![]() ![]() ![]() In response to vocal and vehement adoration from witches and Satanists, Black Sabbath mocked them in interviews and started wearing large crosses around their necks at the suggestion of the head white witch in England. Despite their interest in black magic, Sabbath were hardly devil worshippers. I told Ozzy and that inspired him to write the lyrics to the song as a warning to people that were getting heavily involved in black magic.”Ĭonsidering the band’s name, it’s not hard to grasp how Satanists misunderstood the meaning of some of Black Sabbath’s lyrics and assumed the musicians shared their blasphemous views. ![]() It frightened the pissing life out of me. “I woke up and there was this black shape looming over the bottom of the bed. “In the middle of the night I felt this presence,” Butler told Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. “Black Sabbath,” which is often referenced for its blatantly Satanic lyrics, was actually written by Ozzy Osbourne and was based on a paranormal experience Butler had one night. I suppose we got wrapped up a bit too much sometimes.”īlack Sabbath didn’t exclusively write about darkness and evil and they stopped short of endorsing the occult. There was this thing called ‘the occult’ and we wanted to soak in as much as we could about it and find out what it was about. And they wrote from a knowledgeable perspective since they had dabbled in occult rituals and readings.Ĭoven, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls To a large extent, Sabbath knew they were playing with fire and enjoyed being provocative. But Roger and Tom just had the knack of doing it.”Īside from the cult Chicago band Coven, which wrote Satanic lyrics and included a recording of a black mass on their 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, Black Sabbath were the first group to write songs that mentioned Lucifer and Satan and featured occult themes. A lot of producers tried that but dismally failed. It sounds easy, but it’s actually a really hard thing to do – to record a band live in the studio and get the whole feeling across. We just went in, set up and played and they recorded us. “We didn’t know anything about studios or production or engineering. “We literally went in and played as if it was a live gig,” adds Butler. We had one day to prove ourselves, and that’s what we did.” Some people think the album was recorded in a haze of drugs, but we hadn’t discovered that yet and we didn’t have time to get stoned. One second we were playing these songs and then the next thing we knew we were out of there. “We went in the studio and we were off from the word go,” Iommi recalls. They were tight, they were heavy and they were ready to transform rock 'n' roll in a day. Other heavy artists - including Blue Cheer, The Stooges and Jimi Hendrix - had dipped their toes into the gut-twisting morass of chords and notes that was to become heavy metal, but Black Sabbath were the first to capture the sound, vibe and attitude that defined the genre.Īs soon as Earth decided to stray from their blues roots, they expanded upon their new sound with a batch of dense, equally textural tracks, including “N.I.B.” and “Behind the Wall of Sleep” and rehearsed them until they could play them from start to finish, time and again. “Before them, no one played those notes and no one played these doomy riffs with that sludgy, heavy sound.” “They just brought a vibe and a feel that no other band on the planet ever tried to do,” he says. “From the start, I was listening to the rain and the wind and the bell and then that riff started and just blew my mind.”ĭisturbed frontman David Draiman had a similar experience years later when, during a game of "Dungeons & Dragons," his friend put Black Sabbath on the turntable. Yet Black Sabbath relished the uneasy feeling the repeated three-note passage engendered.Īnthrax guitarist Scott Ian first heard it when he was a kid listening to his uncle’s stereo and the experience left an indelible imprint on his brain. Rarely was the tritone heard in popular music it was most often heard along with the haunting noises in horror film soundtracks. Black Sabbath started with atmospheric sound effects and then guitarist Tony Iommi launched into one of metal’s most influential licks, the devil’s tritone – a dissonant, unsettling configuration allegedly once banned by the church and shunned by composers. ![]()
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