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Overview
Decades before reality television was invented, Ozzy Osbourne was subversive and dark. Ozzy was the singer in the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, and they meant business. In an era when rock bands were measured by how 'heavy' they were, no one was weightier than Black Sabbath. All four founding members of the original Black Sabbath grew up within half-a-mile of each other in a tiny Birmingham suburb. Though all shared a deep love of music--The Beatles for Ozzy, the Mothers of Invention for Geezer, the Shadows and Chet Atkins for Iommi, and Gene Kruppa for Ward— they formed their group "as the quickest way out of the slums." This is the story of how they made that dream come true--and how it then turned into a nightmare for all of them. At the height of their fame, Sabbath discovered they'd been so badly ripped off by their managers they didn't even own their own songs. They looked for salvation from Don Arden—an even more notorious gangster figure, who resurrected their career but still left them indebted to him, financially and personally. It finally came to a head when in 1979 they sacked Ozzy: "For being too out of control--even for us," as Bill Ward put it. The next fifteen years were a war between the post-Ozzy Sabbath and Ozzy himself, whose solo career overshadowed Sabbath so much that a reunion was entirely on his terms. Or rather, those of his wife and manager—to add a further bitter twist for Sabbath, daughter of Don Arden —Sharon Osbourne.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466869691 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Sales rank: | 86,414 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
MICK WALL is the UK's best-known rock writer. He is also a TV and radio broadcaster. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Classic Rock, Mojo and the London Times. He has written a dozen rock biographies, including books on Led Zeppelin, Guns ‘n' Roses and Metallica. He lives in England.
Read an Excerpt
Black Sabbath
Symptom of the Universe
By Mick Wall
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2013 Mick WallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6969-1
CHAPTER 1
I, AWAKE
They were scum and they knew it. Human debris from the shitty, bomb-cratered streets of a post-war British nowhere named Aston. Black Country misfits with no future they could see and a past they would never escape. Musical interlopers that would always be found out; revealed for what they knew they were: the lowest of the low. A joke no one found funny, least of all the clown that stood at its front. For as Ozzy Osbourne would tell you, not a trace of a smile on his melancholy jester's face, 'We were four fucking dummies from Birmingham, what did we know about anything?'
Their timing would always be bad. Too late for the sky-touching summer of love, too early for the rock'n'roll genocide of glam, they were Black Sabbath and no matter what the musical revisionists would say of them one day, long after it ceased to matter, they were the most reviled rock band on the planet. People whispered of Led Zeppelin, told of their secret magic and insatiable lust for power; others stood in awe of Deep Purple's telepathic musical prowess. Hendrix was still alive and so were Brian, Jimi and Janis. Rock was on high yet Sabbath were oh, so very low. Critics – outsiders, cunts, mainly from London – simply could not relate. The kids, though, they loved them the way only kids can. Like crafty cigarettes in your bedroom, windows cracked open; like stealing coins from your mum's purse when she was out, or finding a porno mag under your dad's bed; like a first glimpse of the cold fires of hell, body oscillating with the feeling of filthy inescapability.
Nobody fidgeted more uncomfortably at a Black Sabbath show, though, almost paralysed by self-loathing, than the four band members themselves. As their lyricist and bass player, Geezer, would later lament, 'For years we went around thinking we were shit – the press hated us, said we couldn't write, couldn't play ... other bands hated us, everyone.' Something that could be heard all too clearly in their music: those crucifixion guitar riffs, nailed in with such heavy relish, framed by storm-gathering bass and head-rattling drums, together making a sound like that of a body being dragged from a river. Those eerie singsong vocals: as dramatic and pitiful as the sound of a swan dying. Full of cobwebbed yearning, of self-harm and picked scabs and the shriek of lost souls. The three of them zombie-walking around the stage in their preposterous crosses and moustaches, while the fourth self-combusted at the back, mouldering in his own poisons, the quad combining to ensure a fifth element: the pockmarked face of the most brutally deformed style of rock ever allowed to push its way, stinking and blood-cowed, among us.
