Last Rites, is scheduled to be released in October of 2025. It is said to include details of the diagnosis of the disease that killed him, his final concert celebration that took place just two weeks before he passed and presumably following him to the very end.