Black Sabbath by Steven Rosen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The title track ['Paranoid'] and 'Iron Man' are probably the two songs that best represent the band: full of monolithic guitar licks, lyrical venom and that unique scream/moan unique to Ozzy - not really a musical motif in any sense of the word but dripping like an overripe plum with attitude and angst."

Well, Paranoid, Iron Man, and War Pigs are the only three Black Sabbath songs that I remember. It was almost exactly 50 years ago (the winter of 1970-1971) when I first heard Paranoid and I remember listening to the song several times a day. I am not sure if the term 'heavy metal' existed in 1970 but I swear I was thinking about Black Sabbath's music in terms of it being 'heavy' and 'hard'. Late 1960s to early 1970s was the golden era of 'heavy rock.' To me, Led Zeppelin ( Stairway To Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored ), Deep Purple, and Steamhammer (little known in the U.S.) were much better than Sabbath in the 'hard and heavy' genre. (Naturally, King Crimson was the best, but that's another story.)

Steven Rosen's Black Sabbath (with Special Guest Foreword by Ozzy Osbourne) is a readable if severely overwrought history of the band. Due to personnel changes it morphs into stories of individual band members, to finally focus on the "reality TV" show The Osbournes. Four boys, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler, and Ozzy Osbourne, "street urchins" as the author calls them, from Aston, a suburb of Birmingham, grow up in the 1960s, are involved in a series of bands, and form Black Sabbath in 1968 to explode onto world scene in 1970 with their first, eponymous album, followed by massively popular Paranoid and Master of Reality.

One of the ubiquitous themes in the first part of the novel is the juxtaposition of Sabbath and Led Zeppelin: the pairing works only with respect to the general feel of the music. Led Zeppelin had much more talented musicians while in Sabbath only Tony Iommi was a virtuoso. Another motif in the book is the purportedly 'satanic' nature of Sabbath's music. The author quotes a fragment of Nick Tosches' review in Rolling Stone (dated 4/15/1971):

"No act is too depraved, no thought too bizarre, as they plunge deeper and deeper in the realm of perversion, into the ultimate 'trip' of their own self-fashioned Hell. Orgies, incest, drugs, homosexuality, necrophilia, public nose picking, Satanism, even living sacrifice."

This is hilarious because it is 100% fake news! Sabbath used the 'satanic image' solely for commercial reasons, to sell their concerts and albums. Young adult audiences are suckers for 'depraved', 'bizarre', and 'perverted' acts. This is not to say that the band members were saintly in their behavior. The author spent some time with the band in 1974 and he reminisces with affection how the band completely thrashed a hotel room in St Louis.

In the second half of the 1970s Ozzy's alienation from the rest of the band begins and 1978 marks the end of Sabbath as it had been known. Tony Iommi remains the only permanent fixture in various personnel configurations. Until 13 July 1985 when Black Sabbath re-unites for the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia.

I will not pretend that I read the passages about the TV series The Osbournes with interest. I still cannot understand the concept of the so-called "reality show" because in my view nothing can be farther from reality than acting it out on commercial TV. Yes, I am elitist and snobbish, and proud of it. I haven't ever watched the show but the author describes it vividly as "in large part unadulterated, unfiltered profanity." Well, let me show the full degree of my wretchedness: I could do without Ozzy Osbourne and, in fact, I would like Black Sabbath much more if not for him and his antics.

I find the writing style a bit annoying: circular and repetitive: the author comes back to the same subject many times without even trying to approach it from a different point of view. The author is quite generous with bold metaphors and similes and some of the analyses - probably designed to make the text look deep and respectable - are quite far-fetched. For instance, the author claims that the roots of Black Sabbath's musical style can be traced to the "multitude of bombs that rained upon [Birmingham] during the war":

"The anger and venom and unreality of their music was a natural outgrowth of living amidst air-raid warnings, demolished buildings [...]"

Two-and-a-half-stars.

View all my reviews