Tony Iommi was the leader. Follower of the left-hand path, no noble speechmaker he, no bringer of messages from on high, but a true musical alchemist, the flint-eyed general in whose hands the guitar became both a wand and a war machine. An only child who had always got his own way, never any need to explain, Tony did not take 'no' for an answer, did not waste words nor suffer fools gladly. 'Tony has fists like fucking hammers,' Ozzy would recall, his pained animal eyes still round with the memory of their bruising attentions. 'Somebody had to crack the whip,' Tony responded, typically stone-faced. 'And that was me.' It was Tony's riffs that laid the foundation stone for the Sabbath sound, like a drill burrowing into the underground caves of the tallest mountains, until even they came toppling down, terrifying boulders colliding through the undergrowth, thunderbolts zigzagging across the sky at his command.
After Tony Iommi there was Terry Butler – nicknamed Geezer, after a childhood affectation for calling everyone he met Geezer, which the adults laughed at and found charming, and because of which became the name he retained throughout the stunted growth of his own adulthood, along with everything else from his youngest days: the need to be mollycoddled; to be stroked and petted and constantly reassured, constantly adored. The bright boy of the class, good with words, teacher's pet, good at staying out of trouble, or never being caught out, which meant the same thing to him. Clever Geezer it would be that came up with all of Sabbath's lyrics, because, Ozzy said, 'Geezer's got a great brain.' He could play too, swinging the bass like a guitar, bending the heavy strings, weighing each note, then catapulting it forward, just like his hero, Jack Bruce, he said, 'Who shadowed the riff rather than copying it.'
Then there was Bill Ward, a brilliant if wayward percussionist who loved jazz, especially the crazed Gene Krupa, and who would forever be treated as the joker in the pack. Poor old Bill, the one they set fire to – not just once, and never by accident, but as a matter of habit. The one they laughed at not behind his back but right into his face. Bill, who saw it all from his perch, sweating bullets at the back of the stage, arms flailing, legs spasming, always out of breath, always running to stand still convincingly, always the last to know what even the others, who always knew last, might know first. Poor old Bill, the one who would remain the most honest and would pay the heaviest price for it, kicked repeatedly until he refused finally to get up again.
And of course there was Ozzy – or Ossie, as he was dumbly credited on the first Black Sabbath album. Since The Osbournes turned him into a family-friendly, panda-eyed cuddly toy, Ozzy has been denuded of the credibility he once enjoyed as a rock singer. He never had much in the first place, forced to stand at the side of the stage, jumping up and down like a caged gorilla, as Iommi hogged the centre-stage spotlight. Yet there was something about him, for those that tuned in, that spoke of a truly unresolved problem; some echo of rock's original spirit of incoherent, bleary-eyed helplessness that could not be learned or faked; something uncomfortably real. As a fan, you wanted to be Robert Plant or maybe John Lennon. You never wanted to be Ozzy. It was all right to be a tormented romantic soul: a Rod Stewart or even an Elton John. It was an entirely different thing to want to suffer actual pain, to know that you're mad, that you've always been mad. To know, finally, that one day you really might lose your fucking mind.
* * *
Yet underneath it all they were so ordinary, so plain, so bleeding obvious. All born within a year of each other – 1948 – all growing up on the same dingy streets, victims of the same dour post-war schooling and slums, there was good reason why they all looked so much alike in person and onstage. Wrought from the same black matter as their music, none of them could have made it in any other band, though they all tried, despairingly, until fate finally forced them together, against their wills, one typically downcast day in 1968, after factory closing time, before the pubs opened, only their cheap pack-of-five cigarettes to warm them.
Growing up the fourth child of six, the mangiest of a pack of strays packed like fresh corpses into the two coffin-sized bedrooms of No. 14 Lodge Road where the Osbourne family lived, John Michael was in trouble from the day he was born. His father, John Thomas – Jack to his mates down the pub – worked nights at the local GEC steel plant, making tools, which meant he slept all day. Forced to tiptoe around the house, lest he wake him 'and receive a belt for my trouble', young John used to fantasise that his dad was dead. 'I'd creep into his bedroom and poke him, to see if he'd wake up,' he later told me. 'Then when he did he'd fucking kill me ...'
A fun-loving, outgoing, easily bored child who left the hard stuff to his mum, Lillian, whom he recalls seeing crying when she couldn't pay the bills, and three older sisters that continued to mother him long after Lillian had gone, Ozzy, as he was quickly nicknamed in the school playground, found his niche early on as the class clown. 'I always worked along the lines of: if you can't beat 'em, make 'em laugh. Do anything you can to keep them on your side. And if they still don't like you after that, burn their fucking house down!' It became a metaphor for the way he would live his whole life. Keep the bad guys happy by appearing to pose no threat, keep 'em laughing as you hid behind a strong woman's skirts. The daft jokes and stupid pranks – the worst of which included stabbing his aunt's cat with a fork, trying to set his sister alight and hanging himself with a clothesline – were also intended to shield the teenager from the sheer monotony of life on the streets of Aston. School was most definitely out; his undiagnosed dyslexia saw to that. Football was for the kids that could afford it, Ozzy instead becoming one of the ne'er-do-wells who would offer to 'watch your car for a shilling' – i.e. agree not to vandalise it in exchange for a bribe – whenever local club Aston Villa played at home.
That left music, something he was immediately turned on by, becoming fascinated by the Teddy Boys: devotees of Fifties American rock'n'rollers like Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, and of course pre-army Elvis. Teddy Boys styled their hair in huge pompadours – quiffs – and wore Edwardian-style 'draped' jackets, with shiny winkle-picker shoes, and sharpened the handles of their steel combs to use as shivs. 'I loved hanging round the cafés they went to,' Ozzy would tell me, years later, as we sat together in one such place, its windows frosted over with speckled grease and cigarette smoke, its pinball machine still pinging in the background. Even music, though, would get him into trouble. 'I'd get sent home from school for wearing winkle-pickers and blue jeans instead of their boring grey flannels.'
The same convergence between school, music and trouble would have one, much more significant impact on the early chapters of the Ozzy Osbourne story: his meeting with Tony Iommi. Both boys were pupils at Birchfield Road Secondary Modern School, in nearby Perry Barr, but they were very different people. Where Ozzy was one of a clan of a sprawling working-class family trying to make do, Anthony Frank Iommi was the only child of a family of mixed Italian and Brazilian extraction. A well-to-do middle-class family at the centre of a larger, extended family that owned ice-cream and bakery businesses in Cardigan Street, then the centre of Birmingham's Italian district; a typically hardworking immigrant family that liked to play hard too. 'All my family and relations played accordions and drums. My father played accordion and harmonica, and my aunt and uncles all played accordions and drums.' They would set up big 'accordion bands' in the living room and play all night. 'They would play a lot of weddings, too, my dad and all his brothers.' Young Tony was nine the first time he was encouraged to put an accordion of his own on his knee – a special left-handed piano accordion, 'with the button-bass. In fact, I've still got one.' He had wanted a set of drums 'but nobody would let me because of the noise. So I was fobbed off with an accordion, and basically I learned to play that after a fashion.' Not content to learn the old Italian folk tunes of his father, Tony was soon squeezing out wheezing versions of contemporary hits. 'I'd try different stuff, I'd try Elvis Presley numbers, "Wooden Heart" and things like that.'
It was through his love of Elvis that he first cottoned on to his Fifties' counterpart, Cliff Richard, and in particular Cliff's backing group, The Shadows. Led by bespectacled lead guitarist Hank Marvin, The Shadows were an instrumental group whose sound was fashioned by Marvin from a then new-fangled device called an echo box and prodigious use of the tremolo arm on his red and gold Fender Stratocaster guitar. It was this slinky, slightly sinister sound that took The Shadows to No. 1 in the British charts with their first single without Cliff, 'Apache', in the summer of 1960. By the time Tony picked up a guitar for the first time, in emulation of Hank Marvin, when he was fourteen, The Shadows had enjoyed another six chart-topping hits, including most recently 'Wonderful Land', which stayed at No. 1 in the UK charts for more weeks than any other single throughout the Sixties. As Tony recalled, 'A lot of people laugh at The Shadows now, but I think they started a lot of guitarists off from my day. Dave Gilmour and people like that were all Shadows fans. Brian May ...'
Unable yet to afford a Fender Strat – Marvin, in fact, was the first guitarist in Britain to actually own one, and his had been imported from America specially by Cliff – Tony's first guitar was a Watkins, marketed in the Sixties as 'the British Strat', bought from a cheap shopping catalogue and paid for by his indulgent mother in monthly instalments. 'Being left-handed, you see, I was very limited to what I could get. And that was a model that they did do left-handed, so I had that one. I mean, in the music shops in them days, it was very, very rare to get a left-handed guitar.' The Watkins was followed by a left-handed Burns Tri-sonic, with a much richer harmonic sound, or as close as the teenager could get to figuring out how to replicate Marvin's Strat and echo box combo. His dexterity on the accordion helped somewhat to learn simple chords. That and the classic Bert Weedon book, Play In A Day. He tried seeing a tutor but lasted only one lesson. 'I didn't like it. I didn't feel comfortable. I thought I'd prefer to try and learn myself, and that was it, I never went back again.' Tony became the classic withdrawn teenager, sequestered in his room at home, playing along to his Shadows records. When he felt he'd got good enough he took his guitar to school, and began showing off to kids that had only ever seen an electric guitar on TV. 'I remember at school all the girls fawning over him,' recalled Ozzy, 'I remember thinking, what a great way to pull birds.'
* * *
Unfortunately for Ozzy, that wasn't the only thing Tony did that would leave an impression on him. Tony, who was only ten months older than Ozzy but in the year above him at school, and therefore carried all the authority of the older kid, always bullied Ozzy at school. 'I used to hide when I saw him coming,' Ozzy would tell me, only half joking, years later. 'It was just that thing at school,' Tony would say, when I asked him, uncomfortable at my quizzing from such a distance. 'At our school, it was pretty ... you had to sort of ... keep ... um ... you know, give the younger kids a clip round the earhole, you know? It was one of those, really. And Ozzy was one of them, you know? He was only a year younger but ... you know, at school it was, er ... they just used to get beaten up.' He chuckled darkly. 'It was one of them.'
'Tony always intimidated Ozzy at school,' recalled Geezer. Subsequently, there would remain an echo of those early master–servant beatings throughout Sabbath's career. 'When things happen in childhood, you never quite blow it out of your system.' Indeed, years after Ozzy's solo career had far eclipsed that of the band he'd left behind, he still became tremendously agitated whenever Iommi's name came up, referring to him as Darth Vader and other less amusing, more wounding epithets. 'I try not to hate anybody or anything any more,' he told me dolefully. 'But for years I hated Tony Iommi. If you'd have told me one day we'd be back together again I'd have laughed in your face and told you to fuck off.'
* * *
Geezer was different again, of course. The youngest of the band members, by eighteen months, Terence Michael Joseph Butler was the seventh of seven children born to Dubliners, recently resituated to Birmingham, good Catholics in search of good pay for honest hard work. Geezer was the much-cherished baby of the family. 'I was fairly spoiled to death. Me brothers used to give me money, me sisters gave me money and me parents gave me money, so I was richer than anybody else in the family.' He smiled that generous Irish smile, but behind the paddy curls and tufty facial hair were eyes as dark and beady as an old crow's.
Brought up in Aston, just around the corner from the others, Geezer was taken to Villa games as a kid, waving his claret and blue scarf, a season ticket holder, one of the lucky ones. By the time he was a teenager, music began to overtake his interest in football. For one thing, given the way he now looked, it was safer. 'Around the late Sixties, when the skinheads were running rampant, I couldn't go down to the game cos they used to kick hell out of me. Even if you were a Villa fan, if you had long hair it didn't matter what colours you had on, the skinheads would kick hell out of you.' It didn't matter. 'As soon as The Beatles came out, I desperately wanted to be a Beatle.' He'd persuaded his mother to pay ten shillings (50p) for a beat-up two-string acoustic guitar from another kid at school when he was 11. He didn't get good, though, until his brother treated him to a new acoustic with all six strings, bought from the only place in town that sold guitars, George Clay's Music Shop in Birmingham's Bull Ring shopping centre. The price: £8. A week's wages for most workers back then. The baby of the family had got his way again. He began by learning all the songs from the first LP he ever owned, Please, Please Me, by The Beatles, then grew more adventurous as he began to build what would become a comprehensive collection of the Sixties' most seminal records. 'I used to buy The Beatles, the Stones, The Kinks. And then when the Mothers Of Invention came out, that was when me musical life completely changed.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Sabbath by Mick Wall. Copyright © 2013 Mick Wall. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Acknowledgements,
PART ONE: Children Of The Grave,
One: I, Awake,
Two: The Devil's Interval,
Three: Bringers of War,
Four: Pope On A Rope,
Five: Killing Yourself To Live,
Six: Born To Die,
PART TWO: Unlucky For Some,
Seven: Neon Nights,
Eight: Train Wreck,
Nine: Mob Rule,
Ten: Upside Down Crosses,
Eleven: Dehumanised,
Twelve: Saviour,
Thirteen: 13,
Photographs,
Notes and Sources,
Index,
Also by Mick Wall,
Copyright,